Art of Prayer
By Anthony de Mello, SJ
Somewhere early in my religious life I had the great good fortune of making a retreat under an extraordinary man, Father Jose Calveras, who had the reputation of teaching people how to pray during his retreats. I knew of venerable old Jesuits who had been many years in religious life and came away from Father Calveras’ retreat saying, “This man has really taught me to pray,” not entirely accurate, of course, because there’s barely any Christian who doesn’t know to pray in some way or other. I suppose what they meant was that Calveras had thought them to pray more satisfactorily and in greater depth. This he certainly did for me.
I went to his retreat full of great expectations. But within a couple of days I was afflicted with all my usual prayer problems. When I took them to Father Calveras, he said to me, quite simply, “How do you pray?” (It struck me later that no one before had asked me that question point blank.) So I began to describe, step, what I did in prayer. “I take some point for meditation and get started on that,” I said, "and within a minute or two my mind wanders. I’m hopelessly distracted." "What do you do then?" asked Calveras. "well, when I realize I am distracted (and that isn’t too soon generally) I come back to the point I was meditating on.” “And then?” said Calveras. “Then I’m distracted again.” “And then?” Calveras was very patient while I explained how, in my prayer, I moved from meditation to distraction, to meditation, to distraction – with the distraction generally accounting for ninety percent of the time, I have met dozens of people since then who have had exactly the same experience and I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the experience of most of you.
Calveras then said to me, “What you are doing is thinking – meditating. You are not praying. Nothing wrong with meditation, of course, provided it helps you to pray. Tell me, do you have your rosary with?” Yes,” I said. “Pull it out, will you”? (I was a very young Jesuits and Calveras was an old man. He could so this sort of thing with impunity.) I did. “Do you know how to use that?” “Of course I do.” Then why don’t you?” “What?” You mean I should say the rosary during meditation?” I was a little shocked and showed it. What I did not show were the thoughts that went through my head; they were something like this: Does this man, this reputed master in the art of prayer, seriously expect me to say the rosary during meditation? I had come to associate the rosary with very simple, ignorant people – the prayer for farmers and fisherfolk, and the sort of thing to fell back upon if you were particularly disturbed in prayer and could do nothing else. A sort of second best but I was perfectly capable of meditating, I had just completed my studies in philosophy.
Calveras in his quiet way went on, “Say a decade, praying to Our Lady to obtain for you the grace of prayer, the grace to overcome your distractions. Then come back to your meditation if you wish. And if you are still distracted, say another decade and another. And, possibly, give up your meditation altogether and just pray for all the graces you need. Pray for your fellow retreatants. Pray for those you love. Pray for the world. The fruit of a retreat is not obtained through meditation and deep reflection it is a pure gift of God and while a certain amount of reflection is helpful, even necessary, this gift is obtained though asking, through begging. So beg for it and the Lord will give it to you. Ask for the grace to pray. Ask for the grace to be generous with Christ. Ask for the grace of experiencing his love.”
Calveras clearly took gospel teaching on prayer quite literally. My later experience was to show me that this was the main reason why he was indeed a mater in the art of prayer. He seriously believed, and taught us to believe, and all we had to do was to ask the Lord for what we needed, and the Lord would not let us down. He said to us, “The key to the art of prayer is the prayer of petition. Many people never learn to pray because they have never learnt to make effective use of the petitionary prayer. The hand outstretched o beg obtains what the hand pressed against one’s head to think does not.