The Church at Prayer is the 6th resource from the Dicastery for Evangelization in preparation for the Jubilee of 2025, curated by Carthusian monks residing in various monasteries in Brazil, Argentina, South Korea, and the United States. Founded by St. Bruno in 1084, these consecrated individuals are devoted to prayer, in silence, and in community.
Prayer is indeed the life of the Carthusian monk, his charism and his vocation; it is for him a habitual contact with God, encountered in recollection, solitude, moments of suffering and trial; it is the elevation of the soul to Him, a super-knowledge of the mystery of God that surpasses all human understanding, an immersion in an abyss of light, an anticipation of the Lord who comes and will come, a work of God acting within us, an offering of oneself to the Father—ultimately, a simple and continuous act of love.
The Source of Prayer
It is difficult to summarize and comment on the richness of this text, whose reading is an invitation to personally come into contact with God. All the reflections are filled with a mystical breath, a profound sense of mystery in the search for the origin of prayer in the Church and in the believer.
True prayer is revealed to us by Jesus Christ, the supreme and eternal High Priest, who by taking on human nature unveils to us the hymn eternally sung in the heavenly dwellings—a hymn known only to Him and which only He can teach us. The Father speaks a single word, His only-begotten Word: “You are my Son!” and repeats it in eternal silence. The Son listens and responds: “Abba, Father!” He is the total word of the Father: the Word has no words of His own; He is the purest mirror reflecting what the Father is, also immersed in the pure silence of the Spirit, full of love and joy.
Perhaps a tercet from Dante can help us understand the source of all prayer at the heart of the Trinitarian mystery:
O Light Eternal, who alone abidest in thyself,
alone understandest thyself, and, being understood and understanding,
dost smile upon thyself in love!
(Paradiso XXIII, 124–126)
Paraphrasing: O Eternal Light (the Divine Trinity) who cannot be contained in any place but yourself, who fully understand and express yourself (the Father), and being expressed by You and in the act of fully understanding You (the Word, the Son), love and fill with joy! (the Holy Spirit).
This dialogue between the Father and the Son—this eternal mutual understanding and “speaking” in love, silence, and the joy of the Spirit—constitutes the entire life of God, everything that exists “in the beginning.”
But there came a day when God knocked at the heart of a young girl in Nazareth, asking her: “Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove” (Song 5:2). Open to me because “my delight is to be with the children of men” (Proverbs 8:31). And Mary, in faith, immediately opened herself to the divine message, and then the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14); the praise the Word eternally sings to the Father—“Abba!”—began to resound in human words among us.
Prayer is the gift that, through Mary, God gave to His Church; it is that heavenly song that enables us to dialogue with the Father, a song known only to Jesus and revealed by Him to the little ones who believe in Him. God’s desire to live with us, to reveal Himself to us through Jesus, is the source and origin of prayer.
Through Mary’s silent faith, the Son’s prayer—“Abba!”—spreads across the earth in every time. Prayer became flesh, visible and tangible, so that we might sing first in this world and later in paradise an eternal hymn to the Father with His Son.
In your womb rekindled was the love
by whose warmth, in the eternal peace,
this flower has blossomed.
(Paradiso XXXIII, 7–9)
In Mary’s womb, with the incarnation of the Word, divine love is rekindled; the dialogue between God and man is renewed, and this mystery gives birth to the Church—and then to Paradise, eternal beatitude, and eternal prayer.
Mary is therefore the mother of prayer, both ours and the Church’s, because she is the mother of the only one who knows how to pray. Mary is forma Dei—God’s mold—into which we must pour ourselves, to become new people, to live in hope, to form God’s people and anticipate the heavenly Jerusalem.
The House of Prayer: the Universe, the Church, the Heart of Every Believer
Through the mystery of the Incarnation, it becomes clear that God wants to dwell with us and build a house of prayer. He prepared it, prefigured it by creating the universe through His Word as an absolutely free act of His will: if the Father ceased to speak His Word, the universe—effect of that Word—would not exist, and would collapse into nothingness. The universe is therefore a cosmic temple that raises to God a silent hymn of thanksgiving—the same hymn the Son offers to the Father.
The entire universe is a shadow of the Son’s body (cf. Col. 2:17), who is the perfect fulfillment of all things; the universe too is an epiphany, a manifestation of the divine Word.
But with the creation of Adam, God also began to build a historical temple, which culminates in the Incarnation of the Son and the construction of a house of prayer: the Church. Through His Passion and Resurrection, Jesus becomes the cornerstone uniting inseparably the two walls of this temple—God and humanity. Each believer is a living stone, shaped by the Spirit, and in this house can share in the very mystery of the Son, who is Himself unceasing prayer to the Father. In Jesus, God seeks each of us. We must thirst for God, desire the encounter with Him, the Bridegroom of the Church and of every believing soul.
Now that Christ has come, He has placed in every faithful heart the eternal song He sings in the heavens, moved by the Spirit: “Abba! Father!” A song only the little ones can learn, because only to them it is revealed—a song that is the nostalgia of fallen Adam, the desire of the prophets, veiled in the Psalms but fully revealed to every soul in love with Christ.
This new song, Christ sang throughout His life, perfectly on the Cross, giving His Spirit to the Father—that same Spirit who cries out in us “Abba!” and immerses us in the life and song of the Divine Trinity. But only if we are deeply aware of our need for grace, of our poverty, can we sing the new song that Christ gave to His Church.
The Liturgy: The Bride’s Song
“The Church is born from the paschal cross: there she celebrates her nuptial union with the Bridegroom. As a bridal dowry, as a pledge of His love and union, Christ has given her Himself in the act of offering… He has given her the gift of His prayer, of Himself become prayer.” (p. 60)
We receive this gift in the Eucharistic liturgy, source and nourishment of our personal prayer: the Eucharist is not a devout remembrance of Jesus, it is our encounter with the living Jesus. It is, today, participation in His supper; it is eating His body and drinking His blood. Christ—His sacrifice—is truly and physically present under the veil of visible signs.
Christ’s Passover is the only event in history that never passes away, never swallowed by time. It is a real event, contemporary to every moment in all ages, and each person can experience the Risen Jesus, come into contact with Him. Jesus, by dying, defeats death and gives us His life in the Resurrection. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood, we live in Him and for Him, sharing in His body, completed in His Church, forming His mystical Body.
The Eucharist’s influence continues in the Divine Office, the prayer that Christ, united with His Body, offers to the Father. Here too, the Church’s joy is expressed, united with the song of praise the Son raises to the Father in the eternal silence of the Trinity. “Blessed are those who dwell in your house; they will ever be praising you.” (Psalm 84:5)
Personal Prayer: Desire for God, Liturgy of the Heart
Jesus commands us to pray without ceasing. Mere union with Christ in the liturgy is not enough unless it becomes a stable form of our entire life. We must give Christ our whole self without reserve so that He can live His life in us, repeating in us “Abba!”
Only the desire to be united with Jesus allows us to live in uninterrupted prayer. We must accept dying to ourselves so He may live in us, giving Him everything we are, so He may heal us, and everything we’ve been given may become Christ’s. Day by day, we must empty ourselves so that He may be everything in our lives. If our desire to unite with Christ is continuous, so is our prayer.
Only God’s love can quench us if we have a continuous thirst for Him. But God too thirsts for our thirst: He came to offer us His life. From the heart of Christ flows the river of living water, quenching both God’s and our thirst. The water of life is given to us in proportion to our thirst, our desire, our poverty.
Yet, like Jesus on the Cross, we too may experience God’s silence in prayer—always preserving the desire to see His face, waiting vigilantly for His return to open to Him when He knocks. This silence is a necessary purification for all who pray, to reach the vision of God. In silence, Jesus shapes His Church, conforming it to His Passion, death, and Resurrection.
There is a place where this waiting for God in silence and poverty is fulfilled: the desert—where man discovers his true self: miserable, poor, blind, and naked. There, God leads His bride and reveals Himself as a passionate Bridegroom. In the desert’s depths lies a well where Jesus quenches our thirst—and asks us: “Give me a drink.” Here, we can hear God’s whisper, like a gentle breeze. Here, we can encounter the burning bush of the Cross and Resurrection—where Christ crucified and risen burns without consuming, in the fire of the Spirit, in the fire of love for the Father and for us, where we can behold the true face of the Father.
To conclude, a poem by Clemente Rebora (1885–1957), written before his conversion to a life of faith, helps us understand the value of prayer. It expresses the human yearning to open to grace and God’s desire to meet us. It is the final poem (1920) of his Anonymous Songs, published in 1922.
The poet knows that God seeks him and that grace will eventually reach him: he conveys in personal, poignant images his tension, longing for God, his vigil, silence, the imperceptible pollen of sound spreading through his room to fertilize life, the expansion of his four walls into a desert. Yet, he awaits no one of this world. In the second part, Rebora clearly states that even God wants to come—if he perseveres in waiting—to be his treasure, forgiveness, and comfort for human and divine suffering. Yet God comes like a whisper, perceivable only in silence and inner recollection.
From the tense image
I watch the moment
with imminent expectation—
and I await no one:
in the glowing shadow
I spy the bell
imperceptibly spreading
a pollen of sound—
and I await no one:
between four walls
astonished by space
more than a desert
I await no one.
But He must come,
He will come, if I resist
to bloom unseen,
He will come suddenly,
when I least expect Him.
He will come like forgiveness
for all that makes us die,
He will come to assure me
of His and my treasure,
He will come as solace
for my and His suffering,
He will come, perhaps already comes—
His whisper.
Fr. Giuseppe Oddone