Poverty and Prayer

A passage from one of the books I'm reading for formation this month called 'Clowning in Rome' by Henri Nouwen.  Note: Intercessory prayer is when you pray for someone else.

There is a powerful connection between poverty and intercessory prayer. When we give up what sets us apart from others-not just property but also opinions, prejudices, judgments, and mental preoccupations-then we can allow friends as well as enemies to enter with us into our solitude and lift them up to God in the midst of the great encounter. In real solitude there is an unlimited space for others, because there we are empty and there we can see that, in fact, nobody stands over and against us. An enemy is only our enemy as long as we have something to defend. But when we have nothing to hold onto, nothing to protect, nothing to consider as exclusively ours, then nobody can be an enemy and then we can, in fact, recognize in the center of our solitude that all men and women are brothers and sisters, In solitude, we stand so naked and so vulnerable before God, and become so deeply aware of our total dependency on his love, that not only our friends but also those who kill, lie, torture, rape, and wage wars can become part of our flesh and blood. In solitude we are so totally poor that we can enter into solidarity with all human beings and allow our hearts to become the place of encounter not only with God, but, through God, with all human beings as well. And thus intercessory prayer is the prayer of self-emptying because it asks of us to give up all that divides us from others so that we can become those we pray for and let God touch them in us.

Lent

A talk that gave last year around this time for the CLC guys at St Mary of Sorrows that I wanted to type up since I had it scribbled down on a piece of paper.

Lent offers us 40 days to enter into the desert with Jesus to prepare ourselves for the coming of Easter. Not so much for the new clothes or the candy, but it's about focusing on the resurrection from death into life and understanding the greatness we were created for. Lent offers us the challenge to revisit our sinfulness and how that impacts our personal relationship with Christ from our end and allows us to reorient ourselves in that relationship. Jesus spent 40 days revisiting the disciples after his resurrection before they were sent forth to be missionaries for the world, so it makes since for us to spend sometime revisiting the person of Christ and refocus on how we're called to be leaven for the world. (Acts 1:3)

40 Days in the Bible

(Gen 7:12) For forty days and forty nights heavy rain poured down on the earth.
(Gen 8:6) At the end of forty days Noah opened the hatch he had made in the ark

Moses was on the mountain with God for 40 days (TWICE)
(Exo 24:18) But Moses passed into the midst of the cloud as he went up on the mountain; and there he stayed for forty days and forty nights.
(Exo 34:28-29) So Moses stayed there with the LORD for forty days and forty nights, without eating any food or drinking any water, and he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.


Elijah strengthened by one angelic meal went forty days to Mount Horeb where the Lord passed by and he heard the voice of God
(1 Kings 19:8) He got up, ate and drank; then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.


Jonah warned the City of Nineveh they had 40 days to repent
(Jonah 3:4-7 and 10) Jonah began his journey through the city, and had gone but a single day's walk announcing, "Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed," (5) when the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth. (6) When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes. (7) Then he had this proclaimed throughout Nineveh, by decree of the king and his nobles: "Neither man nor beast, neither cattle nor sheep, shall taste anything; they shall not eat, nor shall they drink water. … (10) When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.


Jesus fasted for 40 days in the wilderness
(Mat 4:1-2) Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. (2) He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry.

Fasting is a heavy theme associated with the 40 days throughout the bible.  As a tradition we fast on Ash Wednesday (today) and Good Friday as well as abstaining from meat on those two days and every Friday during Lent.  Other traditions that we hold to are increased Prayer, Almsgiving, and Repentance.  A few specific examples of those would be going to Confession during Lent, giving up something we like a lot (Fasting), praying for a friend or cause, praying the stations of the cross, and donating our treasure (time or money) to others as a way of giving Alms.  These traditions all come from our ancestry as it's recorded in the bible.

Eros Love

An interesting point on the unity of body and soul.

Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness. The epicure Gassendi used to offer Descartes the humorous greeting: “O Soul!” And Descartes would reply: “O Flesh!”.[3] Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love —eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur.


Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness. Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise “in ecstasy” towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing.

Encyclical Letter: Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) Benedict XVI