Old Prayers Made New
By Lawrence S. Cunningham

Some months ago, I visited a Trappist monastery for a few days. Coming into the tribune for the Night Office, I heard the old versicle which opens the Office: "O God, come to my assistance/ OLord, make haste to help me." The uniform cry of that verse, deep from the belly of the church, hit me not only with its power but with a sudden flash of memory. Many years before, while still an undergraduate, I had been a visitor at another monastery in upstate New York where, on a freezing November morning in the deep darkness of an unfinished chapel, I had heard the same verse, but in Latin: "Deus in adjutorium meum intende/Domine ad adjuvandum me festina." It struck me that a lot of time had passed between those two moments (the change from Latin to the vernacular was one small marker of the change), and, in the passing, a revolution of sorts had happened in the church in general and, undoubtedly, in those monasteries in particular. What had not changed, however, was the cry urging God's assistance welling up from the monks at prayer.

I

It is something that I cannot explain. Perhaps, it is a combination of romantic nostalgia and a sense of the power of old words (the phrase, after all, is from the psalter), but the versicle of the monastic office has become a kind of talismanic prayer for me. I say it as planes take off to wing me hither and yon just as I say it in the morning going to work and on the way home in the evening. I feel badly if I do not say it when it should be said, although I am not sure that I could describe the circumstances of that should.

It was only recently when reading the new translation of the Conferences of John Cassian (in the Paulist series in Western Spirituality) that I realized how deeply monastic that simple phrase is. John Cassian is one of the foundation figures of Western monasticism. He is a figure who straddles the tradition of the desert fathers and mothers of the East and the incipient style of Western monasticism which would find its clearest codification in the Rule(s) of the Master and Saint Benedict.

Born in what is present-day Romania, Cassian lived the ascetic life in Bethlehem, Egypt, and Constantinople before finally settling in Marseilles (around 415), where he founded monasteries for both women and

Lawrence S. Cunningham is Professor of Religion, Florida State University at Tallahassee. He is the author of The Catholic Experience (1985) and is working on a book on prayer in the Catholic tradition.

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men. The first ten of his twenty-four Collationes (Conferences) were published circa 420. They form a coherent treatise on the spiritual life. Conference ten takes up the question of the relationship of words and prayer as a constant in life. Cassian uses the analogy of a child learning an alphabet. Only after stumbling, practicing, and copying models does a child learn to write. The same thing, Cassian insists, is true of prayer. We need models of prayer before we can become persons of prayer. He then adds: "To keep the thought of God always in your mind you must cling totally to this formula for piety: 'Come to my help, O God; Lord, hurry to my rescue' " (Ps. 69:2).

Why, from all the verses of Scripture, does Cassian recommend this one? He answers with an outburst of praise for the powerful efficacy of the verse. It is, he says, adaptable to every condition and useful for every temptation. The last word, I think, is the operative one since he goes on to say that it is a confession of need (and a cry of faith) that when the snares of the world pass by, there is one who can come to protect us from evil; it is, in short, the cry of one "besieged day and night." To hammer home the point, he catalogues a list of temptations that sounds like something from Flaubert's La tentation de Saint Antoine with a repeated counterpoint of the prayer: against greed for food, lust in the eyes, the assault of demons --"Lord, make haste to help me!"

Behind Cassian's paean to this short prayer, then, is the struggle of the ascetic with the powers of the demonic that was so much a part of the desert tradition; one need only think of the powerful scenes in Athanasius' Life of Anthony which was the very paradigm of such struggles. Those scenes have haunted the Western imagination from its publication. Its strong visual character found expression in paintings of the late Middle Ages (Bosch), the nineteenth century (Cezanne), and in our own day (Dali).

Cassian's Conference on prayer was the one serious attempt to introduce into the West the notion of continuous prayer. The practice of repeated prayer leading to absorption in prayer has been a hallmark of Orthodox spirituality from John Climacus down to the practice of modern ascetics on Mount Athos and other such spiritual centers. It is not a practice that common in the Western church, although some recent interest, thanks to a reappreciation of Orthodox spirituality, has grown. The most conspicuous sign of that interest has been the continuing popularity of the Russian spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim.

II

Whether continuous prayer is a viable spiritual strategy for contemporary Christians is a question that I would not like to discuss. What does interest me, however, is another question: Do old prayers, like the one under discussion, "hold up" if the conditions which once gave them their pungency disappear? Most of us, I suspect, do not see our lives as a continuing struggle with demonic forces. To say it in another, more

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personal, manner: can we say (can I say?) this prayer with anything like integrity?

My brief answer is that we can use the old prayers both because they are old (or, to use David Tracy's term, "classics") and because the need of the believer to articulate his or her faith never ends. This conviction came to me recently in a pointed way while reading, of all things, a novel. Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice (1986) has a powerful scene in which a young man tries to help his tortured stepbrother overcome deep despair over the death of a friend for which he was the cause. In an attempt to help the brother out of a black mood of depression and self recrimination, he says:

Try to sort of pray, say "deliver me from evil," say you're sorry, ask for help, find some light, something the blackness can't blacken. There must be things you have, things you can get to, some poetry, something from the Bible, Christ, if he still means anything to you. Let the pain go on but let something else touch it like a ray coming through from outside, from that place outside.

That halting attempt to connect human pain with words that might assuage it, that "logotherapy," provides a deep insight into the nature of genuinely mature prayer. If you look at Murdoch's passage closely, it is evident that she is not talking about the simple expression of a person's condition but the desire to evoke another factor-"like a ray coming from outside"-that somehow adds significance to, and gives support for a person who cries out in need. It is also significant, we should hasten to add, that the advice is not to construct a new word but to dredge up, from the recesses of memory, a word or phrase which, once assimilated, now can be called upon to act as a counterpoint to the condition of despair.

It is clear that Murdoch does not have in mind a conjurer's formula which, through its utterance, makes things magically whole. A close reading of the paragraph indicates that what she really means is that the force of a prayer-fragment is such that it stands as a warrant that the slippery nothingness of despair can be held at bay; prayer is a counterbalance to the nakedness of autonomy.

Does not Cassian have quite the same thing in mind? When one cuts through the unfamiliar monastic language, is he not saying simply that for a person to live as if there is a God means that a person is profoundly dependent not only for the exigencies of this or that moment but for the very reality of existence itself? Ludwig Wittgenstein, that most mystical of philosophers, once phrased it beautifully, if negatively, when he remarked that he could not kneel to pray because it's as if "my knees were stiff. I'm afraid of dissolution (of my own dissolution) should I become soft."

Not all prayer is as "existential" or crisis-oriented as that proposed either by Iris Murdoch or John Cassian. But both point to a profound truth about prayer. The very act of prayer (and, yes, even the act of "saying a prayer") is an expression of faith: there is more in the world than me or us.

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III

The capacity to pray (quite apart from what one can or does say) is the basic gesture of faith. That is why many great spiritual seekers move instinctively toward prayer long before they can articulate a credo. Examples in this God-haunted century are not hard to discover. Simone Weil, in her spiritual autobiography, recounts her early intimations of faith. But it was in 1937, when visiting the town of Assisi, that she visited the little Romanesque chapel of Sant Maria degli Angeli (housed in what is perhaps the ugliest baroque church in the world), where, as she writes, "I was compelled for the first time in my life to go down on my knees."

Weil's experience was not unlike that of another luminous soul, the young Dutch Jewish intellectual who perished in the gas chambers in 1943, Etty Hillesum. In her diaries, An Interrupted Life, she charts her turbulent life of study, service, and sexuality along with her deep yearnings for an absolute center. In an extraordinary passage, she tells how, in late 1941, she was riding her bicycle through the rainy streets when she began to babble out a prayer, which began "God, take me by your hand, I shall follow you dutifully, and not resist too much ." What follows is an extraordinary outpouring of desire; it is a cry for meaning and solidity and love.

The cliche articulates an obvious truth, but-and this is the point-it does carry a truth. When one says that "there are no atheists in foxholes" one is saying, in effect, that at crisis points in life one cries out for what sustains as the familar pillars crumble and collapse. That can be read to mean that one will try anything in a moment of despair (like the now famous "Hail Mary" pass in football), but that does not exhaust the truth of the matter.

Some people are born into a life of prayer; it comes to them, as Elie Wiesel said of his Hasidic childhood, as naturally as breathing. Nurtured in a tradition of prayer, one moves naturally and unselfconsciously from the quotidian to the sacred. Indeed, prayer comes so naturally that it can become unreflective and routinized. How many times in life have we said the Lord's Prayer? How many times have we said it and thought about what the formulaic words mean?

To cry out in times of crisis, by contrast, means that the words themselves become the vehicle of faith. We say "God, come to my assistance" precisely because any other alternative that could bring assistance seems inadequate at the moment. That is what Murdoch was trying to say in her novel; that is what Cassian was saying to his monks.

On this topic, as with many others, Karl Rahner has some wise words. Speaking of poets, Rahner notes that the poetic task is to bring into life those fundamental words (Urwortes is his term) which reveal the fundamental mystery of existence. Like the priest, Rahner says, the poet breathes out words that transform accustomed reality into the luminous mystery of authentic being. James Joyce makes the same point in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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The poet, like the person of prayer, utters words which make real the reality that is there waiting to be actualized in the concrete. When we call out to God "come to my assistance," like the monks of old, we make present, yet again, those relationships that are there from the creation; relationships of dependence and grace and love.