Prayer or Works?

Intermountain Catholic

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Last month I had a real-life encounter with a question that St. Thomas Aquinas asks in his Summa Theologica: “Whether the active life is more excellent than the contemplative?”

It so happened that I went to a presentation by a Catholic human rights activist on the same day that I interviewed Sister Margaret Mary Miller, OCD, who has been a cloistered Carmelite nun for 77 years.

Sr. Margaret Mary entered the convent at the age of 18, and since then she has lived a life of prayer, cloistered in the convent. As the interview concluded, I commented that some of the prayers that used to place me in God’s presence no longer seem to do so.

“Just live with the Lord,” Sr. Margaret Mary suggested. “Just being with the Lord is prayer. It is. It’s simple prayer. The simpler the prayer is, the closer it is, in a sense.”

This thought is nothing new; St. Teresa of Avila, who founded the Discalced Carmelite order to which Sr. Margaret Mary belongs, said prayer “is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.”

The concept of “just being with the Lord” is indeed simple. Living out that idea, however, is anything but easy. When I wake in the morning I pray that I will walk with the Lord, but I’m usually not even out the door before I’m caught up in worldly thoughts.

A couple of hours after talking with Sr. Margaret Mary, I was listening to Aimee Murphy, founder of Rehumanize International, speaking about how we can help “secure a future with human rights for all human beings,” as she says in her book Rehumanize.

That our society and our world don’t extend human rights to all is evident by a long list of transgressions against the dignity of our brethren: war, abortion, racism, the death penalty, euthanasia, assisted suicide, torture, police brutality, sexual abuse, slavery – the list goes on.

Catholic Social Teaching speaks of “the sacred value of human life from its very beginning until its end,” as Pope John Paul II phrased it in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae. In that work, he explores “the deepest roots of the struggle between the ‘culture of life’ and the ‘culture of death,’” and bemoans the harm done not only by the evils listed above but also infanticide, poverty, hunger and endemic diseases. Again echoing centuries of Catholic Social Teaching, the pope calls the Church to proclaim the Gospel of life – and by “the Church,” he is referring to individual Catholics.

“We have been sent,” John Paul II writes, adding, “Everyone has an obligation to be at the service of life. This is a properly ‘ecclesial’ responsibility, which requires concerted and generous action by all the members and by all sectors of the Christian community. This community commitment does not however eliminate or lessen the responsibility of each individual, called by the Lord to ‘become the neighbour’ of everyone: ‘Go and do likewise’ (Lk 10:37).”

Murphy’s talk was a reminder of this call; she challenged those of us in her audience to transform our communities and end violence against all human beings. It is a lofty goal, but as with prayer I find myself struggling take such action on a regular basis.

At home that evening, I thought about the different paths taken by Sr. Margaret Mary and Aimee Murphy. Both are working to bring about the Kingdom of God, one through a cloistered contemplative life, the other by being active in the public square. Aquinas maintains that the contemplative life is more excellent, but he also quotes St. Gregory the Great to the effect that it is possible to enter the heavenly kingdom without the contemplative life, “but we cannot enter therein without the active life, if we neglect to do the good we can do.”

Which means that while it’s good to deepen my prayer life, I’d do better to worry more about my acts of charity.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.