Body Language: Christopher West delivers the first of a series about spousal prayer.
By Christopher West
Recently, while preparing for a long drive, I decided to look through my old collection of tape series for something to listen to (yes, I still have a cassette deck in my car). My eyes landed on a box set called Passion for God by a Carmelite Abbess named Mother Tessa Bielecki. When I arrived at my destination before the tapes were over, I didn’t want to get out of the car.
Passion for God is an introduction to the spousal mysticism of St Teresa of Avila. Here’s how the back cover of the series describes it: “Inside the great medieval monastery at Avila, Spain, one of history’s great love affairs took place. For it was here, within these turreted stone walls, that the Christian mystic St Teresa surrendered her ‘ensouled body’ to God. What emerged from this divine union informs our spiritual lives to this day through the ecstatic ‘spousal prayer’ form that St Teresa embraced so fiercely … Mother Tessa takes listeners far from the hard pews of dutiful worship and into a lush marriage chamber, where God is mystically experienced as spouse.”
Regular readers of my column are certainly familiar with the biblical analogy of spousal love as a way of understanding God’s love for us. God’s eternal plan is to “marry” us: the Church is the bride and Christ the bridegroom.
“Spousal prayer” means, very simply, to open oneself wholly and completely to Christ, surrendering to him in a union of love like a bride surrenders to the loving embrace of her bridegroom.
And, yes, as uncomfortable as this might seem for men at first, this includes us too. As John Paul II wrote in Mulieris Dignitatem, “According to (the spousal analogy), all human beings – both women and men – are called through the Church, to be the ‘Bride’ of Christ, the Redeemer of the world. In this way ‘being the bride,’ and thus the ‘feminine’ element, becomes a symbol of all that is ‘human’” (25). Don’t worry, guys – it doesn’t mean we have to wear a wedding dress or anything. It means, essentially, that we, as creatures, have to learn how to open and “receive” the love of the Creator. This is not a threat to our masculinity, but the key to authentic masculinity. Spousal prayer, as St John of the Cross put it, leads to “a total transformation in the Beloved, in which each surrenders the entire possession of self to the other with a certain consummation of the union of love. The soul thereby becomes divine, God through participation, insofar as is possible in this life.” Then he makes the analogy more explicit: “Just as in the consummation of carnal marriage there are two in one flesh, as Sacred Scripture points out (Gen 2:24), so also when the spiritual marriage between God and the soul is consummated, there are two natures in one spirit and love” (Commentary on stanza 22:3 of the Spiritual Canticle).
Oh, to what astounding glory God calls us! God is an eternal “explosion” of life-giving love, and he calls us to participate in it. That’s where spousal prayer takes us – into the heart of God who not only loves us, but is love. When we see the union of husband and wife for what it is, we see that it is a “great mystery” that reveals the master plan of God to become “one” with us in Christ (see Eph 5:31-32). It’s an icon of something divine, a window into heaven. And that’s precisely why our sexuality is under such attack in our world: the enemy wants to blind us to the divine “iconography” of our masculinity and femininity. As Tessa Bielecki said so well in this tape series, we mustn’t repress or try to annihilate our sexual desires. Rather, in and through Christ, we must sublimate them – that is, make them “sublime,” noble, holy. Indeed, spousal prayer takes us on a journey of painful trials and purifications through which erotic longing becomes more and more a yearning for God, a path to holiness. This is what John Paul II was positing when he said: “The sexual urge is … a vector of aspiration along which [our] whole existence develops and perfects itself from within” (Love and Responsibility, p 46).
The great mystics of the church not only understand eros as a longing for God, they live it as such. They live eros as “prayer.” For prayer, as Pope Benedict put it, “is nothing other than becoming a longing for God” (Mary: The Church at the Source, p 15). We’ll explore this idea a bit more in the next column.