The early brothers and sisters prayed their daily journey with Francis and Clare, well grounded in Scriptures, in quiet solitude and community. They traveled between “the marketplace and the mountain” involved in ministry and deep contemplation. Often they prayed in wayside chapels, under trees, in caves and open clearings as they made their way from solitude into service, from mountains back into villages and marketplaces.

Francis was moved by a word from the Lord, spoken from a famous Crucifix in the Chapel of San Damiano to “Francis go rebuild my house, which you can see has fallen sadly into ruin.”  For years after Francis, his dear friend, one of his earliest companions, St. Clare of Assisi, prayed before this Cross with Sisters and other Brothers. She directs all of us through a letter she wrote to “gaze upon, consider, contemplate and imitate” the profound mystery of love revealed through this Crucifix. The Christ portrayed here is the One who has risen from the dead. Rises up with blood still pouring forth from his hands as sacred beverage for those who are gathered around him on this Cross. While more certainly can be said and has been written recently about his particular Cross, the San Damiano Crucifix, it invites us to especially enter into the dying and rising of Jesus, the One who entered into human experience in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who suffered, died and rose from the dead, leading us all home to the Father.

 

 

This is a form of meditation that moves to a “heartfelt consideration” of the Spirit’s movement in these Scriptures, the voice of God that might come to us in quiet and in silence. This voice is often wordless, but has deep meaning aroused in our hearts as we hear “the Word,” the Christ, God’s own “logos,” which one experiences in the “prayer of the heart” or meditation. Time spent this way is not so much a time of thoughts as thoughtfulness, not so much of activity of the mind, but mindfulness or a heart centered on the outpouring love of God that we see in Scriptures, in the Crucifix, in creation, as we find it in the world full of other contradictions, as we see it in the Cross, which conquers all that is contradictory.

The ancients would pray “O God come to my assistance, O Lord make haste to help us.” We often pray here at the Mountain from Psalm 46, a profoundly rich outpouring of love to an outcry for peace, “Be still and know that I am God.” Our own heart’s helplessness cries out to the One who is the helper and Savior of all of the poor.  

 

This movement in prayer is contemplation itself. In contemplation is a further flowering of this simple movement in our daily lives as we practice it. We move from desperate places and places of tiredness and confusion, of happiness, difficulty and joy to a God-centeredness of all that is. We consider the sufferings of Christ, our own and others in the world today with a heart expanded to create hope. In the midst of all of this our heartfeltness begins to discover the dark truth, as Merton would say, we are “already one.”

 

 

The contemplative journey is one in which our heart seeks out the God who is already present to us. It is a prayer, ironically enough, in the business and busy-ness of life where we “rest in God,” we trust the God who rests in our hearts.  In this practice trust is so prominent in our journey, in our search for God that our practice, in the midst of great times of activity and personal demands, is a practice of stillness, of silence.