{"id":237,"date":"2011-05-30T12:12:01","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T16:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/catholicbychoice\/?p=237"},"modified":"2011-05-30T12:12:01","modified_gmt":"2011-05-30T16:12:01","slug":"simplicity-and-communion-we-will-live-the-way-we-love-and-love-the-way-we-pray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/2011\/05\/simplicity-and-communion-we-will-live-the-way-we-love-and-love-the-way-we-pray.html","title":{"rendered":"Simplicity and Communion: We will live the way we love and love the way we pray"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/05\/Prayer-55-200-x-200.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-238\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/05\/Prayer-55-200-x-200.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As I grow older things are becoming simpler. Left behind with the years was some of my propensity to complicate things. Oh, don\u2019t get me wrong, I have a long way to go. Having been with those preparing for death in my work as a Deacon of the Catholic Church, I have discovered that, in a recollected person of faith, prayer before death is the most revealing. No longer burdened with the concerns of \u201cthis world\u201d, such prayer becomes inspiringly simple.<\/p>\n<p>Living simply can help us to see things differently. To those who voluntarily embrace it, simplicity becomes a means of grace, an invitation to love, and a school of sanctity. All relationships, with persons as well as with the goods of the earth, are changed by its embrace. In the light of simple faith, even painful experiences can become the material for our personal transformation and enable us to open ourselves more to the fullness of life and the transformation of love.<\/p>\n<p>Through simple surrender to the loving plan of God, we are invited into communion with God and equipped to respond to His loving gaze. In this communion with God, fear dissipates and everything is bathed in light. After all, when all is stripped away, there is only God. In His Sacred Humanity, prepared for death, the Lord Jesus prayed for each of us \u201c\u2026 May they be one, as you Father are in me and I am in you\u2026\u201d The words of this prayer reveal the simple heart of God.<\/p>\n<p>The way of simplicity and communion leads us into an ever deepening, intimate, loving relationship with God, and, in Him, into a new relationship with all men and women and creation itself. Contemplatives comprehend, or rather, are comprehended by, this experience of communion in simplicity. They literally fall in love with God, and in Him, they fall in love with all men and women and with the entire created order. After all, it is ordered toward the One who fashioned it in love and for love.<\/p>\n<p>All Christians are called to this contemplation, no matter what their state in life or vocation. Simplicity helps to satisfy the hunger of our souls. It strips away only what impedes love. Those who walk in simplicity and communion find the path to peace and become lanterns for others seeking the way. The oil which lightens their path is derived from prayer. Prayer is about falling in love with God. Isaac of Ninevah was an early eighth century monk, Bishop and theologian who wrote these words in one of his many treatises on Prayer:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen the Spirit dwells in a person, from the moment in which that person has become prayer, he never leaves him. For the Spirit himself never ceases to pray in him. Whether the person is asleep or awake, prayer never from then on departs from his soul. Whether he is eating or drinking or sleeping or whatever else he is doing, even in deepest sleep, the fragrance of prayer rises without effort in his heart. Prayer never again deserts him. At every moment of his life, even when it appears to stop, it is secretly at work in him continuously, one of the Fathers, the bearers of Christ, says that prayer is the silence of the pure. For their thoughts are divine motions. The movements of the heart and the intellect that have been purified are the voices full of sweetness with which such people never cease to sing in secret to the hidden God.\u201d<a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/05\/Monks-4.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-239\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/72\/2011\/05\/Monks-4.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"175\" height=\"262\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Through prayer daily life takes on new meaning. It becomes a classroom of simplicity and communion. In that classroom we learn the truth about who we are &#8211; and who we are becoming &#8211; in Jesus. Through prayer we receive new glasses through which we see the true landscape of life. Prayer opens us up to Revelation, expands our capacity to comprehend truth and equips us to change and be made new. Through prayer we are drawn by Love into a deepening relationship with Jesus whose loving embrace on the hill of Golgotha bridged heaven with earth and now opens the way to eternal communion.<\/p>\n<p>Through prayer, heavenly wisdom is planted in the field of our hearts and we experience a deepening communion with the Trinitarian God. We become, in the words of the Apostle Peter \u201cpartakers of the divine nature.\u201d (2 Peter 1:4)\u00a0 Prayer provides the environment for such recollection as it exposes the darkness and helps us surrender it to the light of Love, the Living God dwelling within us.<\/p>\n<p>This relationship of communion is initiated by Him. Our part is to respond. The God who is Love hungers for the communion of sons and daughters &#8211; and we hunger for communion with Him &#8211; because He made us this way. Nothing else will satisfy. The early Church Father Origen once wrote: \u201cEvery spiritual being is, by nature, a temple of God, created to receive into itself the glory of God.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Simplicity and Communion: We will live the way we love and we will love the way we pray.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I grow older things are becoming simpler. Left behind with the years was some of my propensity to complicate things. Oh, don\u2019t get me wrong, I have a long way to go. Having been with those preparing for death in my work as a Deacon of the Catholic Church, I have discovered that, in&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[116,41,52,115,59,98],"tags":[224,13,25,12,223,226],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-living","category-contemplation","category-conversion","category-eternal-life","category-prayer","category-saints-2","tag-contemplation","tag-deacon-keith-fournier","tag-holiness","tag-love","tag-meditation","tag-prayer"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Simplicity and Communion: We will live the way we love and love the way we pray - Catholic by Choice<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/2011\/05\/simplicity-and-communion-we-will-live-the-way-we-love-and-love-the-way-we-pray.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Simplicity and Communion: We will live the way we love and love the way we pray - Catholic by Choice\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As I grow older things are becoming simpler. Left behind with the years was some of my propensity to complicate things. Oh, don\u2019t get me wrong, I have a long way to go. 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He is a widely recognized voice in the Catholic and broader Christian community. He is a member of the Clergy of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia. In his fifteenth year of service as an ordained Catholic Deacon, he is currently assigned to St Stephen Martyr Parish in Chesapeake, Virginia. He is also authorized to serve the Liturgy of the Greek Byzantine Melkite Catholic Church. Deacon Fournier and his wife Laurine have been married for 34 years and have five grown children and six grandchildren. Deacon Fournier holds his Bachelors degree in theology and philosophy from the Franciscan University of Steubenville (BA), his Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Theology from the John Paul II Institute of the Lateran University (MTS), his Juris Doctor Law Degree Law (JD) from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and is a PhD candidate in Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America where he is currently writing his Doctoral Dissertation. Deacon Fournier also holds two honorary Doctorates, a Doctor of Laws (L.L.D. 1994,Honoris Causa) from St. Thomas University - Given for pro-life legal contributions, and a Doctor of Divinity Degree (D.D. 2005, Honoris Causa ) from the National Clergy Council and the Methodist Episcopal Church for his contributions to authentic ecumenical efforts toward Christian unity. Attorney Fournier is a constitutional lawyer who appeared as co-counsel in cases before the United States Supreme Court on Pro-Life, Religious Freedom and Pro-family issues. He served as the first Executive Director of the American Center for Law and Justice for seven years. He then served as a public policy activist for the causes of life, marriage and family issues for a number of years. He has extensive experience in nonprofit and for profit leadership. He has taught at the College level and served in Academic administration. He was a Dean of Students and the Dean of Evangelization at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Steubenville, Ohio. Deacon Fournier is, above all, a communicator. His faith informs his passion to share the fullness of life which he has found in the heart of the Catholic Church. He has written eight books on matters of faith, family and the Christian life and is widely published in the broader Christian community on matters of life, faith, family, and cultural and social issues. He hosted two daily national radio programs, Purpose for Living, and Millennial Moment. He hosted several television series on Christian family and contemporary faith issues on EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network). He is actively involved in preaching and teaching in the Catholic Church and the broader Christian community. In addition to serving as the Editor in Chief of Catholic Online, Deacon Fournier is the John Paul II Fellow and special counsel for the National Pro-Life Center in Washington, D.C. and is the president of Third Millennium, LLC, a communications and consulting company. He views his role on Beliefnet as an opportunity to share his Catholic Christian faith in what he calls a new areopagus. The areopagus is referred to in the 17th Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles in the Christian New Testament. Also called Mars Hill it was there where the Apostle Paul shared the Christian faith with the early Greeks in their temple.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/author\/deaconfournier"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":241,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/catholicbychoice\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}