What prayer is and what it achieves for hope - Spe Salve

In preparation for Pope Benedict's third encyclical I decided to brush up on his thought - his manner of thinking and explaining - by reading his first two encyclicals, Deus Caritas est and Spe Salvi. My first readings were hasty and interrupted, filling me with the impression I was only skimming the surface of what I had before me. The seconding readings, slow and meditative, confirmed that impression. Pope Benedict's intellectual status is undisputed, as was that of his predecessor, but whereas the social encyclicals of John Paul II were sometimes heavy with his learning, those of Benedict are written with astonishing simplicity that opens up nevertheless an equally astonishing depth and subtlety. They are to be read and reread.

Towards the end of Spe Salve, after he has discussed what hope means, how it is related to faith, how there can be no lasting hope without God, that freedom and progress for mankind cannot be uncoupled from faith without a descent into disaster - as has been amply shown - Benedict introduces a section headed "Settings" for learning and practising hope, the first of which is "Prayer as a school of hope" (Nos. 32 - 34). In these paragraphs we find a stunning statement of what prayer is and is not. The italics are mine.

33. ...To pray is not to step outside history and withdraw to our own private corner of happiness. When we pray properly we undergo a process of inner purification which opens us up to God and thus to our fellow human beings as well. In prayer we must learn what we can truly ask of God—what is worthy of God. We must learn that we cannot pray against others. We must learn that we cannot ask for the superficial and comfortable things that we desire at this moment—that meagre, misplaced hope that leads us away from God. We must learn to purify our desires and our hopes. We must free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves. God sees through them, and when we come before God, we too are forced to recognize them. “But who can discern his errors? Clear me from hidden faults” prays the Psalmist (Ps 19:12 [18:13]). Failure to recognize my guilt, the illusion of my innocence, does not justify me and does not save me, because I am culpable for the numbness of my conscience and my incapacity to recognize the evil in me for what it is. If God does not exist, perhaps I have to seek refuge in these lies, because there is no one who can forgive me; no one who is the true criterion. Yet my encounter with God awakens my conscience in such a way that it no longer aims at self-justification, and is no longer a mere reflection of me and those of my contemporaries who shape my thinking, but it becomes a capacity for listening to the Good itself.

What really struck in this description is the necessity "to free ourselves from the hidden lies with which we deceive ourselves." Anyone who is honest with himself knows there are periods in one's life when self-deception leads us astray. That's part of our fallibility - our fallen nature. Collision with our social environment generally undeceives us. But there's another sort of self-deception that appears to me during these times as stubborn and intransigent, a sort of a corporate self-deception - and to which Pope Benedict seems, at least in part, to be alluding. I am talking about the moral blindness to homosexuality, abortion, euthanasia and destructive radical feminism.

So many of us are left staring in incomprehension, for example, at the wide-spread acceptance of the claim by homosexuals that their rights are being denied because the state will not (until now) recognise "same-sex marriage".

Why do ordinary people let the incoherence of the phrasing "same-sex marriage" float by them unchallenged? No rights are being denied homosexuals; marriage is between female and male. That's what it is. The attempt to change the definition is a political tactic by group with a political agenda. It may work politically but marriage will never be other than the union between female and male. That is the prescription of nature. Anything else is against nature. Anything else is a gigantic con.

Again, why do ordinary ostensibly sensible people swallow the political propaganda? Even worse, why the social torpor in the face of a political campaign to make the utterance of what I have just claimed a criminal offence? Imagine it: I commit a criminal offence by claiming marriage is the union between female and male.

I think Pope Benedict has given a clear answer to those questions. He has also given the remedy.

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com