PRAYER IN LIFE AND TEACHING OF BL. FRANCISCO PALAU OCD

St. Teresa in the book of Life 8,5 defines prayer as a relationship between friends; it is “being many times alone with the one we know loves us”. Francisco Palau will take to the limit the experience of this definition of his “Seraphic Mother and human angel”, as he calls her and with whose doctrine he feels fully identified. But just as in the case of Saint Teresa the interlocutor is clearly God in the person of the Son, for Palau it will be an arduous task and a long road to discover who his Beloved was in that relationship of friendship.

Generous hopes, fleeting encounters, wounds of love… that remind us of the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross, will be configuring what for Palau is the object of a love without borders, the Church.

His intimate diary, to which he gives the meaningful title of My Relations with the Church, is an example of this constant and relentless search.

1. Francisco Palau, a man of prayer.

One of the unmistakable hallmarks of Blessed Francisco Palau is his profound spirit of prayer. Apostolate and prayer are like the poles that oriented his whole life. They alternated in intensity and external presence, but they were always harmoniously united in him. There are clear testimonies that already from childhood he was very much given to prayer and fond of devout exercises. This tendency became stronger and more consistent during his years as a seminarian in Lérida, where he stood out for his love of recollection and his assiduity in prayer, meditation and the reading of Sacred Scripture. In his life as a Carmelite he learned, without a doubt, the appreciation and esteem for prayer, as demonstrated by his later teaching on prayer and his familiarity with the terminology peculiar to the spirituality of the Teresian Carmel. He learned the method of mental prayer and its prolonged exercise. The perfect assimilation of this fundamental element of Carmelite spirituality is confirmed throughout his life, beginning immediately after his expulsion from the convent. He took refuge in his hometown and remained faithful to his commitment to prayer, habitually withdrawing to a cave to spend long periods and nights in prayer. There his prayer took on a manifestly apostolic dimension. Not only did he pray for the Church, but he also attended spiritually to the needy who came to his cave in search of consolation and reconciliation. This was to be a constant feature of his whole life. The long period of his life in France was dominated by the assiduous and prolonged practice of prayer. It can be said that his life is one of continuous prayer. From his stay in Perpignan a note with his life plan is preserved; in it he dedicates an hour and a half to prayer after Mass, another hour and a half in the evening and two hours after midnight. He led the same tenor of life in the other places he lived, according to the testimony of his time.

• Prayer illuminates his path of union with God.

Before giving a new direction to his life, he withdraws into solitude to scrutinize the will of God and ask for his lights. This aspect is also a very marked constant in the practice of Palautian prayer. He seeks in it, above all, union with God and, consequently, full acceptance of his will. When this is not clear or manifested, he insists on prayer to know it and follow it. This doctrine is his own experience: “Having finished the winter mission, free from the cares it brings with it, retired to the solitude of my hermitage, I spend the summer in prayer to strengthen my soul”.

• The centrality of the Church in prayer.

We cannot forget that his prayer experience must be read based on his relationship with the Church. Here is the necessity of his prayer, the motive that sustains it, the reality worthy of contemplation. His relationship with the Church is what changes his life: “I was so changed and so new, that her presence renewed soul and body” (Meditation 725.3). It was not only a matter of “strengthening his soul” through prayer; this was for him, above all, the habitual means of his communication with the Lord. Since he encountered God concretely in the Church, his prayer was gradually transformed into a regular ecclesial colloquy. Exactly as we read in My Relations with the Church. As he penetrated the mystery of the Church, prayer itself opened up to the apostolic sense. Union with God thus became “union with God and neighbour,” as he insistently taught his spiritual daughters. It was not only a theoretical teaching; with his prayer he tried to strengthen the foundational work, asking the Lord with great urging to enlighten him on the way to follow. It was one of the most direct and insistent apostolic forms of his prayer. He frequently repeated in his letters clarifications like this one: “In prayer I take care to consult God and I continually ask him to infuse you with those virtues that you cannot and do not know how to acquire with your own strength“.

In him everything is contemplated and focused from the mysterious reality of the Church; everything starts from the Church and becomes Church. Therein lies its original optic, which renews and recreates the being and living of the Carmelite. The friendly colloquy of the prayer unravels with the Mystical Christ and becomes union with the Church, communion of life with all those linked to Christ by the Spirit. On the other hand it considers in the Struggle of the soul with God that the portion of praying people are the heart of the Church and represent it alive (Struggle 149).

• Advanced disciple of Saint Teresa.

The prayer that Francisco Palau lives and transmits has all the features of Teresian prayer. If we look at the Teresian definition of prayer: “It is nothing else, in my opinion, the mental prayer, but to try to be friends while we are often alone with the one we know loves us” (V 8:5), we find that Francisco Palau defines prayer in the following way: “Prayer is an intimate, familiar intercourse that man has with God” (Cat 30:4). We see that in both of them there is a friendly contact, in solitude, which is a gift and a desire to communicate with the Beloved. “These visits only served to torment me more, because with them my desire to see her and to have friendly relations with her grew“ (MRel 727,3). Thus he prays and thus he teaches to pray, if we take the first letter of the epistolary that he addresses to Eugenia Guerin, we see that he invites her to discover her own interiority, to enter into it and to remain there, before the Lord of life. Let us remember what the Saint tells us when defining the prayer of recollection: “It is called recollection, because the soul gathers all its powers and enters within itself with its God” (CP 28,4) and Francisco Palau similarly affirms that: “the great work of God is worked in the interior” (Letter 38,2). Following the Teresian style, he insists that prayer must be transformed into works. “In this matter of prayer, I will say a few things … before I say … what prayer is: three things I will enlarge on in declaring … one is love for one another; another, detachment from all that is cherished; the other, true humility” (CP 4,4). Going through the Letters he wrote to the first sisters, we see that he transmits the same message to his groups. The virtues will give authenticity to prayer and prayer will purify life, so he advises them: “I will repeat many times those counsels that form the spirit, according to the vocation to which you are called… these principal virtues are necessary, obedience, poverty and charity for one another (Letter 12,1). Also, to Juana Gratias he insists: “prayer for the needs of the Church should be short and frequent”…. and he insists telling her who is the Master: “Imitate Jesus Christ in this and you will find a true Master and model of prayer, follow him in all his steps: you will see him in the desert praying for men, in the garden of olives agonizing for them, in preaching helping them in their needs, on the cross offering himself to the Father as a victim of propitiation“ (Letter 6,7). Let us remember how the Saint prays and advises us to pray in this way: “Since I could not think with my mind, I tried to represent Christ within myself“ (V 9:4). The life of prayer is a theological path, which we could summarize as “determined determination”. It is a vital attitude for responding with fortitude and serenity in the face of adversity. Francis Palau expressed himself thus: “God knows how well disposed I am to serve his Church and that in matters of her glory I see everything plain and easy” (Letter 56:1).

HOW FRANCISCO PALAU PRAYS

Francisco Palau’s prayer has several expressions. We highlight the following:

1. Prayer of petition and intercession

In his early writings, Francisco Palau speaks above all of the prayer of petition and supplication. In fact, the entire book of The Struggle is a staging of this theme with the aim of teaching how to pray for the Church; it is not in vain that this mode of prayer is the most frequent in the Gospel, wonderfully condensed and exemplified in the Lord’s Prayer. Palau also introduces in this writing an Our Father applied to the Church. For him, prayer is the reality that enters into the heart of God in such a way that it achieves all that he wants and desires; it is the last remedy when all others have failed. To the prayer of supplication he applies a great capacity for service, liberation and salvation. He goes so far as to say that if Jesus does not remedy so many evils that afflict the Church of Spain, it is because there is no one who asks him for it properly.

The practice of prayer for the needs of the Church is one of the key points of his life and spiritual magisterium. “For the solitary life it is necessary to have great commerce with God, relative to the affairs of men’s health; that is the ultimate of perfection.” And he insists: “prayer for the needs of the Church should be short and frequent” (Letter 6,4).

His conviction of the efficacy and power of supplication and intercession is based on Sacred Scripture: “If one opens the Sacred Books, one will find stamped therein this consoling truth that when the chosen people have been stricken by the hand of God and have made supplications and cried out to heaven, they have always been heard and God has returned to them in his grace” (Lucha 134; cf. 136).

Prayer as a struggle is a very peculiar form of F. Palau within the forms of petition and intercession. It is the theme of the book with this title. Throughout, he understands prayer as a struggle with God in order, like Jacob in his struggle with the angel, to obtain his blessing for the Church.

• The prayer of gazing.

The gaze, which is so important in human experience, and which we know is fundamental in the Teresian experience, is undoubtedly so in F. Palau. The Saint comments: “see that the Lord is looking at you” (V 13,22). For his part, Francisco Palau, explaining the way to pray to Juana, advises her: “Look at him in this body which is the Church, wounded and crucified… offer yourself to take care of him and render him those services that are in your power. Look upon him as Lord and master and king” (Letter 42,2). The Son of God is your beloved and your lover; he is the object of your sight and of your gaze” (Act 74:4). Also in My Relationships this aspect of Palautian contemplation is highlighted, which is an expression of his friendly relationship with the Church: “The more I look at you, the newer I see you… let yourself be seen” (MRel 724). His gaze is centered on Christ as head of the Church: “I looked at Christ, uncreated wisdom and head of the Church, I looked at him with the eyes of faith, I looked at his relationship with the Church, I looked at his beauty, himself“ (MRel 725:Cf.727): looking at the beauty of the Church captivates him: “My Beloved. My Bride, my Sister, you have mortally wounded my heart: with a glance you have revealed your thoughts to me, you have made yourself known to this wretched mortal. And seeing you, returning you to my sight, looking at you, I have remained a prisoner, captive and slave of the presence of your indefinable beauty; and manifesting to me, with your sweet and affectionate, gracious and attractive look, your immense kindness and the affections of your heart for me, my heart has been wounded to death: your look has killed me” (MRel 756).

• Prayer of deliverance, exorcisms.

Where the prayer of Blessed F. Palau acquired more vibrant tones of ecclesial meaning was in his daring apostolate with the sick who were considered victims of the devil (Cf. Positio 508-511). In this mission he felt with greater intensity the urgency of uniting poverty, penance and sacrifice to prayer and faith and a great rectitude in his actions (Cf. Ct. Ermitaño, 15-4-1869, 4; 12-8-1869, 3; MRel 921).

• Liturgical prayer.

As a religious and priest, Francisco Palau was always mindful of the liturgical prayer of the Church; we can see this, above all, in his experience of the Eucharist. This aspect once again shows us his fidelity to the Church.

His daily life is a continuous liturgy since all of it is an offering to his Beloved and through his Beloved to the Father: “I am at her service; Lord my God, command me, reveal to me what you want me to do to please her. You know that on the altar of the cross I have sacrificed my life, my rest and all that is dearest to me for her…” (MRel 729;948).

The manifestation of this experience is found in the way of relating it, which is a liturgical way in the apocalyptic style: “Having said this, there appeared on the mountain an altar of gold, and on the altar the Gospel and the sacred vestments of a priest, and addressing one of the princes who surrounded her, she said: “Clothe this my minister with these sacred vestments”. I went up to the altar, and they dressed me as a priest. She held in her hands a book and a crucifix, and said, “Come near to me.” And I approached the throne where she was, and she held out her right hand to me and stretched it over my head, and said, “March, preach the Gospel. This is the law: “You shall love God for who He is, infinite goodness; and your neighbors as yourself,” and he handed me the book. Then, extending her right hand again, she said to me: “Go, proclaim to the world the forgiveness and remission of their sins“. And handing me the cross, she added: “This is the sign of the redemption and mercy of God on earth; by its virtue you will destroy the kingdom of sin“. Having said this, heavenly songs were heard on the mountain, mingled with very soft and sweet music; and the voices said: Glory to thee, O holy Church, thou hast triumphed in the blood of the Lamb” (MRel 740; Cf.720; 743-744; 752-753).

Nature and the cosmos are also presented as a welcoming and living space that is involved in this prayer (cf. MRel 847; 897; 910; 977). Because “all that material world, which we see moving in our sight, the celestial spheres, and the bodies that revolve in them, the stars and planets, serve the good of the Church” (Igl 709; cf. Col 1:18,20). Palau places Christ and his Bride at the center of the universe. Christ as the source of light and the Church as the finality of all creation. “Such is the idea that we have of the earth and other elementary bodies, and of all the celestial bodies that serve man for his perishable life. We do not abound in the sense of some, who think that it is that material sun that should occupy the center of the globe of the universe, but the humanity of Jesus Christ, and the body of his Bride the Church, by which everything has been created, and to whose glory all creatures will serve” (Igl 709).

• Prayer in life.

For F. Palau, apostolic service is an encounter with Christ present in the members of his own Mystical Body, which is the Church. Prayer and apostolate are complementary expressions – mutually inferred – of the same ecclesial love. Christ and the brethren become present both in contemplation and in the proclamation of the divine mystery before men. To love and serve the Church is equivalent to realizing in fullness and perfection the supreme law of charity. In the end, as Francisco Palau repeats, “love is works“ (MRel 740).

Going through the letters he wrote to the first sisters, we see that he transmits to his groups the need not only to pray at specific times, but also to live a life of prayer and to pray over life. For Palau, as a good disciple of Teresa of Jesus, the proof of authentic prayer is in the occasions that arise each day.

HOW HE TEACHES TO PRAY

When Francisco Palau speaks of prayer, he does so from a strong and intense experience. He speaks as an experienced teacher. The pages on prayer are autobiographical pages, fruit of the experience of the intimate, friendly and familiar relationship he has had with his God.

1.Mystagogy

The word mystagogy comes from the Greek verb (mystagogein) and means “to grow in the mysteries”, “to be introduced into the mysteries”. In the early Church mystagogy referred to the last stage of the catechumenate. There was a remote preparation (of several years), then came the immediate preparation for the reception of the sacraments of initiation, which were received at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday. The teaching received up to this point was called catechesis. In the early Christian communities the mystagogue introduced the baptised to the sacred realities and the Mystery of Christ. We do not find a more elaborate reflection until the Mystagogical Catecheses of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Cyril of Alexandria and St. John Chrysostom. And we will have to wait until St. Maximus the Confessor (580-682 A.D.) for a treatise on mystagogy.

With time, the meaning of this term was broadened and applied to any transmission of one’s own experience of God so that the other person can have his or her own experience. In reality it is to begin a journey of deepening in the mystery, proceeding from the visible to the invisible, from the sign to the signified, from the “sacraments” to the “mysteries” (Cf. CCC 1075). Throughout history we see that the great mystics have made an authentic initiation into the Christian mystery through their own experience of encounter with Christ.

Nowadays, spirituality tries to exercise mystagogy by presenting the mystery and inviting to experience it.

• Francisco Palau as mystagogue.

Francisco Palau in his spiritual itinerary shows us how he arrives through prayer or what is the same through the relationship with the Church to such an intimacy that it becomes a mystical experience that he lives and transmits.

He transmits and spreads what he lives to his groups of brothers and sisters, to the students of the School of Virtue and to all the people who approach him and invites them to follow his own itinerary. He does this in the places where he settles and creates communities.

From his prayerful experience embodied in the book of My Relations can be deduced some guidelines to follow for those who wish to enter into his deepest center in order to unite intimately with God and neighbor and experience the mystery of ecclesial communion. In fact this entire book is an ongoing relationship of friendship with his beloved Church. But it is above all in his Letters that he unfolds his prayerful magisterium, rightly guiding those who wish to embark on and enter this path.

Features

• The core of prayer is the ecclesial mystery of communion. It is grounded in the Gospel and this is its nourishment and strength.
• It is a free gift from God but requires the acceptance of the person for God to act.
• Determination is needed.
• The training process has to be administered in due time, gradually and gently, according to their capacity and disposition.
• It takes into account the whole person.
• Since the physical and moral constitution of man is such, his progress and his march along the path of virtues requires and demands a gradual and lifelong education, because in the school of Christ, learning is our whole life (cf. EVV 404-405).
• The rightness of adopting and choosing a suitable way of transmitting the content of the faith (EVV 403).

Pedagogy of prayer.

Taking into account his orientations, we arrive at the following script on prayer:

Enter within yourself: “Enter the temple of your soul; place yourself there in silence and listen to the voice of your King Solomon, who speaks to you always from the throne of the altar in the depths of your heart” (Ct. Ch. 1).

To be silent. In order to listen, it is necessary to seek solitude, to silence oneself. It is not an empty silence, but with a purpose: to listen to the Beloved, to welcome her or her word, to allow oneself to be looked at, to be transformed in order to reach union with God and the Church in faith, hope and love: “God hears us and can do no less because we speak to him in complete silence” (Cf. Cta 28; Cf. 38).

Time to contemplate: the gaze. “If you believe in me, never look at the Head separated from the Body…” (MRel 785;Cf.Cta 42,2).

Time to let oneself be contemplated: “And since I believe that this very clear and pure intelligence has been looking at me and seeing me for an eternity, it was very natural for me to be attentive to her eyes and to wish to see them open and looking at me, since I was looking at her” (MRel 727).

Time to let oneself be transformed: “The presence of your Beloved in faith, love, in your person, has transformed you into her. Your being, formless without faith or love in her, has taken on her figure with her presence, and you have been transformed into her being” (MRel 915;Cf.753, 7;725;958).

Time to respond: “I am no longer my own, but your property; because I love you, dispose of my life, my health and my rest and all that I am and have” (MRel 722;Cf.332;740).

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THE PALAUTIAN PRAYER

We start from the fact that the essential element of Palatian prayer is ecclesiality. The other characteristics derive from this as from their source:

Dialogical, personal and communitarian prayer.

From his experience of the Church as a mystery of communion-relation it follows that the first characteristic of Palautian prayer is that of being dialogical and personal. Palautian prayer is rooted in the very structure of revelation, which is precisely dialogical: God speaks, and man listens and responds; God works and man collaborates. To the extent that he listens, he becomes capable of questioning himself, of seeing and understanding. Palautian prayer is personal in the sense that it is addressed to a person, the Church, and involves the whole person. God is experienced as a ‘mystery of communion’. The encounter with God is one to one, but the you is “God and the neighbor”, therefore the encounter from person to person is an encounter with the Church. The Church is a living person, in whom only finds love, forgiveness and salvation. That is why Palautian prayer is never a monologue, but the descent into the depths of the self is always a coming out of oneself, a communitarian, ecclesial colloquy. This colloquy is so true, so real, that it sometimes takes the form of discussion and dispute. The colloquy with God-Church moves simultaneously between two poles: transcendence and immanence, closeness and distance, trust and fear. It is enough to open the book of My Relationships. All of it, as its name indicates, is a permanent dialogue with the Church.

Palautian prayer is therefore deeply personal; it always involves the whole and sincere prayer of the person praying, but it is also communitarian and ecclesial. The individual is never separated from the history of his people and always prays as a member of the people and intercedes for them. The passage from the personal to the collective, from the individual to the communitarian takes place without counterpositions and without violence. And this is not only in formulated prayer, but already beforehand at the level of lived experience.

Prayer, a matter of three.

Generally, the emphasis is placed on the dialogical relationship between God and the person. On the other hand, it is fairer to open ourselves to the triangular dimension: God-me-others. The praying person in his or her complexity. God’s partner in prayer is the person in the realism and complexity of his being. He must never avoid this confrontation with the reality of life in order to place himself in the presence of God without masks. In the person/community relationship in which the believer lives, the others are not strangers, they are the “with me” of the history of salvation.

The pedagogical value of mediations.

The non-immediate character of the relationship with God, if not through faith and love, the non-visibility of his presence and the non-audibility of his word and his will, must open the discourse to the mediations of the presence and revelation of the God of prayer. In fact, prayer – dialogue with God – is realized through mediations. These mediations can be: the Eucharist, the Word of God, nature, the events of history, images, the various simple repetitive prayers. In the same way, these mediations can be at the service of a prayerful expressiveness on the part of those who wish to be in total relationship with God through expressive forms: prayer with gestures, prayer with the body, prayer with song, meditation, contemplative silence.

The interiorization of prayer.

Since the encounter with God tends to take place in the most intimate part of us, every prayerful activity must gradually lead to an interiorization by which the whole person listens to God and responds to God. In this task of interiorization, it is necessary to underline these two possibilities that go at the same pace: The progressive interiorization of the external mediations. Interiorization of the word, the rhythmic and repeated prayer, the Eucharistic presence, the image…. the progressive interiorization of the praying methodology through the degrees of prayer, as indicated by the masters of Christian prayer: vocal prayer, meditation, recollected prayer, simple contemplation or loving attention… The path of interiorization cannot but go hand in hand with a real progress in the totality of the real relationship with God in the whole sense of Christian life, at the moral and spiritual level.

Trinitarian experience

The God of our prayer is the God of revelation in its Trinitarian dimension: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. In Jesus revelation has manifested itself as the communication of a divine life that is a dialogue between persons. The revelation to man is the translation to the exterior of an internal dialogue. And so prayer is not a generic reference to a solitary God, but a precise and personal reference to the Father, the Spirit and the Lord Jesus. The ultimate end of prayer is always the Father, but through Christ and in the Spirit.

“I went up, and he led me among the ruins of a hermitage. My spirit rose to contemplate the heavenly Jerusalem; the whole mountain was filled with glory. And the Father, making his voice heard, said: “This is my Daughter and your Daughter“. And the Son: “This is my Bride and your Bride“. And the Holy Spirit: “I am the love of the Father and of the Son, and I am the bond that will bind you by grace and love to the Daughter of God and to the Bride of the Lamb” [Rev 21:9-27]” (MRel 754-755; cf. 772,946.6).

Gratuitous experience

Prayer presupposes a relationship and, more precisely, a relationship of love. The men of the Bible are the friends of God. Prayer, therefore, can be discovered along the lines of friendship, and those who pray are God’s friends who converse with Him, since they are invited by Him to this conversation. In relation to man, God always has the initiative. Although in the Bible the “search for God” seems to prevail, it is He who moves first in search of man. If God had not revealed Himself, all the efforts to find Him would be valid; but if He has revealed Himself, it is right and prudent that we seek Him through the path of His concrete revelation. In dialogue we must leave the initiative to God: to pray is above all to listen. Prayer in the Bible favors the attitude of listening: “Hear, O Israel” (Dt 6:4). In the beginning there was already the Word. Jesus is the total revelation of God. To pray is to welcome this word and this mystery.

Prayer is born of the awareness of the gift and the knowledge of the limit, but always in an open vision, in the desire to go beyond. If it is true that the gaze starts from daily experience, from the history in which we live, from its joys and its dramas, it is equally true that then the gaze goes towards the One who is beyond history. Above the goods of God, prayer seeks God. The secret vein of all Palautian prayer is the desire for God. Prayer thus expresses the loneliness of man, who feels exiled, unsatisfied, a pilgrim towards the absolute and a stranger here, never perfectly integrated and understood, never perfectly expressed. The things of the world, the very gifts of God, are the image of God, not God. Prayer is the sign that man is made for God; it expresses the desire to meet him: “I saw her looking at me, and I thought she was looking at me with favorable and loving eyes…. I had my heart full of things and I could not explain them to her. So, she went away and I remained mad with love and affection, because these visits only served to torment me more, because with them my desire to see her and to relate with her in a friendly way grew“ (MR 727;Cf.721;726,1.2;952,3).

INTERWOVEN WITH HISTORY AND LIFE

Another important characteristic of Palautian prayer is its close link with history and with life. Note above all that the prayer assumes different physiognomies and tones in the various stages of his spiritual journey, the history of salvation itself. The prayer of eager search of his youth: “Holy Church! Twenty years I had been looking for you: I looked at you and I did not know you, because you were hidden under the dark shadows of the enigma, of the tropes, of the metaphors and I could not see you except under the species of a being incomprehensible to me“ (MRel 722). That of the Struggle of the soul with God during his exile in France; the prayer full of questions during his exile in Ibiza; the prayer of liberation practised in the exorcisms; the joyful prayer of union with the Church, once he discovers her true face: “Oh, what joy is mine! I have already found you. I love you, you know it: my life is the least I can offer you in correspondence to your love... I am no longer my own thing, but your property; because I love you, dispose of my life, my health and my rest and all that I am and have” (MRel 722).

1. Francisco Palau prays in life and with life.

God speaks to man in history, and man responds to God within history, adopting its language, its culture and its problems. The man of God who is Francisco Palau transforms into prayer all the realities that populate his life. The God of prayer is the God of salvation, the God of life. Prayer is not a separate experience, an isolated event. There is not prayer on the one hand and life on the other. Palau prays what he lives. Palautian prayer is above all contemplative. He does not disregard his personal reality or his surroundings; the interest of prayer is directed towards God and his neighbor, towards the contemplation of the Church:

“-I will not let you be alone from now on,” she said to me with much love.

-When you see me alone, will you be with me?

-Yes, and also when you are in company, because I am the neighbors united among themselves by love under Christ, my Head; and when you are with them you are with me and I am in you” (MRel 799).

From it, the prayerful person will know how to return to himself and to the things he has to accomplish, for her glory and in her service.

“Seeing that human forces are not enough to stop the very serious evils that afflict the Church, in certain seasons I withdraw to an islet, an hour long and of a prodigious elevation, which in columned crests rises above the deep Mediterranean Sea. The boat leaves and I stay there alone for a few days, to unite myself with God and his Church, in faith, hope and love. My object was to unite with her in faith, hope and love and to carry out her commands. There I saw the attributes, graces, gifts, virtues and perfections of Christ, head of the Church, in the saints who are on earth and represent her…” (MRel 723).

Prayer is always both a vertical and horizontal gaze, never just one or the other. We seek the face of God, and we are referred back to creation and history; here are his traces, the signs of his love and mercy. We question ourselves about life, and we are pointed back to God and his mystery. By questioning life, we arrive at God, and by contemplating God we are led to a new vision of life. Prayer is born from life and, after having turned to God, it returns to life, but with new eyes and opening new possibilities.

For Francisco Palau, true prayer is the prayer of the heart, that is, the prayer that comes from the center of the person and from the depths of life. The prayer of the lips or of many words is not authentic, because it does not come from the root of man. In prayer man is involved in his totality, in his inseparable unity. The physical and spiritual needs form body. Palautian prayer does not move only in the sphere of spiritual goods, but in the totality of life.

Prayer is not a verbal relationship with God, but a vital, existential relationship, of which the verbal relationship is simply its explicit and partial expression. Before the acts of prayer there is in Palau a constant perception of “the presence of the Beloved,” which we can think of as a vital, implicit prayer that gives meaning and truth to the verbal prayer. One of the most serious deviations that the Bible reproaches is the separation between prayer and morality, worship and life (Is 1;Am 5;Jer 7).

• The connaturality of Palautian prayer.

Prayer is not a strange phenomenon, typical of rare people. It is exactly the opposite. Let us think a little about how prayer is gestated in the human heart. Man is a “being of needs”. He is never fully what he wants to be, nothing fully satisfies his desire. And, seeing himself in need, the human being cries out: “I am hungry, I am afraid, I want to be loved, I am overwhelmed, I am dying”. This cry is at the same time a call. The person does not only cry out his need. His cry is addressed to someone to come to his aid. Regardless of your religious beliefs, there is one basic fact that cannot be ignored. The human being is a beggar, and his existence is always, in some way, a cry, a call and a request for help. But human beings do not only need things, objects or solutions to their various problems. At the bottom of these concrete needs, the person perceives a deeper emptiness, which nothing and no one can fill. Women and men need “salvation”. This is continually demonstrated to us by the Palautian narrative. It is, as we have seen, the cry made supplication to God: From the depths I cry out to you, Lord; hear my voice (Ps 130:1).

Ultimately Palautian prayer is not to assume knowledge or learn techniques. It is an awareness of that liberating and saving presence; the only one that ultimately can make the protagonist of the prayer or the protagonists, recover for themselves and their community, their own image and dignity: “In fulfillment of my word, I was going up to the top of the mountain to pray, and I did not find the one I was looking for in the place of the appointment; I called her and she did not answer me. I went up to another little mountain covered with forest, and I found her solitary and in deep meditation. And a loud voice from the same mountain said to me: “Prayer, prayer“. And I became silent and prayerful. I was very agitated and deeply moved by what I had heard in the city from whence I came. And my beloved made me a sign, and lifting her hand to heaven, she said: -During the beautiful summer evenings and at dawn you will pray in due form; you will come alone to this place and find me. Prayer will cure all your ills; do not fail” (MRel 830).

• In spirit and truth. Simplicity and transcendence.

When F. Palau begins to put into words the intimate movement of his spirit, in vibration with the Church, his prayer has reached contemplative simplification; it has naturally become a friendly relationship, a loving relationship with the one who is everything to him: the Church, his Beloved. Prayer is then soliloquy, dialogue, colloquy, reciprocal communication. The process of rational discourse and meditative reflection is overcome.

Everything is expressed and expressed admiringly and affectionately. We are before the Teresian prayer, but centered on the loving presence of the mystical Christ in the Church. When Francisco Palau transfers his prayer to paper, he does nothing more than put in writing what he is saying to the Church or what he has just spoken to her. He is simply expressing the loving encounter of that day.

The common thread of all Palautian prayer is the encounter with the Church. How to serve her in the circumstances of every day and how to find her in every person in need.

THE SIGN OF “SILENCE” IN PALAUTIAN PRAYER

Doing silence is a need of the person to meet himself, to develop more strongly his capacity to think, to be serene, in a word it helps the person to be himself. The believer in making silence also meets with himself and with God, but in this meeting there is the God who speaks and the God who is silent. A capacity to be silent is to welcome in faith this silence of God.

1. Silence of God.

The most disconcerting, revealing and purifying experience of Palautian prayer is the silence of God. Not infrequently in prayer one encounters a God who is silent. The invocation of Psalm 22 comes to mind, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It is the question of a poor Jew who feels abandoned by a God whose fundamental characteristic is faithfulness. The lament of the poor Jew became the prayer of Christ on the cross. We are at the heart of the Christian faith. The experience of God’s silence envelops life as a whole; however, it is in prayer that this experience becomes more acute, more perceptible, more unarmed. Palau, like the biblical prayer, knows not only a God who listens to us, but also a God who hides himself, who denies us. He even knows a God who seems to deny his own promises.

“My Beloved not only did not accept my blood, nor did she reveal or discover herself to me, but she withdrew from me and abandoned me to the power of all the demons of hell. And at 31 years of my age I began to die living and to live dying a life so horrifying to my sight, so bitter, that it horrifies my flesh to write it: God gave my soul into the power of the demons; and it seems they had the strength to do with me as they pleased. And this life lasted until the age of 50 years, that is, 17 years in a row, without a day of light or interruption. During this time, love not only was not extinguished, but, raising its flames ever higher, it reached such an excess that it was no longer possible for me to bear my situation any longer” (MRel 871; cf. 814-815; 968).

The biblical God, not built by man and greater than man, judges, disenchants, forces him to overcome his desires, and precisely for this reason liberates and saves him. God’s silence is the sign of his love and fidelity, the sign that he listens deeply to man. Prayer is always effective, but in its own way: “What father among you, if his son asks him for a loaf of bread, will give him a stone” (Lk 11:11). Even in prayer, God is the master of events, and his way of directing them is a mystery to man. Therefore, in prayer it is man who is led to conversion, and not God; a theological conversion, and not only a moral one. Prayer is not the attempt to force God to enter into our projects, but the offer of an availability to his free initiative.

• Silence of the prayer.

The exhortation to silence in the presence of God is frequent in Scripture: Silence in the presence of the Lord (Hab 2:20); It is good to wait in silence for his salvation (Lam 3:25); … my desire is still and silent, like a child in its mother’s arms… (Ps 131:1). And in the theophany of Horeb, Elijah recognizes the passage of God when he hears: “the voice of a faint silence” (1Kings 19:12).

The entry into silence is a teaching common to all mystics: “The simple, absolute and incorruptible mysteries of theology are revealed in the more than luminous darkness of silence,” said Pseudo Dionysius; and Taullerus: “Let us sleep in God gently and in that endearing repose, let us listen to what He speaks in us and let us pass into the darkness of wise silence… Choose, then, one of two things: be silent and God will speak, or speak so that He will be silent. You must be silent. Then the word will be spoken that you will be able to understand and God will be born in your soul. On the other hand, be certain that if you insist on speaking, you will never hear his voice. To achieve our silence, waiting to listen to the Word, is the best service we can render him”.

“Pure, chaste, virginal love works in solitude to the fullness of its powers, because there it can see with all possible clarity its own object, which is the holy Church, or God and its neighbor. In solitude, retreat, silence, it works with all its efficacy, because there no one distracts it” (MRel 917).

The mystic goes beyond reason and thought to penetrate into a silence where he no longer needs words or concepts, because God is immediately present. Perhaps this was the origin of Francisco Palau’s silence, after an intense experience of God. He expresses it with the symbolic language he is accustomed to:

“I went many years in search of my Beloved; I found her, for she came to meet me; I have her, and her presence is enough for me. She lives in your midst, and you see her and know her better than I do. Tell me for my consolation: who is she, what is she? Give me her portrait. And the mountains were profoundly silent” (MRel 757).

Francisco Palau is requested by his beloved, he goes up to the solitude of the mountain, relates to her, listens to her, and finds in this conversation the strength and the guidelines for the mission entrusted to him by the Church: “After the prayer I withdrew into the crevices and openings of the mountain, and there I continued my prayer… Oh, I am alone, precious solitude!… And God, seated on the clouds, with a voice of thunder calls me and says to me: “Son of the great Prophets, come out of your cave and come if you dare to deal with me“. I rose up full of terror, horror and fright. And as I came out, a friendly voice said to me silently: “March, do not be afraid“. And I, clothed with strength, stood before the majesty of God” (MRel 922-923).

• Silence of creation.

In his descriptions, especially in My Relationships, he expresses in a masterful way when nature is calm and the effects it produces in those of us who contemplate with attention the peace it transmits: “I got up, I left my cave… A sepulchral silence reigned everywhere: the sea was at rest and without opening its mouth even to murmur; the air, still and serene; the sky, clean and pure. The eagle and the sea raven and other fishing birds that had come to spend the night in these high crags, came out of their hiding places to look for their food; the sparrow hawk that had its little ones in the inaccessible crevices of these rocks came out to hunt; the blackbird, a solitary bird, announced its melodious song from the most sublime of these crests on a beautiful day. Nature, with a sweet and eloquent voice said: “Let us adore the Creator, God, author of our being“; and I, joining her, prostrated myself before the cross of the Savior, that the more rough and rustic, the more it announced its virtue and strength” (MRel 813).

The solitude of the cave or the mountain is that privileged space where the colloquy with the beloved takes place. F. Palau, urged by love, withdraws and the silence of nature alerts his spirit to listen and welcome the voice of God: “Just as one who, tired from walking, lies down and sleep returns his strength, so I, this time, my spirit oppressed as I climbed up the rocks of the mountain, climbing the steps of the mountain….. And nightfall came, and waking up as one who comes out of a deep lethargy, answering the inner voice that delighted me in my reverie and fatigue, I asked with the most lively interest: -Do you exist, my dove?… My soul no longer slept. And keeping silent and attentive, that celestial voice continued saying: -I am, I exist, I live, I understand, I see you, I look at you, I speak to you, and I am your Lover and your Beloved” (MRel 909-910).

In Palautian experience, nature is an ideal space for integrating solitude, inner peace and spiritual experience: “I was, at sunset over the waters of the Mediterranean, sitting on the top of the mountain. The climate and weather was magnificent; all creatures were in deep peace, stillness and silence. The sea looked like an immense hall of glass or blue-green crystal at the foot of this mountain. The air whispered so sweetly, that it scarcely let one feel its fresh aura; and so clean and pure, that, joining in the distance with the waters, it was the image of glory. As the king of the stars hid beneath the sea, he glorified with his rays the waters and the air, so that it seemed like the empyrean, and in its center the Sun of justice clarifying the saints. I was looking at the great panorama that nature presents from the most sublime of the mountains when the star that illuminates and vivifies it bids her farewell. “Farewell, are you going away and leaving us in darkness? Will you come back? When? Come back, our life; come back, bright star, come back and do not delay“. So said all the creatures, and I listened; I was silent. And when the sun disappeared, I knelt down, and there I waited…” (MRel 910;Cf.827;918;944).

SOLITUDE

Loneliness is something inherent in the person. Solitude and silence are necessary both psychologically and religiously to meet God and ourselves. It is a dimension that stands out in Francisco Palau’s life; it is an important vocational element, so much so that it became an imperative need for him; he needed solitary spaces and places where he could meet his Beloved.

1. “In solitude I lived”

Francisco Palau, because of his Carmelite vocation, feels the call to contemplation, it is a personal decision; in his book The Solitary Life, he writes: “I decided at that time (1841-1842) to fix my residence in the most deserted, wild and solitary places, to contemplate with less occasion for distractions the designs of Divine Providence on society and on the Church” (VS 246).

By spiritual instinct and Carmelite formation he is a contemplative: “As a Carmelite, as a son of St. Teresa, I can only kiss these keys that keep me locked within these walls of Mediterranean waters… Here I have more than I asked for in my golden dreams when I was young, I dreamed of a contemplative life. Here I have my cell, my heaven; here I can use all my strength to work as a good priest with God the Father in the affairs and interests of Jesus Christ and his Church” (Cta 44,6).

He feels an imperious desire for solitude, but solitude and silence demand places to find them, we can affirm that he looks for them; we see in his biography that he always has his solitary place wherever he is; it can be a cave or a mountain (Cf.T.ALVAREZ,1981,73-74).

He has places with his own names: Aitona in Lleida; Montsant in Tarragona; Galamus, Livron, Mondessir and Cantayrac in France; San Honorato de Randa in Mallorca; Montserrat and Vallcarca in Barcelona, the Vedra in Ibiza. Solitude appears as the clothing of his great experiences: “These days I have been as solitary as I could wish” (Cta 6,2; Cf.MRel 910-911).

F. Palau’s vocation to solitude did not happen suddenly; it was present at the dawn of his religious life and priesthood. It then unfolded throughout his interior life and his apostolic action, as a missionary, founder and passionate for the Church. With a clear awareness of his connection with the two great archetypes of prophet and solitary: Elijah, the biblical man of Horeb and Carmel, and Teresa of Jesus, the great passionate of solitude (Cf.T.ALVAREZ,1981,74.).

The primacy of God, lived from the Mystery of the Church, imposes a contemplative mood on his whole existence. From this, he felt an apostolic urgency and a hunger for solitude: “In solitude I will be your companion, and in the midst of the peoples I will not leave you; in life I will be with you, and behind the shadows of the present life you will see me and I will be with you face to face in glory” (MRel811; Cf. 794-795).

• Solitude, the place of encounter.

It is the solitude of the heart in love that desires nothing and no one but the Beloved. She is the center of his life, she is somehow, in a San Juanist way, the quiet music and the sonorous solitude. That is why the vital space of the mountain becomes his home: the Vedra becomes the symbol: “You are in your own house. This mountain is your mansion, mortal man… the house that your Father had prepared for you so that in it you would be united with your Daughter” (MRel 807). When he is in the solitude of the mountain he expresses his encounters with the Beloved as biblical theophanies: “I went out of my cave. And on the top of the mountain, on a throne of immense glory, I saw the daughter of the eternal Father ….. She was covered with glory and did not let herself be seen, as the noonday sun does not let itself be seen, and out of the glory one could see only a clarified lump. And she said to me: You have called me; I am here on the mountain, come up” (MRel 739;Cf.851-852;866).

His experience urgently calls for solitude to contemplate and assimilate, to clarify himself in matters that concern the Church and to project the future. In solitude he prays, receives the mission and commits himself to fulfill it: “I remained alone on the mountain and having received the mission, I prepared myself to fulfill it” (MRel 740). Also in the solitude of the mountain he renews his religious commitments of fidelity and surrender to the Beloved: “Now it is important for me to know if you love me. That I receive you, that I love you, this is nothing strange, because you are infinitely beautiful and kind… Give yourself to me and I will receive you, says the Church. I …. give myself as I am with all that I have to you now in the time of my life and eternally” (MRel 763).

In solitude he finds the possibility of being united to his Beloved and at the same time his inner pacification. Here we can perceive the Sanjuanist resonance of the stanza of the Spiritual Canticle “in solitude I lived” (Cf. CB 35). Let us take up his experience: “Darkness and sadness covered my spirit. And I reached the top of the mountain, and there I found the one I was looking for… Happy solitude… I have everything with your presence, I lack nothing if I have you” (MRel 826).

In the same context he expresses that solitude heals the wounds of love, but, at the same time, opens others that are incurable, and these will not be healed until the definitive encounter: “Precious solitude, you have healed the wounds of my heart, but you have opened others that are incurable” (MRel 906; Cf 827).

He concludes the account of Mis Relaciones with a description of some of the birds that nested in the Vedrá, or frequented its rugged rocks, and served as company in his endless hours of solitude. He makes an evocation of the sonorous solitude and that somehow makes us perceive Sanjuanist resonances of the Spiritual Canticle especially in the songs 14-15;35-37. Thus it is expressed: “The solitary blackbird on the rocks, with the arrival of the beautiful season of spring, has already found his consort. And now, satisfied with such a companion, he congratulates himself; and having found a house to house his offspring, the two prepare the nests to place them. This is one of the eyewitnesses of my loves in solitude, a faithful companion, who with his mournful but melodious song celebrates my liaison with the Daughter of God. From the lofty pinnacles of the mountain it has often called my attention, not to hinder my conversation with my Beloved, but to extol with its sweet melody the glories of a solitary bird” (MRel 978).

We can conclude by saying that solitude is the space to recognize the Creator, to savor the intimate manifestations, to regain strength, to recognize the intimate emptiness and to accept the presence of God who envelops us, enabling us to surrender (cf. MRel 827).

Authors: Mª Dolores Jara CM, Pilar Munill CM, 100 fichas sobre Francisco Palau, Ed. Monte Carmelo, Burgos 2010, pp.267-288.

Translation: Aleksandra Nawrocka CMT