From: A Catholic Response to the New Age Phenomenon prepared by the Irish Theological Commission in 1994
"New Age Movement" is abbreviated as NAM.
At the very heart of our faith lies the fact that God has come out of his Mystery and revealed himself to us in order to draw us into a new life, and a new world. In Jeremiah 31:3 we read: 'I have loved you with an everlasting love, and so am consistent in my affection for you'. This divine approach to humanity has a long history, one which began with Abraham, the person through whom God wished to bless all the nations of the earth.1
This story of God-with-us 2 unfolds through the pages of the Old Testament, where the children of Abraham became the Chosen People, who were given 'the glory and the covenants', as Paul says in Romans 9:4. God manifested himself to them by words and deeds, as the One, True and Living God. The result of this was that 'Israel came to know by experience the ways of God with men'. 3
For her part Israel discovered that she was God's chosen one, his beloved. 4 The Israelites realised that they were unique persons, each a 'you' addressed by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Each one had the chance of hearing these words of Isaiah 43: 1,3-4:
Do not be afraid, for I have redeemed you: I have called you by your name, you are mine: I give Egypt for your ransom, and exchange Cush and Seba for you. Because you are precious in my eyes, because you are honoured and I love you.
Since God took the initiative in calling Israel to be his own people, Israel responded with praise and adoration. She became a people of prayer and worship. This is attested to in the Book of Psalms, which grew out of her continued response to God in prayer. These prayers respond to God's creative and saving love. Here are some examples:
Give thanks to the Lord for he is good,
His love is everlasting!
He led his people through the wilderness,
His love is everlasting!
He remembered us when we were down,
His love is everlasting! (Ps 136: 1, 16, 23)
God's love for Israel not only made her into a great nation, but also guided her throughout her history. It made it possible for her to respond to God with love and service, and thus she became a people of prayer, worship and service. Just as a mother's love for her infant eventually evokes the child's smile of recognition, so God's love for Israel called forth the prayer of Israel. To pray is to say 'yes' to God's love for us.
God speaks to us by revealing himself, and our response to that revelation is prayer. The revelation of God in the Old Testament is incomplete, like an unfinished symphony, for God revealed himself in so far as the people could respond. The Prophets saw this clearly. Hosea said that the more God called the people, 'the further they went from him'. 5 God complained through Isaiah, 'I reared sons, I brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.... Israel knows nothing, my people understand nothing.' 6
The Prophets understood the difficulty of bonding the people to God. This people seemed incapable of living in intimacy with God, and this inability thwarted God's plan for the Covenant, whereby they were to be the people through whom he would set up the kingdom of God on earth. But God is the eternal optimist, and promised to give his people a new and eternal Covenant. 7 And so, in the fullness of time, the eternal Son of God became flesh, 'taking on what he was not, not losing what he is' as St Augustine said. Jesus is the revelation of the invisible God, 8 who speaks to us out of the abundance of his love, makes us his friends, and lives among us, so that he might invite us into fellowship with himself 9 Jesus, the eternal Word, who is God, 10 not only took on our full human nature, our flesh, he also took on our human condition with its horrific baggage of sin.
In order to accomplish his mission, Jesus sent us his Holy Spirit. It was the Holy Spirit who convinced the Apostles of the Resurrection, and who reminded the disciples of all that the Father and Jesus had done, the one who brought them 'the fullness of grace'. 11 It is little wonder that the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was the catalyst of prayer.12 It seems that the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the 'Lord and Giver of Life', had enabled the disciples to perceive something of the wonder and vastness of the descent of the eternal and only-begotten Son into our history.
The descent of God into our human flesh brings about the ascent of our human flesh into God. St Paul, himself converted to the Crucified and Risen Christ, prays that the believers in Ephesus might be enabled by God the Father to grasp this revelation in order to appreciate the hope that God's call holds for us, and how infinitely great is the power he has exercised for us 13 Through Christ all believers have access to the Father in the Holy Spirit.14
'Christian prayer is always determined by the structure of the Christian faith in which the very truth of God and creatures shines forth'. 15 From what we have been saying it should now be clear that 'there exists a strict relationship between revelation and prayer'.'16 This relationship consists in the fact that God's loving self-communication stimulates and calls forth a response from us that includes prayer. Since God's love reached the heights of handing over to us his Beloved Son 'even unto death on a cross', this raises our humanity to the glory of being at the right hand of the Father.17
Christ is the key to prayer, because prayer is all about communion with God, and Jesus is that divine and human communion in its highest form. The only prayer that is authentically Christian is that which rises to God through Christ and the Holy Spirit. St Augustine explains that 'God first praised himself in order to show us how to praise him worthily; and since he has deigned to praise himself, man has discerned how to praise him'. 18
Seven characteristics of Christian Prayer
The full circle of revealed truth opens up stupendous vistas for the prayer-life of believers. First, the prayer-life of the believer has to be inserted into the Trinitarian movement of God, now that God has descended in his Son, and in the Holy Spirit, has lifted up fallen human beings. Whenever Christians pray, be it in the liturgy or in private, or with others, their prayer participates in the praying of Christ who lives to intercede for us,19 and who commands us to pray always.20
Next, we can better appreciate the full sense of the 'our Father' which Jesus gave us in response to a request of his Apostles. This central Christian prayer 'clearly indicates the unity of this movement: the Will of the Father must be done on earth as it is in Heaven. The petitions for bread, forgiveness and protection express the fundamental aspects of God's will for us, so that there may be a new earth in the Heavenly Jerusalem'.21
Thirdly, Christians enter through prayer into the life that was made visible when the life-giving Word became flesh.22 Prayer is necessary for salvation, which consists in taking possession of the spiritual life our Saviour won for us. 'By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity', the priest says daily in the Eucharist. The sheer necessity of prayer becomes evident when we observe the concrete reality of our lives in the world, with its personal and collective dangers.
Cardinal Newman makes the point with great insight: 'We often hear it said that the true way of serving God is to serve man, as if religion consisted merely in acting well our part in life, not in direct faith, obedience and worship. How different is the spirit of this prayer! Evil round about him, enemies and persecutors in his path, temptation in prospect, help for the day, sin to be expiated, God's will in his heart, God's name on his lips, God's kingdom in his hopes: this is the view it gives us of a Christian'. 23
Fourthly, it is the simple faith of Catholics that our Saviour perpetuated the mystery of his descent from heaven in self-emptying love, and his ascent in glorification as Lord of history, by and in the sacrament of the Eucharist. 'Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes'. 24 The Liturgy of the Eucharist encapsulates and hands on forever the prayer of Christ offered up with loud cries. 25 The Holy Eucharist as the sacrament of the Lord's death and resurrection gathers up the whole of life in its greatness and littleness, in its joy and sorrow, and plunges it into the dying and restoring Christ.
Fifthly, Christians who are faithful to prayer grow in the love of God, the Holy Trinity, and so reach the fullness of their self-identity. Christ, in fact, is the true measure of our existence, and the key to the mystery of our humanity, whose greatness he reveals in our capacity for God. In him we discern what it means to be created for God who is love.
Moreover, when we pray, we may do so either merely as creatures of the Creator, or as children of the Father through Baptism.26 As creatures, our prayer is weak, and we are far from God. As children, our prayer is strong and intimate, for it is the prayer to our Father who loves us. How wonderful! We can call the Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, 'Abba', 'Daddy', 'Dearest Father', because we are in his Son, and therefore share in his relationship to the Father. We are sons and daughters in 'the only-begotten Son'.
Furthermore, prayer is not only an individual thing: it is also an activity of remarkable social implications. Since by Baptism we are all incorporated into the Body of Christ,27 and have all drunk the same spirit, the prayer of each one of us has its bearing on the well-being of others.28 Prayer may be intensely personal in its performance and that even in the case of liturgical prayer, but its performance and fruits are socially powerful. An aspect of this is the 'prayer of unity': 'I tell you most solemnly, if two of you on earth agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in Heaven'.29
In order to pray better, some people have recourse to various methods or techniques. Church history records a rich legacy of method, and of the experience of prayer. A new phenomenon has emerged today, however, in the form of psychological-corporal methods. Since, 'in prayer it is the whole man who must enter into relation with God, and so his body should also take up the position most suited to recollection', 30 Christians today, therefore, are becoming more conscious of how our bodily posture can help in prayer. Some disquiet arises where certain preparatory exercises, sometimes imported from non-Christian religions, are employed without discernment. Perhaps two principles should enable us to discern what is good and to hold fast to that: first, the essential Christian and Trinitarian character of prayer must be maintained; second, techniques of relaxation are only means to prayer: they are emphatically not prayer.
Prayer is more necessary to the soul than food is to the body. Prayer is, in fact, the oxygen of the soul. Since God is the life of the soul, and since he seeks communion with US,31 we must cultivate this first and most basic of all relationships, without which we do not reach our destiny as people or as Christians. The gospel tells us to pray constantly. 32 This does not mean to recite prayers always. Rather it means to say 'yes' to God's holy will in our daily lives with the help of his saving grace. The daily duties of our life can all become an abiding prayer provided we set the compass towards the magnetic north of God's will. 'Whether you eat or drink or sleep, do all in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ'.
Since the purpose of prayer is not in itself, but in building up friendship with God through Jesus and in the Holy Spirit, doing the will of God well in the present moment 33 turns our day into a lasting prayer. To achieve this, however, we need to be able to cope and to live with the daily trials and hardships. We need to see in these sufferings the face of Jesus, 'despised and the most abject of men, a man of sorrows and familiar with grief'. 34
NOTES
1. Genesis 12:3
2. Isaiah 7:14
3. Dei Verbum 14
4. See Deuteronomy 7:7f; Hosea 11:1f
5. Hosea 11:2
6. Isaiah 1: 2-3
7. See Jeremiah 31:31f; I Cor 11:25
8. Colossians 1: 15; I Timothy 1:17
9. See Exodus 33: 11; John 15: 14-15; Baruch 3:38; DV 2
10. John 1:1
11. Eucharistic Prayer IV
12. See Acts 4:24-30; 6:4; 2:42, 46; 12:5, 12 etc.
13. Ephesians 1:18
14. See Ephesians 2:18; DV2; LG 4
15. Christian Meditation: Letter to Bishops on some aspects of Meditation: CDF 1990 S3
16. Ibid., 15
17. Philippians 2:8, 11.
18. Quoted in Pius X, Divino Afflatu, AAS 3 (1911) 633
19. Hebrews 7:25
20. Luke 18:1
21. CDF 7
22. I John 1:2;John 1:14,17
23. Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 289
24. I Corinthians 11:26
25. Luke 15:37; Hebrews 5:7; SC 47
26. See Galatians 4:4-7; Romans 8:15-17
27. Romans 6:3; Galatians 3:27
28. Romans 14:7
29. Matthew 18:19
30. CDF 26
31. I John 1:1-4;John 15:1-17
32. Luke 18:1
33. See Matthew 7:21
34. Isaiah 53:3
