Making an oratory of the heart…
The phrase, “oratory of the heart,” is not common parlance. I first encountered it in Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God,. I had to stop and think about the word oratory. It’s not one we hear in daily conversations. Oratory is defined first as as eloquence in public speaking and second as a place of prayer. Clearly Brother Lawrence refers to the second meaning.
It’s an arresting phrase, isn’t it? Coupled with the image of the Oratory of St John Co-Cathedral it becomes wondrous. Imagine if our hearts could be this splendid, glorious?
This is precisely what an unknown monk from the seventeenth century invites us to do. In a simply worded, brief book called the Practice of the Presence of God. Embedded in this second link is a free PDF. This copy of the book contains four ‘conversations’ between Brother Lawrence and an unknown writer.
The secrets lie in willing His presence and in understanding that it’s not about us. It’s all about Him, Christ, His grace and mercy. The anonymous conversationalist writes this:
…that we might accustom ourselves to a continual conversation with Him, with freedom and in simplicity. That we need only to recognize GOD intimately present with us, to address ourselves to Him every moment, that we may beg His assistance for knowing His will in things doubtful, and for rightly performing those which we plainly see He requires of us, offering them to Him before we do them, and giving Him thanks when we have done.
That in this conversation with GOD, we are also employed in praising, adoring, and loving him incessantly, for His infinite goodness and perfection.
That, without being discouraged on account of our sins, we should pray for His grace with a perfect confidence, as relying upon the infinite merits of our LORD. That GOD never failed offering us His grace at each action; that he distinctly perceived it, and never failed of it, unless when his thoughts had wandered from a sense of GOD’s Presence, or he had forgot to ask His assistance.
Making an oratory of the heart
when people are killing one another because of their religion? Muslims killing Christians and Christians killing Muslims? How is it possible to keep our hearts free of all that is dark, violent and depraved?
A couple of weeks ago, Fr. Chris Kanowitz was preaching an extemporaneous homily. He had not expected to preach that early morning mass and had nothing prepared. And so he spoke of a painting, icon, that he keeps in his prayer room at the rectory. The Franciscan artist calls it, The Madonna of the Holocaust.
His description of the painting intrigued me therefore, him to send me an image of it. Here is this haunting, unsettling, profoundly provocative painting of the Madonna and her Child at Auschwitz.
Each of us ponders the whys of terror, hatred, the spectacular violence of humans upon one another.
And how and why God permits them.
Moshe Greenberg ‘s words can fit as caption to this painting:
“Through nature, God reveals Himself to Job as both purposive and nonpurposive, playful and uncanny, as evidenced by the monsters He created. To study nature is to perceive the complexity, the unity of contraries, in God’s attributes, and the inadequacy of human reason to explain His behavior, not the least in His dealings with man.
“For it may be inferred that in God’s dealings with man, this complexity is also present–a unity of opposites: reasonability, justice, playfulness, uncanniness (the latter appearing demonic in the short view). When Job recognizes in the God of nature, with His fullness of attributes, the very same God revealed in his own individual destiny, the tumult in his soul is stilled. He has fathomed the truth concerning God’s character: he is no longer tortured by a concept that fails to account for the phenomena, as did his former notion of God’s orderly working.”
