For Chinese Catholics: The Holy Hour, how to meditate on the Gospel (1)
Today AsiaNews begins publishing a book that explains the way, techniques, contents of Gospel meditation, in the wake of the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. A service to the Church in China in its urgent need for spiritual formation for bishops, priests, religious, laity.
Rome (AsiaNews) - Chinese bishops, priests, religious, laity all agree on one fact: that there is a need to strengthen the spiritual and intellectual formation of the faithful. Even the two branches of the Catholic Church, official and underground, are searching for resourced and people to help with the theological, cultural, spiritual education of their communities and seminaries.
Already the Letter from Benedict XVI to Chinese Catholics emphasized the importance of permanent formation, first of all for priests (No. 13). To that was followed in 2009 by a letter signed by Card. Tarcisio Bertone to Chinese priests, reiterating the value of formation.
This year the Asia News Symposium on the Church in China, highlighted the urgent need for this in light of the missionary challenges that the Chinese Church faces: state atheism, growth of traditional religions, modernity.
The current emphasis on reaching diplomatic agreements or the appointment of bishops tends to hide or sideline the responsibility that is of all Catholics worldwide: to help the Church in China, today in some nebulous future, to grow and to strengthen in faith. Pope Francis is not insensitive to this theme: his Evangelii Gaudium is a permanent educational-missionary teacher's manual, and even details how to prepare homilies!
This led to the proposal to publish a book on the Holy Hour, on the meditation of the Gospel, which explains the method, the rhythms, and also the contents of meditation. The author is Fr. Ottavio De Bertolis, a Jesuit Professor, who serves in the Gesu Church in Rome. With his permission, we begin publishing his book in chapters today (BC).
KEEPING WATCH AND PRAYER
The Holy Hour
A premise
The term "holy hour" traditionally indicates a classical expression of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which is inspired by the Lord's words: "My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch with me. "(Mt 26:38). We do so every Thursday night of that prayer full of pain and love with which Christ welcomed the will of the Father, "he learned obedience from what he suffered " (Heb 5, 8), he took our sufferings, our pains upon himself and was crushed for our iniquities (see Is 53, 4-5).
He is truly the high priest who intercedes for his brothers, holy, innocent, stainless, who has offered himself (see Eph. 7: 26-27). In him, lying on the ground in Gethsemane, that Psalm expression comes true: "Yet I, when they were ill, put on sackcloth, afflicted myself with fasting, sobbed my prayers upon my bosom. I went about in grief as for my brother, bent in mourning as for my mother"(Ps. 35: 13-14). He prayed for us sick and in his heart, in his breast, in the Garden of Olives echoed the prayer that came to the Father for us as he saw all the betrayal and infidelity of those who would have been consumed throughout history. He who called us friends (see Jn 15, 14) and brothers, and said that we would have been a mother to him, if we had done the will of the Father (cf. Mc 3, 34), he was angry for us as we are for our friends, brothers and sisters, in their infirmities. Indeed at that time "For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin" (2 Cor 5:21); In other words, he lived in himself the separation and the distance from God, as the last of the sinners and the damned, in our place, so that no one could say he was not loved to that point. And so comes the word of the Psalm: “If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, there you are" (Ps 139, 8). Jesus lived the hell, not only descending into the abode of the dead in the mystery of the holy sabbath, but also dwelling in the abode of those who have died in the spirit even though they are alive with the flesh, that is, sinners, who condemn themselves, still living Their own infinite distance from God, their infinite sorrow: for anyone, even the last of the sinners, could say that He had come to him "to the end" (Jn 12: 1), that is, to the point where he was.
In this regard, I have always been impressed by a word of Jesus addressed to Saint Margaret Maria Alacoque, and you have annotated that we must read according to the categories and the language of the times of the saint and which, once well-understood, contains a confirmation of all that we have discussed above: "Here I suffered more than all the rest of my Passion seeing myself abandoned by Heaven and earth, loaded with all the sins of humanity. I stood before the holiness of God who, without regard to my innocence, in my fury crushed me; He made me drink the cup, which contained all the gall and bitterness of His just indignation, as if He had forgotten the name of Father [...]. Nobody in the world can understand the intensity of the pain I suffered. It is the same pain that the sinful soul experiences when it comes before the court of divine sanctity, which judges it [...] and throws it into the abyss of righteousness. " Truly, "God did not spare His own son, but He did so for all of us" (Rm 8, 32).
Saint Margaret Maria devoted herself to the practice of Holy Hour every Thursday night from 11 pm to midnight in the chapel of her monastery. But we are not bound to this. The essence of this prayer consists in meditating or contemplating for an entire hour and continuing the Passion of the Lord with the desire to offer him love and reparation for our infidelities and betrayal, and especially for those of the consecrated souls. There is no particular "system": one can read and meditate the story of the Passion of one of the Gospels, in whole or in part, or pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, or do the Way of the Cross, or even stay silent and empty ones heart in front of Him.
In short, every individual prays according to their capability: I propose, especially for those who are beginning, to start by reflecting on the story of Christ's Agony in Gethsemane, or on a passage from the Passion. After reading it and re-reading it, allow yourselves to simply wonder what the text says and what the text tells you, what it says to you, to your life. Allow yourselves to be touched by the Word and finally, when it spontaneously comes, tell the Lord whatever comes to you. Or try to imagine the scene we read, enter it, imagine yourself in there, and having a conversation with the people present there, in accordance with how each is spontaneously and freely inspired. As for the position of the body, may it be whatever position helps us most, even changing it: standing or kneeling, sitting or bending, whatever position we may feel most useful to the exercise. And we remain in this prayer until we have derived some fruit from it.
It is clear then that such a prayer is always pleasing to Jesus, without specifying days or times: but it is true that Thursday night is precisely the exact memory of "that" Thursday night, of that hour in which the power of darkness seemed victorious. Keeping watch, too, has an important meaning: you keep watch at night, and the night is not only an outer darkness, it is also an inner one. Let us learn to illuminate the night with prayer, our personal night, that of the world, and maybe even the night of the Church. Moreover, it is at midnight that the groom arrives and we run to meet him (see Mt 25,6): the heart of Christ, upon which the beloved disciple rests his head, is the heart or breast of the groom, to whom the bride confides in the intimacy of love: "Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death"(Cf. 8: 6).
Of course, it is not necessary to remain in Church to do all this, although it is true that praying before the sacrament is to pray differently: it is not necessarily a matter of leaving home, and perhaps it is the opportunity to enter the silence of one's own room and pray in secret. At this time, each of us, and especially priests, will find an inexhaustible source of grace, consolation and personal comfort, intercession for each other and apostolic fertility in their ministry.
It is an authentic "school of the Sacred Heart" because in the end this spirituality is not taught and not learned from books, but it is Jesus who reveals it to each one according to his own grace. In my opinion, it is the best means of gaining a true knowledge, not learned but lived, not "for the sake of saying" but to have "seen and touched" the very heart of Jesus, which is shown to those who seek it.
In this booklet we want to offer ideas to help discover, or rediscover, this beautiful form of prayer, a simple, free "being with Jesus", not done out of duty but out of love. It is a weekly space to dilate our prayer, which maybe in the hustle and bustle of other days, in the midst of so many activities, we have little time for. It is a kind of spiritual pause that we allow ourselves, a vitamin or supplement that we really need. I would like to note that, probably, it would be difficult to have a Holy Hour every day, but equally once a month would dilute its efficacy. Instead once a week is a rhythm that is possible for everyone, and thus doing it becomes almost a course of Spiritual Exercises in everyday life. Without leaving our occupations, here we have begun to seek and find the Lord, to water ourselves with the living water that flows from His Heart.
Finally, I would like to suggest that for those who do not feel like standing in prayer for an entire hour, begin to practice the holy hour in a simpler and yet no less effective way, and on the other hand, one which everyone can follow. At a certain hour of the day, of our choice, we simply do what we do as if we were in front of Jesus: invite him to us, so to speak, to stay with us in our occupations, and offer him time to respond to the love of his Heart. It is not therefore to pray, nor to focus, but to stay with him: especially the sick can join their suffering, physical or moral, to his passion; Whoever meets someone and sees people can honor Christ present there in those near them at that moment; Those who do a job can join their hidden life. And so our whole life is now hidden with Christ in God (see Col 3: 3) and we learn to offer our bodies, that is our lives, as a spiritual sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God (see Rm 12, 1 -2). Do not underestimate how useful this simple way of praying is, one that is always within our reach: it teaches us to live with him, in front of him, for him, in everything. With the words of St. Ignatius, he teaches us to be "contemplative in action," to seek and find in all the greatest glory and service of Our Lord God.
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