Today would have been Fr. Thomas Green's birthday; it came just four days too late. But it was also my day to pray Psalm 16, so I prayed it for him: Keep Tom safe, O God, on the journey he has before him now--for in you he has taken refuge (1).

A couple weeks ago, knowing how much I have appreciated my relationship with Fr. Green, Steve asked me to summarize three things I have learned from him. I post my response here as a way of having/sharing it.

Prayer is 90% God's Work

I am not a very good pray-er--not by any standard. But experiencing God as the Lord of the Dance has been tremendously helpful to me. Not that I can blame him for my lapses, but I know that he is working prayer in me. It is Jesus who intercedes on my behalf, and if it happens that I sometimes enter in--this is neither drudgery nor decisive. It is pure joy.

Consolation is only Constant as Self-Satisfaction

I sought out Father Green in the early 90's as a tortured soul. I had made the global commitments I thought I needed to make in order to experience closeness to God. And of course there were moments of great promise. But the pattern of guilt, repentance and decline persisted. I read When the Well Runs Dry at the same time as J.C. Pollock's biography of Hudson Taylor--and the two books might have saved my life. It was either spite or a deep consolation to learn that the great archetype of missionaries ("The sun never rose on Hudson Taylor's China without finding him on his knees") struggled with depression and even thought of ending his life. Green's introduction to Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross spoke in concert with Taylor's discovery of the rest we find in the sheer goodness of God. Neither my ability to secure God's blessing nor any emotional sense of consolation in prayer indicate a genuine relationship with God, but a growing sense of his goodness--quite apart from and prerequisite to any growth in virtue.

Dryness is the Ether of the Lord

I have shared the four stages of prayer's growth from Teresa's biography, Chapter XI with I don't know how many people. And of course I learned them from Fr. Green. If I am a teacher, that does not mean so much that I have a particular set of skills as it means that, when I learn something I can pass along to others I feel like it is the greatest possible kind of possession a person can have. The surprise of Teresa's analogy is that maturation in prayer does not mean greater proficiency. A mature pray-er does not know how to pray at all. That is beginning prayer--when we pray by wrote, with an acquired pitch and vocabulary. And dryness in prayer is not the failure of these strategies. Technology should be honored for how far it can take us. But their "failure" is actually the Hand of an Operator, shutting off the valves we otherwise learn to trust in. The final image in Teresa's beautiful analogy--from a bucket and a rope in the garden of virtue, to an artesian well and then flood irrigation--is a face turned expectantly and desperately toward the heavens, hoping for rain. In mature prayer, it is not that the 90% of God's work becomes progressively more and more our responsibility, but that we learn more and more to depend on him as he takes away every consolation that comes from our own industry.