Contemplative Prayer and Hope for America

In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, how do we answer the violence that grips America’s public square?

This latest social horror is part of a disturbing pattern of other assassinations, massacres, and violent riots that have gripped our country. Confused and cowardly men vent their rage on defenseless children and people of faith. Drugged-out gangbangers terrorize schools and neighborhoods. Deadly plots of lone-wolf assassins foil safety measures and rob our society of important voices that we need to hear. Our whole social reality is unraveling, and until we return to the truth of our own humanity before God, we risk even greater horrors to come. The Catholic tradition proposes that the only adequate answer to the social horror we are witnessing is the peace of Christ, and the saints and martyrs of this tradition discovered this peace through a return to contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer as an encounter with the saving mystery of Christ is America’s only real hope.

Evil needs to be confronted and stopped, especially social evil. Simply drawing back in horror is never adequate. But the scale of evil seems beyond mere human effort to overcome. In this vein, many of our political leaders see the need to turn to prayer. While even the most humble vocal prayer offered with sincerity is a good place to start, the witness of the saints challenges us to go much deeper in the heart. By saints, I mean those who have gone before us and who confronted the social horror of their own time with the peace of Christ. These saints point us to an observant engagement with God that suffers the truth about our humanity and dares to cry for help. Such is the mystery of contemplative prayer.

The saints witness to contemplative prayer, also called mental prayer. This expression of prayer seeks God, to behold Him with wonder, to gaze upon Him with love, to see rightly the One who truly is. This prayer is faith, opening the eyes of the heart to the living presence of the Risen Lord. It is the prayer that takes risks and that rises to the challenge because it has seen something worth the risk. It is a prayer of courage.

Many taste this, if only for a few passing moments, after receiving Holy Communion, or else, after spending a little time in Adoration. Sometimes, it lingers after a good confession. It is not a feeling, though many feelings might come and go. It is not a thought, even if this prayer can conceive and bring to birth many startling insights. This contemplation in faith is an awareness of the Risen Lord’s personal presence deeper than anything that can be felt or thought. This is not esoteric escapism, but a baptism of the heart into the very depths of reality itself. Such a vision of faith is possible because the Word of the Father has chosen to make Himself known to us. Yet He never forces Himself but will only make Himself known if we ask and wait for Him in faith.

The Lord’s own teaching about prayer gave the saints good reason to hope that those who ask for Him will receive Him. If St. Paul declares that “In Him we live and move and have our being,” (Acts 17:28) and if he also proclaims that Christ is “before all things and holds all things together in himself” (Col. 1:17), this means that the Risen Lord is more present to us than we are to ourselves. He never changes but is always making all things new. His presence is never static but always at work in each moment of our lives with the power of the Holy Spirit, even as He sits at the right hand of the Father. Contemplative prayer welcomes this saving presence and makes space for Him in the heart.

St. John Paul II spoke of this prayer as gazing into the face of Christ, who gazes on us with love. St. John of the Cross describes an unfamiliar light, a dark night, a secret ladder, a divine inflow, and an awakening in the soul that brings all of creation into harmony. For St. Therese of the Child Jesus, this prayer is a cry of the heart that embraces both sorrow and joy, one that she manages to offer even in the total darkness of her own faith. Recently canonized Carlo Acutis pondered such truths in Eucharistic miracles, and Pier Giorgio Frassati expressed it in his hidden care for the poor. Then there is St. Paul’s beautiful description of “the first fruits of the Spirit” manifest in a cosmic and interior groaning, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26, cf. 8:23).

This prayer is always a participation in the last wordless cry of Christ from the Cross, and only this kind of prayer learns to hear all that the Father wanted to disclose in that sacred moment. In the Mass, the Liturgy of the Hours, and Eucharistic Exposition, as well as in other forms of personal prayer such as the Rosary or Lectio Divina, the Risen Lord pours His life out even to the point of what the Fathers of the Church describe as a holy inebriation, and contemplative prayer is vulnerable to this sober intoxication. Rather than diminishing reason, this sharing in the Lord’s own prayer leaves it in silent astonishment. Such chastened clarity is filled with the silence of the Word of the Father, a silent fullness that is completing His work in the soul and through the soul in the world—such is the renewal of prayer that answers the horror of violence.

Heeding the call to deeper prayer that the saints make known will be increasingly important the more the third millennium of Christianity unfolds. This means living our lives in a way that allows these holy ones to draw us into the prayer of Christ more than a technocratic society nudges us into commercialization. If we fail to resist technocracy’s nudging, if we fail to put ourselves in a place where more noble things can draw us, the merely material is a swamp that bogs down the heart. When bogged down in the merely material, our desire for a meaningful life is frustrated. Anxiety and resentment flow from this frustration, and this anxious resentment offers a slippery slope to every kind of social horror. The way out of the swamp is the kind of contemplative prayer that we find in the saints. This kind of prayer offers ground firm enough to stand on in the midst of the swamp. That is, borrowing an insight from Pope Benedict, contemplative prayer provides understanding, the foothold one needs to live a meaningful life, even in the midst of extreme confusion.

The image of a swamp, in fact, speaks to the limitations materialist societies place on themselves. A materialist society, a society that seeks to displace the sacred with the merely material, does not endure. Mircea Eliade pointedly observed that whenever a society forgets the sacred, it passes away within a couple of generations. Our post-Christian technocracy is at this point, and only the saints can help us rediscover the solid ground that will bear the weight of our existence.

The swamp has frustrated many who serve the Church. There is a certain frustration that no matter the program, the planning, or the effort put into something, the pastoral results are not really meaningful. Pope Benedict explored this frustration at the outset of his Introduction to Christianity. He asks whether the actual problem is our own lack of belief, and he suggests that this is where contemplative prayer comes in—contemplation helps a soul find better ground even in the midst of a swamp.

No other novelist has explored this swamp as powerfully as Shusaku Endo in his work Silence. He presents a traumatized priest in despair during the 17th-century brutal Japanese persecution of the Church. The priest has been manipulated and nudged into a silenced conscience, acting in betrayal of his faith, a hostage to those willing to do whatever it takes to secure the traditional material order of their culture. Yet the novel unfolds how both his conscience and the conscience of Japan are silenced, and in this silence, the priest becomes a symbol of Japan itself, spiritually bogged down, unable to thrive, a swamp.

Endo’s description of Japan as a swamp may be applied to every materialist society, that is, even to our own technocracy. As was the case in medieval Japan, technocracy is also preoccupied with the preservation of material wealth for the elite classes. When the merely material is held more sacred than the spiritual, dignity and worth are seen in terms of the accumulation of wealth and the avoidance of suffering, and everyone is weighed on this scale. Christianity’s preference for voluntary poverty for the sake of the spiritual, its protection of the dignity of every person, and the positive value that it gives to suffering all render it disruptive to any materialist social order. Seeing Christianity as a threat to the social order, the culturally powerful have acted to silence the voice of the Christian faith in the public square. And this never goes well, either for the most vulnerable or for the whole of society.

Endo’s swamp is one in which the beauty and excellence of humanity are bogged down by material power. On the edge of Endo’s story are seemingly pitiful characters, their lives senselessly and brutally thrown away. The persecutors use their suffering to manipulate the priest to apostasy, and he finally abandons his faith to save their lives. His ironclad reasoning makes it feel unreasonable to disagree with his silence. Yet there is a subtle critique offered in the novel. This critique is not expressed in words, but instead in the scandal of silence, much deeper and more meaningful than that of the tormented priest.

To find the deeper silence that Endo portrays, the reader must move beyond the seemingly pivotal players of the novel and look to the least of the characters, the ones hidden in social horror. These pitiful side characters scandalously serve as unlikely witnesses to the power of prayer. Their piety is given only the same banal description as their persecutors would have given it. Their deaths are depicted as senseless, as the priest imagined. Yet, the martyrdoms manage to testify to a depth more profound than despair. This mystery of silence, this Holy Saturday that stands between Good Friday and Easter, is a silence full of meaning. This same silent fullness, the silence that the martyrs share, waits for us in prayer. For contemplation and martyrdom both come from and lead to loving union with Christ. If Endo leaves the full weight of martyrdom obscure and hidden behind the traumatized doubt and apostasy of the main character, his depiction of the scandalous sacrifices of anonymous Japanese peasants (based on actual events) haunts a reader long after the novel has been put down.

The silence that lives in the scandal of Japanese martyrs may help us glimpse why the social horror that took Charlie Kirk is such an important call to prayer for America and the Church. If his courage to witness to the truth was scandalous to many, his willingness to enter into conversation with those who disagreed with him was even more so. While his values were traditional and spiritual, the culturally powerful villainized not only his positions but also his very person, even shaming those who agreed with him to silence. In this swamp, Kirk attempted to witness to the goodness of America as a place where ideas could be discussed in the public square. He also brought attention to the goodness of a rising generation that he wanted to inspire. He observed how this new generation is drawn to traditional family values and traditional forms of faith, such as Catholicism or Orthodoxy, as an answer to the growing chaos of our culture.

This is where a rediscovery of mental prayer can renew the Church, if we let it. If this new generation scandalously seeks firm ground in the midst of the swamp of technocracy and materialism, the Church has the duty to pass on the riches of contemplative prayer, the wisdom of the saints. In other words, the next generation is looking for a foothold in the face of the commercialization of their existence, and the only foothold that the Church can offer is scandalous, as scandalous as the spiritual answers that Charlie Kirk proposed, as scandalous as the Cross of Christ itself. Against a culture that promises an easy life, this new generation scandalously desires to sacrifice it to have a meaningful life instead, and the Church has treasures to help them. The Church has something for those who want to be challenged in this way, and what we need now is to offer it anew. Yet our ability to offer this to those who yearn for a word of hope can only be realized to the extent that we make this tradition of prayer our own. We need to return to the prayer of the saints, the contemplation that demands ongoing conversation, the gaze of love that gives us the courage to love.

The Savior has descended deep into the swamp of humanity, and He is waiting for us to find Him in prayer. We are called to be saints in the swamp, not to condemn it, but to offer a word of hope where hope is most needed. Only the prayer of scandalous saints, prayer learned in the swamp, finds in the scandal of the Cross the hope that does not disappoint. This hope is the only thing new that this dying world has ever known, and it is passing away without it. Yet with it, believers have something to offer that no violent or cultural power can ever hold back.

Prayer in the Catholic Tradition is about facing the swamp, facing even the social horror that it engenders, and answering it with the peace of Christ. This peace is about taking the risk of opening the eyes of one’s heart to find out the truth about God, about the world, and about sin. Those who take this risk always look pitiful and obscure, but they are the only ones dealing with reality and empowered to do something about it. Yes, the saints are those pregnant with this scandalous wisdom, and the whole Church is called to join them in bringing to birth a silent fullness of truth in love to answer the meaninglessness of sin.

(Editor’s note: This essay was posted originally on the “What We Need Now” site and is published here with kind permission.)