Servant of God Father Isaac Thomas Hecker, C.S.P.
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HECKER REFLECTION: PRAYER IS THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

6/24/2013

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The following reflection is taken from a sermon entitled, “The Battle of Life,” that Father Hecker preached at the Paulist Mother Church in New York City, the Parish of Saint Paul the Apostle in 1865. This sermon was published in a Paulist sermon collection in 1866.

You say you have no time to pray! Have you time to breathe? Prayer is to the life of the soul as breathing is to the life of the body. It is absurd to say you do not have the time to pray, as it would be to say that you have no time to breathe. Pray when you rise and dress, pray when you are on the way to work, or to your place of business, or on your return home or before you go to bed. Lift up your hearts to God at intervals during the day. These short aspirations of the soul are like swift arrows which pierce the clouds and penetrate to the very throne of God. Believe me if you practice recollection and mortification to the degree you are able, in a short time, no exercise will be as easy as prayer.
 
How can you practice recollection? You cannot go into solitude as you have a family to see after and a business to attend and other obligations to fulfill. Make a desert where you are. Avoid to the extent you are able unnecessary distractions. Attend Church and in this way you will keep God’s presence in your heart. When the parents of Saint Catherine of Sienna sought to prevent her from following her religious vocation, she made a place in her heart where she prayed and meditated and dwelt with God in peace.  While her hands were occupied with external things, her heart was her oratory.
 
You must practice mortification. It is a great lesson to learn how little of material support is necessary for our physical life. They do not know how much of what they think is necessary is in fact superfluous. Remember what you deprive the body of, you give to the soul. Govern your appetite, be more temperate in your drinking, less indulgent in your sleeping and you will learn how much you deemed necessary as not indispensable. You will pray as easily as you breathe; for recollection and mortification lead to prayer and prayer aids in recollection and mortification.


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RESPONSE: FR. TOM RYAN, CSP
Our tendency is to think of praying in terms of speaking words to God. But Fr. Hecker clearly has something much broader in mind than that in telling us to pray when we rise and dress, when we’re on our way to work, to pray during the business day and on our way home. He’s talking about what Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection called “practicing the presence of God.” He’s inviting us to live with an awakened heart.
 
“Spirituality” is an “in” word in our times, but what does it really mean? The essence of it is this: A growing intimacy with God experienced through the people, places, events, and things in our daily living. And that clearly is what Hecker is talking about with his language of “short aspirations to God” and “lifting up our hearts to God at intervals during the day.” His example of Catherine of Sienna makes clear that it’s not just about going to Church on Sunday. It is rather about letting your heart be your oratory every day of the week, and letting your prayer be as natural as breathing.
 
His language of recollection and mortification is less current today. Recollection might be described as those moments when we enter the oratory of our hearts and make conscious contact with the presence of God dwelling within. And mortification refers to dying to our sensory appetites or self-centered tendencies. It was considered a discipline of the spiritual life and had a penitential resonance to it. But when you get right down to it, what is discipline all about? It’s about liberation from the things that bind us so as to be freer to follow the deeper movements within our hearts. Discipline is for discipleship. When the appetites of our bodies, the movements of our hearts and the thoughts of our minds are subject to the directives of the Holy Spirit within, our prayer throughout the day will become as natural as breathing.    
 
Paulist Father Thomas Ryan, CSP is Director of the Paulist Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations located at the Hecker Center in Washington, DC.  He is the author of numerous articles and some fourteen books with a specialty in the area of spirituality.


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HECKER REFLECTION: LIFE IS A BATTLE

6/10/2013

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The following reflection is taken from a sermon entitled, “The Battle of Life,” that Father Hecker preached at the Paulist Mother Church in New York City, the Parish of Saint Paul the Apostle in 1865. This sermon was published in a Paulist sermon collection in 1866.
 
There once reigned harmony between nature, man and God. The kingdom of God, in a word, reigned upon the earth as it does in heaven. All things have been changed. There reigns everywhere now antagonism and discord. The earth is undergoing a revolution in its climate and features. One species of plant is pushed off by another. One race of animals takes the place of another by their destruction. The same law reigns over men. The stronger race conquers and exterminates the weaker one. The intelligent take advantage of the ignorant, the rich increase their wealth from the scanty earnings of the poor, the powerful oppress the weak. The laws of society and legislation favor the privileged over the downtrodden. A battle is waging. 
 
You object and say that life is to you not a trial or a struggle. Could it be that you are living in the unconscious innocence of your childhood? It may be that you have never asked yourself what is life’s meaning or why are you here? If you possess reason, you will find that there is a task imposed on you that will tax your energies to fulfill. Be a man! Resolve to tell the truth, restrain your eagerness for riches, fame or pleasure; deal honestly with others, make restitution, restrain your appetites and keep away from sin.
 
Do one these things for not a year, or a month or a week, but just for one single day, and you will find that you are at war with yourself and if you come off with victory it will only be after a severe battle. Be a Christian and your life will be warfare.  In the histories of great men, you will learn that it was in their conquest of self, their struggle to do right and in keep God’s holy law, in their high trust in God that made them great in the sight of both God and man. Solitude, fasting and prayer feed the soul with supernatural energy, enabling it to do great things without effort. Christ has pointed out the way. 

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RESPONSE: FR. FRANK DESIANO, CSP

Servant of God Father Isaac Hecker was usually positive about nature and creation (remember his 1862 work Aspirations of Nature). In this sermon we see Hecker’s clear acknowledgement of conflict built into human existence. He paints a natural world of struggle, quite the opposite of Isaiah’s vision of lions lying next lambs, ranging from weather to international conflict. He further argues that if his listeners do not see life as a struggle, then perhaps they haven’t engaged the greatest projects of life—personal integrity, true charity, and peace with God and all. 

Try it, Hecker says, for one day—try to live with the values you should live with, and you will find plenty of trial, plenty of struggle. This is quite a sober message to our modern culture which avoids all discontent at any cost, and sees the existence of stress as itself a problem to be solved or a condition to be medicated.
 
A world that is comfortable has a hard time seeing the need for salvation and, therefore, the need for a savior. Notice how Hecker does not resort to the strategy that many churches use today to highlight the need for salvation—guilt. No, for Hecker the need for salvation comes from the very ideals we pursue in the deepest parts of our spirits, and our inability to really attain those ideals on our own. This reminds me of the thought of a famous Paulist philosophy professor who spent weeks having his students ask, “Is it better to be a happy pig, or an unhappy human?” Only humans, true humans, live for the highest ideals; only humans, then, experience conflict and frustration.
 
Hecker finally moves his listeners to the inner life, where he felt most at home. It’s in our personal discipline, our inner integrity, our acceptance of the fundamentals of asceticism, that people find the resources for victory. Of course, Hecker would insist that it’s the Holy Spirit who works exactly in this area, in our hearts, helping us experience the Victory of Christ in our lives.

Rev. Frank Desiano, CSP is President of Paulist Evangelization Ministries, based in Washington, DC. 


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