The Jesus we meet in the Gospels, this lovely, kind, charismatic man, is our model and our inspiration. He is the source. The Jesus of the Gospels shows us that God is a person, too—though “person” in a large, mysterious sense. And there are kinds of prayer that encourage us to imagine this figure in detail, to place ourselves in the scene, as in the Ignatian form of imaginative prayer known as “contemplation.”
And yet Jesus—our idea of him, our image of him—can be a real problem in prayer. Jesus can be an obstacle in our faith life.
The problem is that most of us have never had a vision of Jesus the way some of the saints did and a few people still do, haven’t seen his face or heard his voice or felt his touch, and so we can doubt he exists at all. The problem is that most of us can’t summon an image of Jesus in prayer or keep it for very long—we’re no good at Ignatian contemplation—I’m not—my thoughts and feelings are usually much fuzzier, more abstract—and it’s very important that we know that this is OK, it’s normal, it’s common, even with many of the saints.
For some of us concrete images of Jesus are actually repulsive sometimes: the Jesus in all the paintings, all those beards and ribcages and knees—the Jesus in all the movies, all those particular faces, all those robes and sandals. That’s OK. It’s fine. This is an invitation to deeper, more mature, more genuine faith.
In the twelfth century, for example, St. Bernard wrote that in his experience of Jesus in prayer, there was “nothing sensational.” He didn’t see anything or hear anything. What he felt was much subtler, something like “a warmth and glow” in his heart.
In the sixteenth century St. Ignatius describes a moment when he seemed to see “something white, from which the rays were coming.’ It’s a “something” he sees. It’s vaguely, if brightly, white, and even this is more specific than Ignatius usually is. For him the experience of Jesus is much more a matter of feeling and intuition.
This is tremendously freeing, I think. We’re in good company. We can relax. We can open up.
Ignatius uses the image of a “sponge” soaking up the divine presence, slowly, over time. He is even suspicious of the dramatic and the vivid, of what he calls the big “splashes.” They’re usually just that, splashes. They quickly drain away.
In the second Eucharistic Prayer, we pray the Spirit will come down upon us “like the dewfall.” Soft. Fleeting. Everywhere, on all the grasses.
Thomas Merton says plainly that if imagining Jesus is a good thing and helps, by all means do it, but that for him it’s not the only way to pray or even the best way.
The danger is that if we get fixated on the historical Jesus we will fail to see, to sense, to discern, the presence of God everywhere in our lives. We don’t even need to be thinking about God at all, Merton says, in any sense–and we shouldn’t try, because God is everywhere, deeper within us than we can ever be aware of. God is not an object. God is not an idea. God is the ground of all being, including our own, the very essence of things, “so close that you simply live, and He is your life, and don’t see it.”
. Maybe we pray most deeply, Merton thinks, when we’re not thinking about God at all but living our own lives in freedom and with close, self-forgetful attention.
For Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, God is woven into the very fabric of our lives. We sense him as a “steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the center of everything that is.”
The danger in this other, looser way of thinking about Jesus, of course, is looseness, is vagueness, is having such a broad idea of prayer that prayer means nothing at all. When does prayer stop being prayer? I’m not sure.
But I keep thinking of Jesus in the Garden of Stone on the day of the Resurrection when he appears before Mary Magdalene and she’s so happy and she tries to embrace him. He says, no, don’t embrace me. Don’t try to hold onto me. I’m on my way somewhere else.
At first Mary doesn’t even recognize him. She thinks he’s the gardener.
Jesus isn’t Lazarus, the one he raised from the dead. The Resurrection wasn’t a mere physical resuscitation. Everyone knows who Lazarus is, they recognize him, and one day he’ll actually die, just like the rest of us.
It’s the Risen Christ we sense in prayer, after all, not the historical Jesus, the Christ who ascended and then sent the Spirit to fill the Church and the world and us, in our own bodies.
Terrible things are going on in our country and in the world, unjust and violent and terrible things, loud, deafening, and the temptation now is to raise our voices, too, simply to react, and in a way we should. Certainly we should resist. We should stand up.
But the real challenge even now and especially now is to listen for this quiet voice, this voice underneath, this voice that is not ours, this small, subtle thing that’s bigger than anything has ever been.
“He Who Is,” Merton says, “is present in the depths of our being as our Friend, and as our other self.”
The idea isn’t to explain Jesus away but to encourage us to experience him more profoundly—not merely as an idea or a force or an energy, but not as a statue come to life either, not as an actor with a soft beard and an English accent.
The idea is: rejoice. The Lord has risen. He has risen indeed. And he always has been rising, from the beginning of time.
Sometimes when I read the name “Jesus” or I hear it said aloud, I feel this kind of quickening in me, this catch of the breath.
Just the name itself.
That’s it. That’s the call. That’s our hope.