Our book is called ‘A Message For Its Own Time’ (AMOT). 

In Chapters 9 & 10 of our book, I attempted to give a description of Contemplation, or the Prayer of the Heart and how it effects our spiritual and personal development and that of the whole world. I thought it might help if I gave an outline of how I have experienced its development in my own life.

I have been a priest for 55 years. I have been praying official Church prayers since I started in seminary at the age of 11, so I have been steeped in it.  I have also prayed privately and there I expect my prayer has been largely like everyone else’s. It is only since I retired from parish work that I have found time to think more deeply about the heart of prayer and to allow my understandings to come together. It is taking a long time and awareness only comes through actually practicing contemplation.

I do not set myself up as an expert, and I am certain that much of what I will write will be inadequate as a serious treatment of the enormous reality of the praying heart, but I offer my thought and experiences as one pilgrim speaking to another, and hope that you will give me your thoughts so that we can learn and grow together.

We need to see the journey of contemplating our Father as something normal for Christians and become used to humbly sharing our experience of it. It is a  basic necessity of our Christian life.

I call this series of chapters about contemplation a stream of thought, because I hope it we will develop it together as we explore and experience this prayer of love.

The Glory be

Things took a surprising new turn for me with the Glory Be to the Father prayer.

You know: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be world without end. Amen"

We say this prayer a lot. It is at the end of each decade of the Rosary, and it is constantly repeated in the Office, the official prayer of the Church that Priests are instructed to pray daily. That is made up of set Morning, Evening and Night Prayer, as well as Mid-day Prayer and a section called the Office of Readings.

I have to confess that my saying of the Office has been ragged. This is partly because the other duties of a Parish Priest have increased so much, and also because I have the habit of stopping and meditating on bits of it when I am struck by a thought. Since I retired from parish work, I have found more time for the Office.

The biggest element in the Office is reciting parts of the Psalms. Each part of a Psalm ends with the Glory be to the Father. A few years ago, I found myself being stuck on this prayer. It was like I couldn’t get past it. It seemed as though the Trinity was demanding my attention - knocking on my door.

I did some reading to find out what was going on, and I turned to a book about St Elizabeth of the Trinity, a Carmelite nun who died in 1906 aged 26. She was gifted with a profound understanding of the Holy Trinity. Reading some of her thoughts deepened my awareness that the whole of reality is rooted in the indescribably loving unity of the Three Persons in one God.

Because it is hard to put into words the reality of the Trinity, we can see it as only remotely connected to the reality we experience every day, but that is like trying to walk without the earth being beneath our feet – it doesn’t work. We are only really alive when we ‘live and move and have our being’ inside the Trinity (Acts 17: 28).

The loving family of the Trinity is the real world. All other worlds were created because that family of infinite joy and unity wants to share. We human beings are fondly created by God so that we particularly can live inside that family. But something happened early in human history where we chose to love ourselves more than God - the Original Sin.

We all inherit this brokenness within. It is a self-inflicted blindness that makes the things of God obscure. Yet all through history that lost harmony haunts us and human beings have yearned to see the face of God.

Contemplation is the simple seeking for the Face of God through love. All religions have tried to achieve this, but they get lost because only God can show us the way. Praise his great goodness! The Son from within the Trinity has becoming human and he shows us the way - he is the way.

To contemplate is to know consciously the ‘great light’ which Isaiah prophesied would shine upon ‘the people who walked in darkness’ (Isaiah 9: 2). But how do you do this consciously?