Prayer and Desire

It was Dom Cuthbert Butler who argued in Western Mysticism that a principal difference between Western and Eastern spirituality was that in the East the emphasis was on denying desire and in the West the emphasis was on embracing and redeeming desire. It is not at all hard to think of exceptions to the rule:  St. Athanasius and St. John Chrysostom in the East; in the West the author of The Cloud of Unknowing and the Dionysian apophaticism of St. Thomas Aquinas. But it is true that the pillars of the Western tradition, St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, St. Bernard, were convinced that you could not get rid of desire, no matter how hard you try, and what is needed is not the abolition of desire but desiring the right things.  What prayer ‘does’ is cause you to desire what you ought to desire.

This week in the Office of Readings we have read Augustine’s Letter to Proba, an excellent example of the probity of desire. Anicia Faltonia Proba was the widow of the wealthiest man in the Roman Empire. Three of her sons held the consulship. After Alaric led a Gothic army into Rome in 410 and pillaged the city, Proba, with a considerable retinue of widows and younger women, took refuge in Africa and established a community of religious women in Carthage. Proba asked Augustine how she ought to pray, and he advised her on the kind of person she ought to be, and what she ought to pray for.

From the Office of Readings last Sunday:

Why he should ask us to pray, when he knows what we need before we ask him, may perplex us if we do not realize that our Lord and God does not want to know what we want for he cannot fail to know it, but wants us rather to exercise our desire through our prayers, so that we may be able to receive what he is preparing to give us. His gift is very great indeed, but our capacity is too small and limited to receive it. That is why we are told: Enlarge your desires, do not bear the yoke with unbelievers.

The deeper our faith, the stronger our hope, the greater our desire, the larger will be our capacity to receive that gift, which is very great indeed. No eye has seen it; it has no color. No ear has heard it; it has no sound. It has not entered man’s heart; man’s heart must enter into it [I Cor. 2:9]. In this faith, hope and love we pray always with unwearied desire.

However, at set times and seasons we also pray to God in words, so that by these signs we may instruct ourselves and mark the progress we have made in our desire, and spur ourselves on to deepen it. The more fervent the desire, the more worthy will be its fruit. When the Apostle tells us: Pray without ceasing [I Thes. 5:16], he means this: Desire unceasingly that life of happiness which is nothing if not eternal, and ask it of him who alone is able to give it.