Sometime in October, 1936, Msgr. Ronald Knox gave a sermon on St. Mary Magdalene, the traditional model of the contemplative life, in which he observed:
The world… does not understand the love that waits, any more than the love that weeps. It is so impressed with the feeling that this and that needs doing here and now that it cannot wait for God’s signal; cannot realize that He has His own way and His own time for doing things; and, in consequence, a great deal of activity is wasted in overlapping, and misdirected effort, and fussiness.
“Fussiness,” it seems, consists in doing what is not yet to be done, or in over-doing what is to be done. The notion that God’s ways are not ours is a difficult one. Whatever can be said for a theory of human action consequent on grace — we are not Pelagians — the fact remains that we want “our” form of salvation, our form of action to substitute for God’s peculiar ways. This is the modernizing social activist heresy, so prevalent among us, absorbing our energies into ideologies and calling this virtue.
Years ago, in Naples I think, I came across a citation from the medieval English mystic, Richard Rolle (d. 1349), on praying while sitting down. We used to be taught that sitting was the least propitious position for praying. Kneeling was the thing. But what with Russian and Oriental bowings or lotus positions, and Muslim prostrating, this is out. In fact, in so many of the chapels I know, the kneelers have been mostly removed by fiat, along with statues and a multiplicity of candles. No helps but pure mind. We are used to St. Paul’s idea of “praying always,” to be sure, and we can no doubt “pray in action,” as St. Ignatius of Loyola used to say, presumably even while jogging about or closing a big deal at the Chicago Board of Trade.
However, I chanced to come across an essay on Richard Rolle in a recent Downside Review (April, 1983), one of the few Catholic journals that has managed to keep its lively sense of tradition. Sure enough, there was the citation about praying sitting down — though in Latin, not the stately old English translation I recalled. My version will have to do here:
Thus, as I looked over Scripture, I found and knew indeed that the highest love of Christ consists in three things: in fervor, in song, and in sweetness. And these three, which I experienced, are not able to persist without great quiet. And so if I wished by standing or walking to contemplate, or even by lying down, I saw that many things would be deficient for me, and I felt myself almost desolate. Hence, by this necessity, in order that I might both have and persevere in the highest sweetness, I elected to sit down.
Now, 4 suppose that any discussion of the best physical position for praying — kneeling, standing, sitting, walking, or lying down — Swill seem rather “fussy” when the main question is whether we should pray at all.
In this connection, in her Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila was certainly to the point when she said, “I do not call that prayer in which we do not consider with whom we are speaking, nor what we are praying for, nor who we are who pray, and to whom; and though prayer may be sometimes without these considerations, they must have preceded it.” So while our very capacity to pray is, in the Christian view, itself a gift, it is still a gift to pray — a properly human activity, which will normally include some attention to what goes on in our mind and likewise what goes on in our bodies.
I like what C. S. Lewis said in this connection:
There is no good in trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
This means, I suppose, that God has his own ways for creatures for whom matter is normal, for whom sitting in great quiet will not likely be an easy or a common thing, however must we ought to take a stab at it.
Yet, we humans, in our very selves, are the location where matter and spirit are so totally suffused that we are only one person for whom both matter and spirit are an every day part of our realities. Prayer naturally will include kneeling, or sitting, or standing, or walking, whatever suits us, without simply ignoring the positive effort we must take to do as St. Teresa taught us — the to Whom, by whom, for what we pray. St. Ignatius, in teaching us how to say the Lord’s Prayer, says,
that the person, kneeling or seated, according to the greater disposition in which he finds himself and as more devotion accompanies him, keeping the eyes closed or fixed on one place, without going wandering with them, says “Father”, and is on the consideration of this word as long as he finds meanings, comparisons, relish and consolation in considerations pertaining to such word.
There is probably even in the spiritual life a case to be made at times for letting our eyes wander about God’s lovely creations, as Ignatius himself did in the famous “Contemplation for Obtaining Love.”
We should not, either, forget what Ronald Knox said of Mary Magdalene, that our weeping and our waiting, even what we waste, are not designed to substitute for God’s graces and ways, but to respond to them. For this latter, I think, Richard Rolle had his point — we do need times of great quietness and for sitting down, to listen, to realize that the whole universe is not composed of ourselves alone. Yet it does include us, each of us, in a plan we did not make, but are given.
When we know this, we can, perhaps, act in a world of matter which God likes, which He is redeeming, but not in a way we would have thought up ourselves, if it were up to us. When the Apostles were told to sit and watch in the Garden while our redemption was being worked out before their very eyes, most of them went to sleep. I have always been glad that Our Lord’s rebuke of these Apostles was so mild. He really does like matter and those composed of it, spirit and all, sleepers and sitters though they be, too fussy usually to comprehend the wonders they have been given.