Jean Lafrance
The convert thus discovers his true nature, which is prayer, and is reborn from the hands of the Creator. He discovers his primordial vocation – to be the priest of all creation, which he wanted to govern before. We know well that man was placed in the paradise garden to cultivate it, that is, to make his life a spiritual culture. And it is precisely in worship that man fully finds his "self". Some modern exegetes translate the passage Gn 2:5 as follows: The Lord God took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden to protect and worship God.
Paradise is symbolically likened to a temple and man to its priestly guard – man is therefore primarily a liturgical being. He has the ability to turn his life, his relationships, and his activities into a spiritual ritual. He carries out the most ordinary daily things as the Eucharist, or rather, in all things he realizes the Eucharist. His entire existence is perceived as a spiritual service. The farmer in his field, the worker in the factory, the engineer in the laboratory, all of them realize the prayer of the heart in their human lives. They do not only offer their activity but the very reality of their being (their body, as Paul says): By the mercy of God, I urge you, brothers: present yourselves as a living, holy, and pleasing sacrifice to God! This is your spiritual worship (Rom 12:1), true adoration.
Even the proclamation of the Gospel is considered by Paul to be prayer and a sacred act, since it makes Gentiles a spiritual offering: Nevertheless, I have written to you somewhat boldly to remind you of some things, because of the grace given to me by God: that I should be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles. I preach the Gospel of God as if I were performing a sacred act, so that the Gentiles may become an acceptable offering, sanctified by the Holy Spirit (Rom 15:15–16).
Such was the first calling of man and such is the calling of man newly created by the power of resurrection – it is a man of prayer, primarily a liturgical creature. He is a temple-man, who impresses the seal of prayer on people and things around him. And the word temple has a wide meaning, because since the incarnation, God dwells throughout the world, in the history of mankind and in the heart of man. I love these words of Silvan of Athos: “Of course, we have churches in which we can pray, we have liturgical books; but may your inner prayer never leave you. In churches, we celebrate worship, and the Holy Spirit dwells there. But may your soul also become God’s temple – for the one who prays without ceasing, the whole world becomes a temple.”
We are therefore invited to become temples and to make our everyday lives a worship. Such a presence of prayer sanctifies all places in the world and contributes to true peace. In God’s universe, which is a great temple, man is the priest of life, turning everything human into a sacrifice and a prayer, whether he is a worker or a scientist.
The privilege of our first parents was to pray without difficulty and to love each other. In some moments, prayer comes easily to us, then it takes on different colors of life. On the contrary, when sin and suffering weigh upon us, it is worse with prayer and we are unhappy. One troubled young man once said to me: “Please pray, because you can!” There are days when we want to pray, but we cannot. However, as long as we can pray, nothing is lost, because hope transforms all situations.
Our first parents were called to be priests of the world, that is, to pray with ease, because they enjoyed an intimate relationship with the Lord and conversed with Him in the evening breeze. It does not come as easily to us, which is not normal. A person who has undergone a prayer spiritual renewal or spent a week in Lourdes will tell you: “I prayed continuously!” If it is possible for one week, why could it not be possible all the time? We should be able to offer our true, deep essence to God, that is, to make our lives a continuous prayer.
Through sin, man wanted to rule the world, to be its master and to subdue it. That is why the world needs people who will be its priests; otherwise, both man and the universe will collapse (the atomic bomb is a tangible proof of man’s spiritual decline).
“The Spirit teaches the monk to love God and all creation. You might argue that there are no longer monks who pray for all people, but I tell you that if there are no praying people in this world, great misfortunes and the destruction of humanity will come.”
This is the calling of all men and women who experience “inner” monasticism amid this world, in the desert of large urban housing estates. Their mission is to lead the entire universe to adoration, which constantly flows from their hearts.
The complete opposite of adoration is passion. For man has a great potential for adoration within him, and if he does not turn it to God, he will adore himself and worship idols – humanity or some person, art, politics, race, nation… anything. If he does not pray to God, he will pray only to himself. There are thousands of various models. Passion is part of human nature; it is an instinctive urge whose ultimate goal is to awaken the desire to worship God. If it loses this direction and focuses exclusively on a limited, imperfect being or thing, it will find nothing eternal, nothing absolute.
We could almost say that this is a definition of Satan – a perverse adoration that gets lost in emptiness. Man thirsts for God, but because this thirst is never quenched, he can be deceived by the angels of darkness disguised as angels of light and invest his adoration potential into the void: “Hell may be nothing more than a confrontation of thirst and emptiness. Man drinks his own emptiness and thirsts more and more.”
Sometimes, paradoxically, we pay too much attention to this emptiness. Then the net of idols, magic, and passions becomes what the New Testament calls the world that is not created by God, but refers to it as this world, which obscures God and His creation and wraps the entire earth in darkness and death.
In May 1968, the following graffiti appeared on the walls of the Sorbonne: “When a finger points to the Moon, only a fool looks at the finger.”
(Excerpted from the book: Jean Lafrance, Prayer of the Heart, published by the Carmelite Publishing House in Prague in 2017, pp. 41–45.)
