Prayer frequently devolves into an abstract exercise or a compartmentalized hosting of the Divine. However, when the soul becomes ensnared by the lower faculties of memory and imagination, it replays temporal grievances or chasing sensible consolations. Drawing upon the Carmelite tradition and St. Teresa of Avila, we examine how the humanity of Christ serves as the necessary mediator. True mental prayer requires moving beyond transient passions to a deliberate act of the will, establishing a continuous, undefended assent to His presence in every action.

  • The Teleology of Emotion: Why focusing on Christ's humanity in joy or sorrow is not about resting in sensible feelings but utilizing them as the material cause for the will's movement toward divine love.
  • The Purification of Memory: Recognizing useless imaginative wandering and arresting the exhausting cycle of dwelling on past temporal honors or injuries.
  • The Governance of Passions: Ensuring that hope, joy, sorrow, and fear are ordered by reason, perfectly hitting the target between excess and defect.
  • The Divine Presence: Why compartmentalizing Christ within temporal boundaries limits the continuous infusion of grace required for contemplative union.

You have the concepts, but you need the tool. When the audio ends and the silence returns, don't go back to "trying harder." Use the "5-Minute Prayer Reset" to stabilize your interior life and prepare for the Divine Physician.

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello there. Welcome to this week's episode of Midnight Carmelite. This week I want to talk about Christ's humanity and saying yes to Christ. These are both obviously broad topics, but I aim to take them together and focus on how they relate to one another and how we can use this relation in our prayer life.

So let's first go to the humanity of Christ. St. Teresa of Jesus, St. Teresa of Avila, talks a lot about focusing on the humanity of Christ. She'll say something like, when you're joyful, focus on him resurrected. When you're sorrowful, focus on him carrying the cross. She'll say that this focus will arise feelings of love and pity, like in the case of the cross, for example. And that's your prayer. So then you start speaking to him from those emotional reactions essentially, but again, you have to remember those emotions are not the prayer. Instead, those are the matter for your will to desire to love. Does that make sense? You're moving past them. It's not something you rest in; you move past it to love Christ himself.

That's an important distinction, and I think there are some tests here that you can ask yourself and reflect on, examining your own conscience about how much you love Christ in His humanity, which greatly delights the Father. You can see in scripture, "This is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. Listen to him." So one test is to look at your passions: joy, hope, sorrow, fear. I think what you'd look there and see is, are those passions under the control of reason? And what do I mean by that? It's saying that they're not in excess, and they're not in defect. We've talked a lot about excess and defect on this podcast. The easiest way to think about it, if you're new, is you're not hitting a quantitative mean by being virtuous and avoiding excess and defect. What you're doing is hitting the right target. In other words, there's some right target, which may not be a quantitative mean, an average, or some sort of compromise. You're hitting the right target for that situation. You're not going above it or below it, to the left of it or to the right of it; you're hitting a bullseye.

Another test is basically the memory test, which is how much your imagination is wandering away from Christ. This depends on the person and their temperament. For example, maybe you'll go through a conversation you had in the past with someone who hurt you, or a group of people who hurt you. It could also be people who praised you or honored you. In either case, you're sitting there reliving that conversation and deriving something from it. In the case of praise and honor, it's feeding your ego. In the case of a detriment and an attack on you, personally or professionally, you ruminate on the hurt. This is human; we all do this. The key is when that useless wandering stops. That's how you know you're really fully loving. And to be fair, just so no one panics, this is a very high state to have these two things I'm talking about. You're basically at spiritual marriage. You've basically reached the limits of the spiritual life insofar as you are limited as a human in this life to be united with God. Because we are limited, therefore there are limits. Obviously, nothing is impossible for God. He can do whatever he wants; He's God. But the normal mode of this is that's the end goal of spiritual marriage.

So how does this humanity relate to what we're talking about here? Well, we have to understand that the humanity of Christ is the door. He's the mediator, the redeemer. It needs to be thought of that way, and it's a very sure path. We often pray to God in the abstract, especially in the beginnings of the spiritual life. We see God as floating out there and we're over here. What you see as the spiritual life progresses is God becomes more and more present until obviously God is all you care about.

And the "yes" that I was talking about to Christ is like you're a door and you're having visitors. Let's use this example. Let's say you're having visitors over to your house for a party or dinner. You have prepared the food, prepared the table, and made sure that your guests are welcome. What you're doing is you are saying yes to hosting and loving, in the charitable sense of the term, your guests. You're paying for the food; you're not going to charge them when you're having visitors over. So the door is open. Now, the door closes after they leave. That's boundaries. That's normal human relations, and that's fine. But that's not how it works with Christ.

You want to keep the door open to him all the time, where he can come and sup with you and bring you the living water. This is not a time where Christ is over here and I do my thing over here. No, he's not a guest in that sense. He's the divine guest and therefore must be there all the time. So when you think of his humanity and the saying of yes, you'll see that you want him invited into every situation, every imagination, every thought, every physical motion. He's present and seeing and being aware of that. Now you're going to say an obvious objection would be, wait a minute, you can be aware of multiple things at the same time, but you have a single directness. That's fair. What I'm saying about the awareness though, is that in the moments where you're going through your day and you're trying to act, you're bringing him with you in the action. You're cooperating by saying yes, because remember it's grace. So you're saying yes to his grace.

So that's what I want to say about that, and I'll see you next time.