Karl Rahner:
Teacher of Prayer
Notes
1.“Warum uns das Beten nottut,” Leuchtturm 18 (1924—25): 10—11, and reprinted in Sehnsucht nach demi geheimnisvollen Gott, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1990), 78—80. Because this text has never appeared in English, I am most grateful to Bruce Gillette for his excellent translation.
WHY WE NEED TO PRAY
How is your heart supposed to be?
Just as the holy, eternal one wanted, as he gave you to be, as he draws and guides and warns you in his holy grace....
Just as the heart of Christ, full of love and the holy power to sacrifice...
Just as you yourself desired when God’s spirit filled you,
your vision was clearer for your life and its task, and you demanded love
which is capable of everything, understands everything....
For the strength to become everything for others, for the strength to lose yourself to serve others....
This is how you are supposed to be.
Try to remember what it is about the eternal will of the incomprehensible God
that you are holy, what it is about the example of him who died that you may be holy,about your heart’s desire to become holy.. . and then say:
Is your heart like this? is God’s will in you action and truth?
Is your interior man renewed in Christ Jesus? Is the urging of your heart life?
...How will you be capable of this, completely capable?
Always loyal without halfheartedness and cowardliness?
You must pray. We must pray! If we don’t pray, we’ll remain stuck to the things of the earth, we’ll become petty as they, nar-row as they, become crushed by them, sold to them, because we gift our love, our heart to them.
We must pray! Then we are far from the petty everyday which makes us petty and narrow. Then we come near to God and become capable “ad attingendum Cre-atorem ac Dominum nostrum, of reaching our Creator and Lord.”
Whoever comes near to God, God comes near to him (James 4:8).
When he, however, communicates himself to his creature
and encompasses it for his love and for his praise, then he lets the soul realize
how vain, empty, and weak it is, filled by the vanities of its narrow existence,
full of fear of the pain and suffering of the cross,
full of small-minded pride and narrow selfishness....
Then at his time, when it pleases him, HE makes the soul light,
illuminated, so that it understands what God wants and his ways,
so that it desires a heart which is believing, full of strong hope,
full of love which never ceases,
desires a heart which is wide and selfless and pure.
Then the Lord fills his soul with grace-power so that it may fulfill in works
what it desired and praised in prayer. That it will become strong
to do everything and suffer everything. Then HE will give it the Spirit of God
who will “come to the aid of its weakness.” Who loves it so
that it forgets to lust after the love of the world.
Who consoles it with his joy. Who is its “pledge of eternal life.”
That’s how the heart that prays will become.
For whoever comes near to God, he becomes one spirit with HIM.
But God’s Spirit is: “LOVE, JOY, PATIENCE, KINDNESS, FAITHFULNESS, GENTLE NESS, SELF-CONTROL” (Gal. 5:22).
This is what our heart becomes when we pray in the Spirit of God.
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