Fr. Redemptus Maria Valabek O.Carm., Rome
(Part 5 - completion. We present this last part of Fr. Redemptus's study, still quite extensive, only in a short selection of excerpts.)
Prayer and the Holy Spirit Today
For prayer to be authentic, it must be influenced by the Paraclete sent by Christ. If we are to make progress on the path of prayer, it is essential that the Holy Spirit influences it ever more deeply.
“Prayer is a need for love, not a psychological need. We have become accustomed to telling people that they cannot live without prayer, while in reality they can do just fine without it, and many simply do not feel the need to pray. However, the need for prayer must be placed in a supernatural dimension. We cannot call God Father except in the Holy Spirit… Either we will behave before God like His beloved children, and then we will feel the need to look up to Him, to love Him, and to confess this love to Him, or we will decide to be content with merely keeping the commandments. In that case, however, we limit ourselves to being servants; we are no longer fully His sons. God wants something more for us: ‘I no longer call you servants, but friends’ (cf. John 15:15).”1
The love that is the divine soil of prayer is poured into the hearts of Christians through the Spirit. It is primarily the Holy Spirit who enables a person to leave the spirit of servitude and accept the spirit of sonship. (...) Prayer is possible when we are convinced that we are loved, and not just in a way of human love (which always carries a trace of seeking oneself and personal pleasure), but with a divine love that is truly altruistic. “... loves even when not loved, greets even when no one greets him – here something new is created, the vicious cycles of hatred and selfishness are broken. Such a person draws from the Spirit of the Creator. This is what parental love looks like. This is true love, similar to God’s love. Parents are not devoted to their children because they are good or grateful, but because they desire their children to become so. Never despairing, they do not lose hope. ‘I will love him so much, I will forgive him so many times..., I will suffer for him and I will suffer with him for as long as it takes until he capitulates, until he is won over by my love.’”2
This is the spirit that the Creator Spirit seeks to awaken in human hearts. If prayer is authentic, it leads to the following conviction: Pentecost created a new reality on earth, it created a new humanity, filled with the Spirit of sonship – children of the Father, who are therefore brothers to each other. (...)
Humility is the foundational attitude in the atmosphere of familial love. Members of the same family know each other so well that they cannot bear to wear masks before one another. The gift of the Holy Spirit, which brings the gift of piety, allows a person to rejoice in dwelling in God's presence without affectation, to humbly acknowledge his limitations, imperfections, and sins, but also to be convinced that the Father’s heart will prepare a feast as soon as the prodigal son comes to himself and returns to the father’s house. No discouragement, lack of success, or dryness will prevail over God’s children, because it is the Father who makes them lovable through His love (and not vice versa).
The Father accepts His son in good times and bad, and His merciful and gentle heart leaves behind ninety-nine sheep to go in search of one lost one. Therefore, when the Holy Spirit teaches us to pray, His primary concern is to awaken in us boundless trust towards the Father, whose mercy lasts forever (unlike human mercy). The Holy Spirit seeks to convince our hearts during prayer that there is no deeper or more satisfying intimacy than the relationship with the Father, only when we allow Him to love us. For when a person relies only on his human experience, he is afraid to let himself be loved, for fear of being exploited for his partner’s benefit. The Holy Spirit tries to convince a person that God’s love is completely different: God gains nothing from loving a person; instead, a person gains everything. The Holy Spirit reveals to a person in prayer a truth that transcends him, namely that there is a love that does not seek itself: God's fatherly love. The Holy Spirit, through the gift of piety, prepares the human heart to cling to this truth and to commit its entire life to it, to stake everything it has on it. And the breadth of the spiritual life, based on this conviction, is one of the richest experiences offered to humanity.
Reproduced with permission from the magazine Carmelus (volume 22, 1975, pp. 213–222).
Selected and translated by Kateřina Lachmanová.
