Timothy Radcliffe OP

sing a new song:

the Christian vocation

This essay was written by James McGonigal OPL and read by him at the regular November study meeting of Glasgow Lay Dominicans in the library of Strathclyde Chaplaincy. The overall theme of study for the year was Prayer, and the book Sing a New Song: The Christian Vocation by Timothy Radcliffe OP was agreed on by the group as shared reading for the meetings. The focus in this talk was on The Promise of Life from the section Letters To The Dominican Order, and The Rosary from the section Living The Gospel.

Yet what we sing is an old song, and what Timothy describes are traditional ways of praying; he also describes those who prayed in that traditional way. In his chapter on The Rosary he describes his father's bargain with God: if God saved his family in the London blitz, he would pray the Rosary every day. God won the bargain and so Timothy grew up with this example of his father's daily prayer. We might note in passing that his father did not force all his family to pray the Rosary with him. They had not struck the bargain: he had. This represented a spiritual duty for him now, balancing the moral duty of engagement in justified warfare. Here, then, is a picture of prayer as paying back honestly for what we have been given: and what he pays back are the old prayers, repetitive prayers -- repetitive as the day after day of the life of each of his children, including, of course, Timothy.

Timothy also relates prayer, in an earlier section of his book, to what is most ancient and repetitive: to the forms of language itself, in which a child is bathed, washed in language, eased into humanity and thinking, a-swim in the linguistic element that is essential our existence. So prayer has that ancient socialising grace, a clean sound which inducts us into what it means to be human.

Now if prayer is so natural and good, sanctioned by custom and also such a useful way of keeping a bargain with God, why does Timothy need to remind all the members of the Order of Preachers about it in this letter The Promise of Life, issued on Ash Wednesday 25 February 1998? It was sent to all the members of the Order, including of course Glasgow Lay Dominicans (although for most of us the letter got delayed in the Italian postal system for a year or so, until published in Sing a New Song in 1999). Why the need to remind the Order about prayer?

He has just been talking about the difficulties of the sexual life and the emotional life for those in religion: what he calls 'the wilderness of loneliness'.  Whenever 'the apostolic life leads us to the bewilderment of Gethsemane, where life loses all meaning, then crisis in love may confront us with the solitude of the cross'. Thus the loneliness of celibate life is to be 'lived as an entry into the loneliness of Christ in his death, which bears and transforms all human loneliness. "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"'

To those who feel crucified in a wilderness of loneliness, he recalls that it was at the foot of the cross, when Jesus gave his mother and the beloved disciple into each other's care and keeping, that the community of the Church was born.

Then he moves directly into the section entitled The Life of Prayer signalling its central place in the communities in which Dominicans live: signalling its role in creating those communities, not merely being a by-product of them. Hence the image of the child being 'fed with words, bathed and soothed with words ... It becomes human in that sea of language.' There may be something quite affecting in using this metaphor from child-rearing and family life to a group many of whom will be celibate, with, one presumes, little direct experience of such matters. It is almost as if Timothy needs to remind us as Dominicans firstly that 'both study and prayer belong to the contemplative life to which every Dominican is called' and secondly that study and prayer are different in kind as an order of words, as a way of ordering the created universe and finding our place in it. Timothy reminds us that 'the mother and father do not talk to their child so as to communicate information. They are talking it into life.'

The parents, one hopes, are not deliberately withholding or distorting information (since truth needs information too) but we know what Timothy means. There is a danger in the Dominican life that study replaces prayer, that information and argument displace intuition and song, and obscure the way that prayer can be the vehicle for both of these -- for intuition and for song. Prayer, also, is the word of God: both in terms of the ancient words of biblical psalms and readings in the daily Office, and also in terms of the words of family conversation -- which is trivial, forgettable, ordinary and day-to-day, dealing out what makes us human, saying the best or needed thing, keeping up our own side of a conversation, being 'in the swim' of family life (to use his water metaphor) , going 'with its flow', letting arguments or tensions just 'wash off us', keeping the mood 'buoyant'. 

Whether the words are serious or trivial, in entering language we realise the presence of the other. Language is inherently dialogic, as the Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin states. Conversations proceed by a subtle accommodation to the other's words and ideas. In prayer, the other is God and prayer is a way of entering 'the larger world of God', but at a conversational level of statement or question and response. Like any good or satisfactory conversation, it should involve both talking and listening and also periods of silence, when a re-orientation of views or an internalisation of what the other has just intimated can take place. So prayer as conversation is variable, with a range of tones and rhythms, and subtle enough to mean more than its string of words in a transcript might appear to mean to someone standing outside that conversation, listening to it or studying it. Thus participation in the life of prayer is important, not merely codifying information about its procedures, or thinking that all prayer must follow a set routine (though routines are important as we shall see). We dislike conversation that falls into set routines, or that seems to have forgotten what conversations are for.

What, then, is prayer for? Timothy reminds us that 'In the Dominican tradition, speaking to God is above all else asking for what we want.' It is interesting to observe how, for many of us, our own early training in puritanical Scottish Christianity kicks in at this point: it strikes us this is surely a childishly self-centred     approach, as if we were nagging God the Father-figure for more pocket money. Countering such an indoctrinated or ideological reaction, Timothy again reminds us that this is 'not infantile but realism'. It shows that we are waking up from the little fantasy world of the market in which we live half-asleep, where everything is for sale. We have begun, at least, to recognise that in the real world everything is a gift from the one who is 'the source of all that is good for us'. The last phrase is a quotation from the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. The purpose of prayer is not to for us to recite mechanically a few petitions from the breviary; the purpose of prayer is for us to open the door to God, enabling us to dare to ask God for what we most deeply desire.

Thomas is marvellous on prayer, which is a sort of appeal, and so an act of reason (see page 402 of Timothy McDermott's Concise Translation of the Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas). The mind makes connections, seeks to cause things to happen, either by command or request. (Even children's conversations with parents, we remember, is often centrally about asking for things to be different.) Again, countering a possible view of petition as a selfish act: Charity commands us to desire what we need, and religion commands us to ask for it: "Ask and you shall receive". Thomas is full of such sensible and indeed comforting aphorisms: The Trinity we beseech to have mercy on us, the saints we simply ask to pray for us to the Trinity (page 403). So there we are, praying.

Both Thomas and Timothy are good, too, on the physical aspect of prayer, a 'physicality' which moves beyond thanks into exulting. In Timothy's words, The exodus from the Egypt of self-obsession is a moment of ecstasy. We are liberated from the dark and cramped little world of the ego. Like Miriam after the crossing of the Red Sea we will surely be exuberant. We exult in having entered the wide open spaces of God's friendship (page 155). This physicality of prayer is very Dominican. After a reminder of Dominic's physical and energetic nine ways of prayer, Timothy moves into a celebration of prayer -- as celebration: the whole body is saved by grace and so prays. He recalls Zulu Dominican sisters dancing and singing, the passionate song of Polish friars, the firecrackers and gongs of a Taiwanese Easter vigil, and so on.

This exuberance may remind us also that prayer may be a physical expression of our care for others, when we petition on their behalf, like reaching to God with protest placards. There is a good reminder in Thomas that when we pray in common for other people, we are forbidden to exclude our enemies. Again, with great common sense he says that to offer special prayers on their behalf is a perfection not demanded of us, but we must be ready in our souls to help them in time of need or when they beg our pardon. He then deals with the various imprecations against enemies which are such a feature of the psalms, as either prophecies or words directed against the kingdom of sin as such.

This variation in the tone of prayer is worth thinking about. To revert to the bathing analogy: we can bathe for many reasons -- to get clean, for healthy exercise, to pass the time, to enter into a different state of existence, to gain a sense of release or buoyancy, or for safety's sake. Or, we can just swim to get somewhere, across a river or a pool. Such exercise can also be a way of escaping the worries or obsessions of the mind itself, by substituting a regular physical movement for its emotional, fitful and moody ones.

This recalls the effect and the efficacy of the Rosary, which is accompanied by physical actions, for example going round the beads, counting them like spinning a Tibetan prayer wheel. The Rosary combines ordinariness in its repetition of basic Christian prayers, with loss of self-consciousness through involvement in a communal round or story. Timothy is good  on the Rosary as a useful prayer for travelling with, in airports for example; perhaps in such places it reminds him of his father and home.

The Rosary is sometimes reminiscent of that kind of familiar language which goes on in a desultory not terribly meaningful way, until suddenly we recognise that this is the meaning. We recognise the importance of prayer, and its comfort and sustaining power, only when we stop doing it: as in general human conversation, its loss is noticed when the other person leaves the room, or leaves your life, with no chance to talk again. Or it may be that the chance to talk is wasted by a lie or a silence or a cynical comment. Similarly, life without that prayer-conversation comes to lack some sort of humanity. This may relate to the third effect of prayer that St Thomas mentions in his schema: the first effect is the deserving of eternal life; the second effect is the obtaining what we ask; and the third effect is the spiritual renewal of the mind (page 404).

This last needs attentiveness to the words and their meanings and, above all, to the goal of prayer, which is God himself and whatever we are praying for. ( I, personally, often pray for a parking space with extraordinary effect!) Thomas reminds us that this last sort of attentiveness, to God and to our object in praying, is available even to the feeble-minded. (I often include myself in that category.)

Again, very sensibly and in a balanced way, he recognises that the human mind is too weak to stay aloft for long. Sometimes, in the middle of prayer, when the mind is lifted up to God in contemplation, it suddenly wanders (page 404). This does not deprive the prayer of its fruit, since the intention which originated the prayer is crucial, and with us constantly. Prayer moreover cannot be constant, because there are many things we must do. We cannot take medicine all the time, but in measured doses:

The fitting thing is that prayer should last as long as is found useful in arousing the fervour of intense desire (for God). When it goes on longer than that and starts to weary us, we should stop (page 404).

And so will I, but with just a thought about any prayer said so often that it is learned by heart and not learned by rote. One sort of prayer can become the other, or drift back and forth between. The prayer known by heart, both literally and rhythmically and in some way intimately (because it has been part of your life for years, part of the life of your mind) is very powerful. Timothy refers to the Rosary enduring by means of its memorable prayers and emotions and its numerical focussing of attentiveness, persisting through years of persecution and neglect, in China and elsewhere.

The rhythms and the words of the psalms, and the structure of Morning Prayer, for me in particular now, and Night Prayer at an earlier stage, have become part of the waters of my life: enjoyable to look at, or to be carried along by their current, even when half asleep, or drifting in and out of attentiveness. Even that registers for me the presence or absence of another order of existence. There is also, of course, the strong sense of sharing in words spoken by Dominican communities in past centuries, and beyond that by Jesus himself; and there is a knowledge of words still to be said, by heart, in days to come. 

And so, Let us pray.

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