So, if I've been spending the afternoon refereeing two competitive siblings playing chess who don't really know how to play chess, does that mean I can go ahead and eat those warm cookies from the oven?
In My Other Self Clarence Enzler—author of the multi-million copy seller Everyone’s Way of the Cross—guides readers in prayerful conversation with Christ wherein the reader is personally addressed as “my other self” and is urged to embody Christ’s love and compassion to others.
Modeled on the fifteenth-century classic The Imitation of Christ, this new edition of a little-known Enzler masterwork has now been reissued for modern Christians after being out of print for many years. This new edition includes an introduction from the author's son, Msgr. John Enzler, pastor of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Washington, D.C.
In this intimate guide to the spiritual life, Christ speaks directly to the reader, whom Christ admonishes to be his presence of love and service in the world. Through this creative mode of dialogue, Enzler leads the reader through the journey of the Christian life, beginning with the call to live in friendship with Christ and fulfill Christ's desire. He then examines the means of the Christian life: detachment, virtue, prayer, avoidance of sin, and the Eucharist. Finally he explores the goal of the journey: a life of union with Christ as his disciple and complete joy with him in eternity. Each chapter of My Other Self is divided into short, eloquent sections based on scripture and with beautiful prayers for meditation. These convenient divisions make the book ideal for use as a daily devotional, or a guide to prayer.
If being human is essentially about relation to God, it is clear that speaking with, and listening to, God is an essential part of it. This is why the Sermon on the Mount also includes a teaching about prayer. The Lord tells us how we are to pray.In Matthew's Gospel, the Lord's Prayer is preceded by a short catechesis on prayer. Its main purpose is to warn against false forms of prayer. Prayer must not be an occasion for showing off before others; it requires the discretion that is essential to a relation of love. God addresses every individual by a name that no one else knows, as Scripture tells us (cf. Rev 2:17). God's love for each individual is totally personal and includes this mystery of uniqueness that cannot be divulged to other human beings.This discretion, which is of the very essence of prayer, does not exclude prayer in common. The Our Father is itself a prayer uttered in the first person plural, and it is only by becoming part of the "we" of God's children that we can reach up to him beyond the limits of this world in the first place. And yet this "we" awakens the inmost core of the person; in the act of prayer the totally personal and the communal must always pervade each other, as we will see more closely in our exposition of the Our Father. Just as in the relationship between man and woman there is a totally personal dimension that requires a zone of discretion for its protection, though at the same time the relationship of the two in marriage and family by its very nature also includes public responsibility, so it is also in our relation to God: The "we" of the praying community and the utterly personal intimacy that can be shared only with God are closely interconnected.The other false form of prayer the Lord warns us against is the chatter, the verbiage, that smothers the spirit. We are all familiar with the danger of reciting habitual formulas while our mind is somewhere else entirely. We are at our most attentive when we are driven by inmost need to ask God for something or are prompted by a joyful heart to thank him for good things that have happened to us. Most importantly, though, our relationship to God should not be confined to such momentary situations, but should be present as the bedrock of our soul. In order for that to happen, this relation has to be constantly revived and the affairs of our everyday lives have to be constantly related back to it. The more the depths of our souls are directed toward God, the better we will be able to pray. The more prayer is the foundation that upholds our entire existence, the more we will become men of peace. The more we can bear pain, the more we will be able to understand others and open ourselves to them. This orientation pervasively shaping our whole consciousness, this silent presence of God at the heart of our thinking, our meditating, and our being , is what we mean by "prayer without ceasing." This is ultimately what we mean by love of God, which is at the same time the condition and the driving force behind love of neighbor.
My dear daughter in Christ,
Praying at Home
Recently, you asked me how you, as wife and mother, with children to look after from morning 'til night seven days a week, can enter into our monastery's charism of adoration and reparation. It will be many years, I think, before you will have the freedom to spend any significant amount of time in adoration before the Tabernacle, or before the Most Blessed Sacrament exposed in the monstrance.
Your Divine Office
Your duty now, and the expression of your love for God, is to be fully present to your family. Your "Divine Office" is to cook, and clean, and change dirty diapers, and run errands, and keep the littlest ones amused, and find time to listen to the older children, and to bandage cuts, and look after bruises, and welcome guests -- and every now and then -- to steal a moment or two alone with your husband. Is this incompatible with your desire as an Oblate of our monastery to offer yourself to Our Lord in adoration, in reparation, and in supplication for the holiness of priests?
A 40 Second Prayer
Here is a prayer that I wrote for this purpose. It takes exactly 40 seconds to say. Over time, it can be memorized. Use it to mark the beginning of your hour of adoration and reparation and, then, go about your business, trusting that Our Lord has heard your prayer and received it into His Heart.
Lord Jesus Christ, although I cannot, during this hour, approach Thee physically in the Sacrament of Thy Love, I would approach Thee by desire and by faith.Transport me, I beseech Thee, by the lifting up of my mind and heart, to that tabernacle in the world where Thou art, at this hour, most forsaken, utterly forgotten, and without human company.Let the radiance of Thy Eucharistic Face so penetrate my soul that by offering Thee adoration and reparation, even as I am busy doing ordinary things in an ordinary way, I may obtain from Thy Sacred Heart the return of at least one priest to the Tabernacle where Thou waitest for him today. Amen.
