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Email a FriendPosted by bunny on Tuesday, Jun 21, 2011 9:00 PM (EDT):
Thanks for posting this, Rebecca, and for “digesting” it for us! So much food for thought and prayer!
Adoration Renews Our Hearts
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 12:00 PM
Here’s what we can learn from Elijah about prayer, according to Benedict XVI.
Each of his presentations on prayer thus far has warned against idolatry, but in analyzing Elijah’s dramatic confrontation with the prophets of Baal, the Pope makes his warning more explicit.
Israel was yielding to the seduction of idolatry—a continual temptation for the believer—by fooling itself into thinking it could “serve two masters” and ease the impenetrable ways of faith in the Almighty by also placing its trust in a powerless god fashioned by man.
You wouldn’t think worshiping a graven image and calling down fire on a bullock on an altar would be directly relevant to us, but here is the connection Benedict makes. He draws a distinction between two approaches to prayer. There is the false approach, exemplified by the prophets of Baal dancing around, stirring themselves into a frenzy and whipping themselves—in other words, trying to create their own response:
The idol’s deceptive reality is thus revealed: Man thinks of it as something that can be regulated, that can be managed with one’s own strength, that can be accessed on the basis of oneself and one’s own vital forces. The adoration of an idol, instead of opening the human heart to the Other, and to a freeing relationship that allows one to leave egoism’s narrow confines in order to enter the dimensions of love and reciprocal gift, closes the human person up within the exclusive and desperate circle of self seeking.
The connection the pope sees between this self-seeking and the culture of death is obvious:
the deception is such that, in adoring the idol, man finds himself forced to resort to extreme acts in the illusory attempt to subject it to his own will. For this reason, the prophets of Baal reach the point of even doing themselves harm, of inflicting themselves with wounds, in a dramatically ironic gesture: In order to get a response, some sign of life from their god, they cover themselves in blood, thereby symbolically covering themselves in death.
Elijah’s prayer is entirely different in nature. First of all, it is not solitary, it’s liturgical.
He asks the people to come near, thereby involving them in his action and in his petition…. Then the prophet erects an altar, making use of—as the text says—“twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord came, saying, ‘Israel shall be your name.’” These stones represent all Israel and are the tangible memorial of its history of election, of predilection and of salvation of which the people were the object.
Elijah’s liturgical action has a decisive impact: The altar is the sacred place that indicates the Lord’s presence, but the stones that form it represent the people, who now, through the prophet’s mediation, are symbolically placed before God, becoming an “altar,” the place of offering and of sacrifice.
It is a prayer rooted in the truth about God and man. It calls Israel back to the truth about itself.
Elijah turns to the Lord, calling Him God of the Fathers; he thus makes implicit reference to the divine promises and to the history of election and covenant that indissolubly united the Lord to His people. God’s involvement in mankind’s history is such that His Name is now inseparably connected with those of the Patriarchs, and the prophet pronounces that holy Name so that God might remember and reveal His fidelity; but he also does this in order that Israel might hear itself called by name and rediscover its own faithfulness.
Returning to a theme from previous sessions, the Pope points out the prayer is merciful:
By his intercession, Elijah asks of God what God himself desires to do—reveal Himself in all His mercy, faithful to His own reality as the Lord of life who forgives, converts and transforms.
Then the fire comes down and Israel can no longer doubt.
The Pope concludes from this the importance of worshiping God and him alone, because anything else leads to terrible spiritual slavery. He further teaches that the primary purpose of all prayer is conversion: to bring our hearts to see God more clearly. As a final point, he tells us what the consuming fire of Elijah’s sacrifice means for us:
The Fathers tell us that this history of a prophet is also prophetic, if—they say—it foreshadows the future, the future Christ, it is a step on the path to Christ. And they tell us that here we see the true fire of God: the love that leads the Lord all the way to the Cross, to the total gift of Himself. True adoration of God, then, is to give oneself to God and to men—true adoration is love. And true adoration of God does not destroy, but renews. Certainly, the fire of God, the fire of love burns, transforms, purifies, but it is precisely in this way that it does not destroy but rather creates the truth of our being, recreates our hearts. And thus, truly alive by the grace of the fire of the Holy Spirit, of God’s love, may we be adorers in spirit and in truth.
Image Credit (P.S.Click the left arrow at that photo to see images from the Pope’s pastoral visit to San Marino this week.)
Previous posts in this series (find links in them to all the pope’s audiences on prayer)
Intercession is the Mercy of God (Session 5)
Prayer Expresses the Self (catecheses 2-4)
Pope Floats (introductory session)
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