The Word in the word

Being from its canonical nature half-wild, half-domestic, a lay Dominican comes up as a peculiar animal. According to its conditio or status, a lay Dominican has little in common with the other Dominican species, the Dominican nuns of the first Order, the brothers of the second, the sisters of the third. Although they own a specific place within the structure of the Church, lay Dominicans do not belong to the class of "consacrated people", as the Church calls them, and consequently the former are not tied to the same canonical obligations as the latter. However, this strange animal called a Lay Dominican prays, as well as the other members of the the same clerical species. It is a fact almost as obvious as its existence, and it is even a duty bound with his or her Dominican vows. The question is whether this prayer is different from the one practiced by the other species of the same family. Personally, I strongly doubt it. In this case, there might be better things to do than to indulge into discussing at length badly formulated issues. Seen from another point of view, however, the same fact turns out to be quite fascinating. If the members of the family are so different, how come they are united in sharing the same prayer? What miracle makes a lay-person adopt the prayer of consecrated people as his or her own ? In other words, when we inquire about the prayer of the lay Dominican, we are obliged, sooner or later, to retrieve from the variety of Dominican ways of being the quintessence of the Dominican prayer, as the specific spiritual attitude which pervades all our different modes of prayers, personal inclinations and spiritual tastes.

This presentation will therefore be divided into two distinct parts. First, we have to examine the original type of connection which exists between a lay-person and the Dominican prayer. If the difference between Lay Dominicans and other Dominican species lies in the way in which they relate to the Dominican prayer, not in the prayer itself, then what is the "way" of a Lay-person - what makes the path that leads a Lay-person towards the prayer of Dominic different from the other Dominican species? I will therefore attempt to sketch out a kind of fundamental "spiritual anatomy" of a lay Dominican. Then, once clarified the way, I will try to describe the object itself. What is the pattern that makes of a prayer a Dominican prayer, common to all the members of this spiritual family, notwithstanding their difference of status? In this perspective, I will freely draw on the material provided by the famous treatise on the Nine ways of prayer. The biblical sources which lie behind the text will help us to penetrate deeper into the living spirit which dwells in it. At the same time, references to great mystical personalities of the Dominican Order will enable us to check the existence and continuous influx of this unique spirit of prayer.

Let ut take a short glance at a Dominican lay-person. Roughly, he is made up of three parts, or rather of three layers that are piled up one upon the other: first, he/she is a human being; second, he/she is a Christian, preferably Catholic; third, he/she is a Dominican. If we want to examine the way in which a Lay Dominican is led to the discovery of the Dominican way of prayer, if we want to spell out the meaning of this prayer for a lay-person, we have to examine shortly the different layers which constitute this spiritual anatomy, from the bottom to the top.

Some people complain that they find it difficult to pray. They say that they do not know what prayer is. They need other people to tell them what is prayer - for instance what is a Dominican prayer- and to teach them how to pray. To some extent, this is understandable from a logical point of view. After all, we have learnt to speak by hearing people speak to us ; that´s the reason why we know for sure that they will understand us if we speak to them. What is the purpose of speaking to Someone who, as we know for sure, speaks, if He evers speaks, in a totally different language? However, this is precisely what we do when when we pray. We try to speak to a Being that we can neither see or touch or hear in the sense which is familiar and well-known to us. The only thing a human being knows about the higher entity he or she prays to, is that if such an entity exists, it doesn´t belong to our world, that is, to the world for the designation of which our language has been produced or invented. The only thing we know for sure about God is that our language completely fails to correspond to His, supposed there be such thing as a language of God. Why should then speak to Him, or rather how should one speak one´s language which is totally inappropriate in order to be understood? Some years ago, a spacecraft was sent in the outer space, beyond the solar system, with drawings engraved on its sides telling about us, human beings, and our world, in the most primitive symbolic way possible. This is about what we are trying to do when we pray, with the difference that if the scientists do have some hopes about settling a communication with beings slightly similar to us, we can as well drop such hopes as we try to speak to this invisible, untouchable, inaudible reality which we call God. On the other hand, what is most remarkable is that it is hard to imagine a human being without the capacity to pray. Children pray without reflecting much on the linguistico-logical traps entailed by the act of praying. Besides, religions, religious practices, have appeared as soon as human beings have appeared, and one cannot conceive of a religious practice which would not be connected with the act of praying. If religion comes from religare, establish a link, a tie, then that is exactly what prayer does. In fact, even if it is strange, even if it is highly unlikely that this invisible principle we are speaking to should understand our language, even if it is much more unlikely than to discover oneday intelligent beings living beyond the solar system, it is not logically impossible: there is a difference between veritas and verisimilitudo, truth and plausibility. The proof of the pudding is in the eating- conversely, the proof of the pudding´s inexistence is in the impossibility of eating it. After all, the most venerable and refined religious traditions in the world are based on centuries-, sometimes thousands-years old experience of eating from that pudding, in a way or another. Those traditions have constituted themselves, each in its own way, along the centuries by elaborating on such a living experience. Precisely, the most basic obstacle people experience when they want to pray may well come from their own prejudices, or rather from the prejudices generated by our modern societies which they have inherited: praying is something culturally primitive, witnessing a childlike or naive attitude towards the cosmos and the unknown principle that might rule it. Accordingly, if one more or less consciously rejects prayer as unworthy of an adult consciousness, it seems that one should not not complain too much that praying is a difficult thing. Moreover, this basic experience of being able to settle a communication as we try to speak to God in our own, childlike way, is in itself an answer to the modern prejudice against prayer. It is true that we initiate the communication through using our own words, because it is the way which is familiar to us. However, as soon as one experiences that the communication is somehow settled, that one´s words are somehow understood, taken into account, even answered, one understands that this type of communication has little to do with the rules of ordinary communication and the grammar of natural languages. Our attention shifts back from the words we utter, from the henceforth useless human language, to the place wherefrom words stem, to their origin. It is directed at our thoughts and emotions which are initially without words, since we are conscious of the work involved in putting the latter into human words. Yet at the same time, prayer is not simply an act of introspection, a process of self-awareness in a psychological manner. As in a normal communication, we indicate to someone our thoughts and feelings because we want Him to know them, and we want Him to know them because we are expecting something from the fact that He will know them. Prayer therefore reveals the desire which lies in our thoughts and feelings, a desire which is much deeper than the needs we express in dayly communication - a desire which only the Entity we are trying to talk to is able to satisfy, since we feel that it the only Being which is really able to understand it. This communication is therefore extremely paradoxical: we cannot try to establish a contact with this higher entity without being talked to, in the sense that we are led to discover something new as when the words of someone else help us to understand a new reality. As we are trying to present to Someone else the truth of our inner being, we "see" as it were this inner being in a new light. Something is happening: it is a real communication, although a very strange one indeed. As we need to leave aside the effort of finding human words in order to speak to this higher entity, we need likewise to leave aside the expectation of human words in order to hear what is being told to us. There is no other path to engage in this most ardent conversation than to immerse into the perplexing silence which dwells in us. In the Japanese school of Zen meditation, the disciples, in order to reach this state of inner silence, this non-linguistic zone of communication, are given a koan, that is a sentence apparently deprived of logical meaning:

Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born.

Now, this expected "answer" coming from the invisible side of reality is also something essentially different from the answers we expect from ordinary communication. It is not only about hearing a second opinion on the same subject; neither will it provide us with new intellectual or emotional insights which will take the place of the old ones. Even when we have something very concrete in mind, for instance a favor to ask, when we pray to this invisible entity called God, the experience of settling the communication is always something that change us, interfere with our deepest being, in a way which has nothing in common with the changes induced by the realities of the visible world. Prayer is not only a mental or psychological (scholastic theologians would say "intentional") act, but an ontological communication, something that transforms our being in a new and unknown fashion. Paradoxically enough, this transformation entailed by a Reality which is totally different from what we know and from what we are is not experienced as something which would in a manner or another alter our nature, but rather as the opposite: it is a transformation which corresponds to the very core of our nature. Through the contact with the invisible, we sense that we are becoming more like ourselves, as if the contact with visible realities had affected us in the opposite direction, as if we had effectively become less and less what we are at the core, as if we had failed to be what we were meant to be. The change induced by the invisible corrects the alteration coming from the visible. Prayer seems to reverse some hardly avoidable movement from being to less-being.

Each of the great world religions - let´s think of Hinduism or Buddhism- provides its original understanding of this fundamental human experience called prayer. For Buddhism, it is not even connected with the existence of a divine entity different from the world phenomena: we become ourselves or buddhalike when this invisible truth we are aiming to, shows to be nothing else than the non-existence of everything, including the self that is aiming at it. Now, if we look in turn towards Christianity, what can be said to be its original contribution to this polymorphous and fragmentary spiritual heritage of mankind?

According to the judeo-Christian tradition, this invible truth a human being addresses to when he or she prays has revealed its most intimate identity: it is not-being, as in buddhism. but being at its fullest:

^JV Exodus 3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.

^LXT Exodus 3:14 kai. ei=pen o` qeo.j pro.j Mwush/n evgw, eivmi o` w;n kai. ei=pen ou[twj evrei/j toi/j ui`oi/j Israhl o` w'n avpe,stalke,n me pro.j u`ma/j

hy<+h.a,( rv<åa] hy<ßh.a,( hv,êmo-la, ‘~yhil{a/ rm,aYOÝw:^WTT Exodus 3:14

`~k,(ylea] ynIx:ïl'v. hy<ßh.a,( laeêr'f.yI ynEåb.li ‘rm;ato hKoÜ rm,aYO©w:

Moreover, the one who is what he is is is also the One who has created heaven and earth, the One who has guided, will guide, and is guiding all the ones who have put their faith in Him.

^KJV Exodus 3:15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.

^LXT Exodus 3:15 kai. ei=pen o` qeo.j pa,lin pro.j Mwush/n ou[twj evrei/j toi/j ui`oi/j Israhl ku,rioj o` qeo.j tw/n pate,rwn u`mw/n qeo.j Abraam kai. qeo.j Isaak kai. qeo.j Iakwb avpe,stalke,n me pro.j u`ma/j tou/to, mou, evstin o;noma aivw,nion kai. mnhmo,sunon genew/n geneai/j

yheîl{a/ ~h'ør'b.a; yhe’l{a/ ~k,ªyteboa] yheäl{a/ hw"ùhy> èlaer'f.yI ynEåB.-la,

yrIßk.zI hz<ïw> ~l'ê[ol. ymiäV.-hz< ~k,_ylea] ynIx:ål'v. bqoß[]y: yheîl{awE qx'²c.yI

In this manner, Christianity gives an ultimate explanation to this utterly deep-seated attitude of a human being when he or she, through the act praying, seems to act as a child: all men and women do it instinctively, because they all feel, at an unconscious and visceral level of their being, that they are the children of some invisible Father, that is of a Reality that cares about them and understand them as a Father does with his children. Of course, this fatherhood of God is a notion which is very much present in the Old Testament and later on in Judaism - but it displays a new dimension through the revelation of Christ, the only consubstantial Son of God the Father. For a Christian, the invisible reality he or she prays is not a Father only because He is the one who has created the world and cares in a special way about the life of human beings, as having a share in His divine and immortal breath, not even only because He cares about the life of the people he has elected and continues to guide. God is not a Father only in a temporal way. In relationship to his beloved Son, who walked on earth as a man, He is Father in an eternal way. Christ, through his own prayer as witnessed in the Gospels, has given us a glimpse at the life of God, as the inner and unfathomable communication between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit.

41. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me.

⁴² And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me.

⁴³ And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice ,Lazarus, come forth.

Furthermore, Christ, through the baptism received in his Church, has made up participants of this divine communication. In the Holy Spirit, a special share in whom we have received through our baptism, we can really say the prayer through which his Father becomes "Our Father...". In my view, this revelation of God in Christ sheds a new and profound light on the common structure of human prayer, the one that we have grossly sketched out previously. Augustine, in his treatise on the Trinity, shows that in the way human mind operates, one can always distinguish the interplay of three faculties, for instance intelligence, memory, imagination, and draws on this description to make us understand how God can be said to be one and three at the same time. He speaks about the verbum interior, the logos endiathetos of the Greek Fathers, the inner word that our mind produces when we think, as about the origin of our verbum exterior, logos prosforikos, what we say. This verbum interior is, according to Augustine, the finite likeness of the Word of God, eternally generated from the Father and eternal co-principle with the Father of the Holy Spirit. It is a likeness of God which is ultimately our real self:

"(...) when the mind knows and approves itself, this same knowledge is in such way its word, as that it is altogether on a par and equal with it, and the same" (book 9, c.11).

I believe that our attempts to pray are tantamount to retreating from our verbum exterior in order to coincide with our verbum interior. The prayer of the baptised Christian is like a living communication between the inner word that he is, and the eternal Word that God is, a conversation through which the former is recreated at the ressemblance of the latter by the work of the Holy Spirit. What is at stake in the act of prayer is therefore nothing else than our personal path towards holiness. So far as the act of prayer requires our will, our cooperation to the action of God in us, prayer it is quite far from an easy exercise. It is rather an obstinate struggle against everything that prevents the energy of the Holy Spirit to hold sway over our daily life, that is, against the reality of sin, which results from the ancestral weakness of Adam and Eva´s children according to the flesh. The sacramental life that the Church offers to every baptized Christian the prayers that the faithful hear, the prayers that the faithful are taught to say help them to find, in the secret of their hears and lives, their personal way towards this divine communication. Yet for some lay people. this does not seem enough. They want to be guided on this path according to a specific school or tradition of spirituality. It is the case for Lay Dominicans. The question is why precisely this teaching? What kind of specific teaching on prayer is the Dominican order able to provide lay people with?

It is only natural that, in order to fully develop the potentialities of their baptism, some Christians would come to think of a life that would substract them to the occasions of sinning and set them free from the ordinary temptations of the world. Christian monks are such people. A monk is not a priest - or rather, since some monks are ordained priests, one should say: what makes a monk a monk has nothing to do with priesthood. In this sense, a monk is a lay-person: he aims at nothing but at becoming a fully-fledged baptised Christian. However, since the life of a monk came to differ radically from the life of other baptised Christians, the former having "left the world", as it has become familiar to say, while the latter still remained "in the world" as it were, people have soon started to define the lay-person as a Christian who is not a monk. It did not mean that monks were the only ones in stand of becoming genuine Christians. As the story about the cobbler in St.Athanasios´s life of S.Anthony reminds us, a lay-person could be found to supersede in sanctity the greatest and first monk of all times. However, if this lay-person was thought to be greater than Anthony in the eyes of God, it was precisely because it was considered so difficult, for a "lay-person" or a Christian remaining in the world, to fully accomplish his vocation of disciple of Christ. Monasticism was invented for the weak, since few are those who can remain strong and find God living in the world.

Remarkably enough though, "being in the world" not shown such an important issue over a long period of time-history. For one thing, life-conditions for the majority of lay people were usually very hard, and the criteria of Christian perfection were lowered in consequence. The main preocupation of lay people, during the Middle Ages, was not so much to become holy, as to avoid eternal damnation. The whole structure of the medieval world was conceived accordingly. Some had to work in order to feed the whole society; others had to fight in order to protect those who worked, and this means that those two categories, which circumscribed the sphere of medieval laity, had little time to dedicate to prayer. However, they could rely on a third category of people, clerics and monks, by way of mutual service. While the laboratores supplied the food and the goods that they could not produce themselves, while the bellatores provided the protection they were not allowed to secure for themselves, the oratores supplied the tribute of prayers that the others, by lack of time, could not afford to pay to God. Salvation was therefore not primarily conceived as an individual, but as a collective work. The gradual and unequal development of an urban way of life, starting from the middle of the XIth c., messed up this quite beautiful - or a least well-thought - order of Christian society. The medieval city is the world that lay people created for themselves. As a famous statement of the time goes, "the air that people breathe in a city sets them free". Within the walls of the city, lay people were, to a certain extent, able to ensure their own military protection, civil administration, and they could do so insofar as trade and craftmanship has become a source of independent wealth. Freedom meant the surge of a still unheard political, cultural and economical autonomy. It was undoubtedly a good thing - yet it was a the same time a frightening one, at least seen from a religious standpoint. Such freedom broke the network of mutual dependance and services that lay at the foundation of the medieval order. The individual had now to take his or her own responsability regarding his or her own way to salvation. In a world were the possibilities granted by the growth of wealth multiplied accordingly moral temptations, the resources of traditional parish life were often seen as insufficient, as providing inadequate answers to the challenges induced by the new order of things. Lay-christian brotherhoods appear, often associated with thriving professional entities, guilds or corporations. As such, they showed however often unable to quench the new spiritual thirst. In the exciting but also suffocating atmosphere of the medieval city, Christians were in need of a vivid connection with the spiritual breath which monastic tradition had managed to keep alive. The whole point and the whole problem altogether, was that such need emanated from people intending to stay "in the world". The formula of this new conjecture could be expressed in the following terms: the connection with that life-element which dwells outside the world, in monasteries, is a requirement of the life-element bound with this world, namely the urban life of lay people. However, it would have been impossible for the Church to establish such connection, had the monastic element itself not gone through a radical transformation without nevertheless losing its very substance. Thus came up a new race of monks- monks who, like the Franciscans and the Dominicans, intended to remain monks while at the same time living in the world, moved by a desire to prevent the growing estrangement between the Church and the new social mentalities. This movement from the monasteries to the city met the need of all those who longed after the monastic spiritual source, while at the same time intending to remain fully participants of civil society. As we see, the whole purpose of this encounter was to open a path towards God within the world, to render therein possible the accomplishment of a fully-fledged Christian calling, To put it in biblical terms: let the sea of the world open itself, divide in two parts, so that the children of God may freely walk towards the place of their Redemption! Now, when we look more closely to the spiritual element which, stemming from the monastic tradition, but also completely renewing it, opens this path, we will see that it looks quite different in the Franciscan and in the Dominican traditions. In french, we say that a pessimist is the one who sees as half-empty a glass the optimist sees as half-filled. To some extent, one could, I suppose, differenciate in this symetrical line the spiritual attitudes of the two Orders, relying on the ambiguity of the notion of kosmos in the New Testament.

John 1:10 ¹⁰He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.

Paying its due to the negative meaning attached to the word in the Prologue of John´s Gospel, one could say that a Franciscan is at first keen on identifying the cause that prevents Christians to fulfil their vocation, the root of evil which turns the world into a spiritually lethal trap. For a Franciscan, this danger had to do with wealth, as a new form of the old human greed. Converting, that is, following the evangelical counsel of poverty, Christians were led to discovering totally afresh this threatening and malicious world which surrounded them. Little by little, the world was meant to reveal the original and immaculate beauty which it had secretely kept since the first day of the Creation; to shows a paradise of innocence for the one who has reached, as the ultimate fruit of his or her conversion to Christ, the state of perfect joy.

Now, the Dominican attitude can be caracterized symmetrically, according to the positive meaning that one does also find in the Prologue and elsewhere in John´s Gospel:

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

For a Dominican, the world means primarily goodness and a beauty- a goodness and a beauty for the love of which the Word of the Father has received the life of a man and Israel´s meshiah gave it away as a God. As you know well, the goodness of the world was the very issue at stake in the struggle of words between Dominic and the Cathars, who conceived the world as the production of an evil demiurge. Dominic´s Order is born in this very struggle. Notwithstanding, people who have a strong intuition about the beauty of the world as it is, people who hold in high esteem other people´s endeavours, are led to face sooner or later the quintessential issue - the presence of an element which distorts this beauty and renders human beings unable to achieve what they are bound to achieve- evil, to condense the phenomenon in a word. Still, rather than wealth, Dominic was inclined to see in the new patterns of thinking the cause which drew the minds and hearts of his contemporaries always further from the truth of the Gospel, as conveyed by the Church. Thus, one could say that Franciscans and Dominicans were willing to challenge two different pernicious side-effects of the new urban freedom: while Franciscus saw the perversity of the new capitalistic trends, Dominicus saw the perversity of ideas, the ambiguity of the mental universe that went along with them. It is easy to understand why the two Orders kept on moving along their original tracks without fusing together into one single movement: showing that the true spirit of Christ is foreign to some specific set of ideas is a good thing, but it is quite another thing to discard these ideas on their own ground, sub specie veritatis, even if this be done in the name of Christ. Finding out such answers for the sake of contemporary men and women, collecting the right word to say and the words proper to express this right word is the Dominican charisma, and by no means a simple job. Since those answers are nowhere at hand, this search requires not only a thorough knowledge of Tradition, a specific training in sacred and profane sciences, but an immersion into the spirit of Christ, so as to be able to fetch the living pearl which lies in the depth of this tradition. This is what the prayer of Dominic is about. One understands right away what it could mean for those who, in a brave but also deceitful new world, were struggling to fulfil their Christian calling. When the wonderful air of freedom that one could breathe in the streets of the rapidly growing cities tended to become suffocating, lay people were offered to take example on S. Dominic, and dive along with him into the life-giving flood of Christ´s Spirit. They would come out of the stream having found the same pearl: the word of God, indicating the appropriate path to follow in order to reconciliate the living tradition of the Church to what was noble and good in the quest of modern men and women. This pearl being not only useful to themselves, but to many around them, they would be led to see, in the sharing of to his life-giving word with their neighbours, an almost boundless opportunity to learn the ways of Christ´s charity in the wake of Master Dominic.

Such, is in my view, the spiritual anatomy of this mysterious being called a lay Dominican: as a baptised Christian, he/she is offered a way to fulfil the deepest spiritual yearnings of his/her human dimension.; as a Dominican, he/she is offered an opportunity to realize the noblest aspirations kindled by his/her baptism: the service of the Truth is an original path towards the fulfilment of one´s Christian calling within the world. In this manner, there is a continuous line to be drawn from the bottom to the top of this iceberg called a lay Dominican.

Now, if the prayer of Dominic is, as I have said, the secret, that makes the whole structure hold together, as the soul is that which makes a living organism out of unpersonal matter, in what does exactly consist this prayer? What does it mean, when I say that all Dominicans are supposed to dive along with S. Dominic in the depth of Christ´s living spirit? How do you do that?

Besides partaking of the liturgical life common to all religious Orders, some Orders have developped a prayer of their own, as a sign of their distinct spiritual way: Carmelites have private orison; Jesuits have codified spiritual exercises. One could have mentioned the rosary for the Dominicans, had this prayer not assumed a role of a private and personal devotion intended for the use of all Christians indiscriminately. Objectively speaking, Dominicans cannot be identified with a specific type of prayer. It does not mean though that there is no specific Dominican mode of prayer- only that if it exists, it has to do with an inner understanding, attitude, direction, that fills with meaning the way of a disciple of Dominic who partakes of the various rhythms of the Church´s daily liturgical life. It is not easy however to characterize this inner attitude, in which consists the Dominican prayer - the Dominican way of approaching God. Our words, the words that are to be found on the lips of preachers, are supposed to originate in this moment which is still without words, beyond language and human communication. How are we to describe this essential silence with words? Well, maybe because it has some analogy with human language. As a matter of fact, when I try to designate this something in my experience of prayer which I believe to be shared by many, since I owe it to the teaching of s. Dominic - or better: since I know it is the reason why with many others I joined his Order- I cannot not think of a better word than "discussion". As you hear, it a word about words and exchange of words. It is indeed in this "discussional dimension" - please forgive this dreadful expression, that I perceive the originality of the Dominican approach of God among the wide spiritual variety that we know. I believe that a prayer is not genuinely Dominican if it is not "discussional" in the sense that I give to - please excuse me once again - this barbaric notion. If this suggestion were to prove true, it would shed some new light on the origins of the tight connection between the Dominican Order and scholastic method, which is, as you know well, "discussion made theology", a way of approaching the truth of God through handling arguments and counterarguments. As a matter of fact, I find a precious confirmation of this conjecture in the very first definition Thomas Aquinas gives of prayer, as early as in his Commentary on the Book of Sentences (1256) which has become the basis of all his later theological works. The Latin word for prayer is oratio, which includes also different other meanings, like "statement", "speech", "plea" in the juridical sense, etc. According to Thomas, prayer can be understood in relationship to these different meanings, provided we understand that reason, the perception of truth, and not will, the faculty to like or dislike, lies at its core:

"As Cassiodorus writes (on Psalm 85), oratio is ratio oris, "reason of the mouth". From its very name, prayer indicates that reason is at work through the action of the mouth. Reason has indeed two operations, even when used at an exclusively theoretical level. The first operation consists in dividing and combining, as described by the Philosopher in Perihermeneias [Aristotle- On Interpretation]. This reasonable operation, as expressed by the mouth, is an oratio [statement]. The second operations consists in joining discursively these different elements, through pointing to the set of causes involved therein. Since the orationes [speeches] of rhetors, called pleas (conciones), include argumentations ruled according to the desire to persuade, there are called orationes [discourses]. And since these discourses, when it comes to legal matters, are subordinated to a request addressed to the judge, they are called petitions in the language of the court. Hence the meaning of the word has shifted to indicate a petition directed at God, as at some kind of judge who cares about our actions. This matches the definition of prayer given by John Damascenus: "praying is asking from God what is proper""[1]

Prayer and academic theology appear therefore to be two species pertaining to the genre of argumentation - the distinctive feature of prayer being that it is a persuasive argumentation of the juridical kind directed at God instead of being directed at a human judge. Still- does it not sound all the more strange? How can the idea of argumentation or discussion be applied to something which is essentially beyond words, as prayer? In my view, it is important to keep in mind that a discussion is much more than a simple communication, as for instance a question and a reply. A discussion is at least a question, a reply, and another question- not two, but three, and three in some cases means much more than two. Not two, but three then. Let us start with the first out of the three.

What son of man would dare discuss with God? Discussion seems to imply some kind of equality between the two partners. Yet what kind of equality can there be between a finite and sinful creature on one hand, and the infinite holiness of God´s being on the other? At the same time if we examine what fuels our prayer with its content, if we look into our heart at the very moment when we start to pray, we will see nothing but disagreements, contentions, objections, bearing on the widest range of issues, from the more abstract to the utterly concrete, from the less to the more revolting. Globally, things do not go the way they should go according to our faith. Where are to see the fruits of the covenant in Christ- where are peace, justice, love, kindness in the world, in the Church, and especially in ourselves? The usual way of explaining this - "it´s all our fault, and God is here for nothing" - is, I believe, not totally mistaken; yet it is still highly unsatisfactory. Yes, maybe it´s all our fault, but why God the Allmighty doesn´t do more, if He is the only good one, knowing to what extent human beings are bad ? For most people, this question remains a very abstract one, a question for philosophers - and for most philosophers, the question itself remains pending, admitting of no real answer. I suppose a Dominican is someone who cannot be satisfied with this situation. For one, this question transcends my own selfish frustrations with God - I know that it is substantially the same question that pervades the hearts of all men and women throughout the world, down to the abyss of human despair. For two, this question impiges on the very honour of God, as it seems to annihilate the relevance of his Revelation in Christ. Therefore, when one understands that behind his selfish problems lie the problems encountered by all his human brothers and sisters, that the former is fundamentally tied to the latter and that in this connection lies the most crucial aspect of the relationship between God and men, the very content and meaning of one´s prayer is transformed from the start. One is no longer praying for himself a God that could evenually help him. One has become the advocate of all his his fellow humans in front of God, and also, by the same token, the champion of God´s cause in front of all his fellow humans. Praying means that one is willing to discuss with God about that, which does wrong to God´s reputation.

But still: there seems to be in all this something pitifully, ludicrously paradoxical. How could an evil son of man discuss about what is Good with the One, who is Himself entirely Good? In actual fact, it would be impossible, had not our immaculate Father himself strongly advised the evil man to do so:

^KJV Isaiah 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

^FIN Isaiah 1:18 Niin tulkaa, käykäämme oikeutta keskenämme, sanoo Herra. Vaikka teidän syntinne ovat veriruskeat, tulevat ne lumivalkeiksi; vaikka ne ovat purppuranpunaiset, tulevat ne villanvalkoisiksi.

^LXT Isaiah 1:18 kai. deu/te kai. dielegcqw/men le,gei ku,rioj kai. eva.n w=sin ai` a`marti,ai u`mw/n w`j foinikou/n w`j cio,na leukanw/ eva.n de. w=sin w`j ko,kkinon w`j e;rion leukanw/

~k,Ûyaej'x] Wy“h.yI)-~ai hw"+hy> rm:åayO hx'Þk.W")nIw> an"±-Wkl.^WTT Isaiah 1:18

For some reason, God himself wants the evil creature to come and argue with him. But what kind of discussion is this? How does one come and argue with God? The verse points at the key, saying "though your sins be as scarlet...". There can be no discussion if the starting-point is something else than the recognition, from the evil man´s part, of his own evilness.

Of course, it might seem strange that one should start with blaming oneself when one has come to put someone else into question. However, there is something wrong with arguing with God about evil in a brutal, straightforward and unreflexive way, as people who are focussed on their suffering - but also philosophers - do often: "What sort of God are you if You allow this?". This does not sound like real question- it is already a judgment, something which is not far from a insult, and therefore from a blasphemy. If we intend to bring about the problem or rather the mystery of God´s responsability in the persistence of evil in a true way, that is a "discussional-key", we should start by acknowledging our own share of responsability in this persistence. Dealing with something like a mote in the eye of God, we should start by removing the beam stuck into our own eye:

"S. Dominic (...) often used to pray by throwing himself down on the ground, flat on his face, and then his heart would be pricked with compunction, and he would blush at himself and say, sometimes loudly enough for it actually to be heard, the words from the gospel: "Lord be merciful to me a sinner"[2].

The same attitude is shared by Catharine of Sienna, when she brings to God with her four intentions of prayer- for herself, for the Church, for the whole world, for special situations:

"And, when the morning came, and the hour of the Mass, she sought with anxious desire her accustomed place; and, with a great knowledge of herself, being ashamed of her own imperfection, appearing to herself to be the cause of all the evil that was happening throughout the world, conceiving a hatred and displeasure against herself, and a feeling of holy justice, with which knowledge, hatred, and justice, she purified the stains which seemed to her to cover her guilty soul, she said: “O Eternal Father, I accuse myself before You, in order that You may punish me for my sins in this finite life, and, inasmuch as my sins are the cause of the sufferings which my neighbor must endure, I implore You, in Your kindness, to punish them in my person”[3]

There is something utterly important at stake in this prayer of penance, which can be practiced under various forms. Taken in its depth, it is about going through a living reminiscence, an anamnesis, of the salvation bound with the sacrifice of Christ. The begging for mercy of the sinner is the prayer through which a contact with the real God, the one who is willing to save us through the sacrifice of Christ, is established and reestablished. In the passage quoted above, the Nine Ways places here in the mouth of Dominic the prayer of the publican in Luke.

Luke 18:11-13 ¹ The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. ¹²I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. ¹³And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner.

The greatest sin is to reject the grace of God, and nothing more strongly inclines towards it than the pride of a moral consciousness satisfied with itself, setting an invidual apart from his fellow humans: "I thank thee, that I am not as other men are". Conversely, nothing stands closer to the grace of God than the anxiety of a painful moral consciousness when it is directed towards God: God be merciful to me a sinner.This prayer unveils the misery hidden in every man, the reality in which lies the ultimate reason of God´s incarnation.

Luke 18:14 ¹⁴I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

As I go down through this prayer into the very heart of my misery, into the wound left in me as in all men by the fall of Adam, I reach the place where the grace of God, the whole purpose of salvation, becomes the object of a living understanding. The misery of my own heart makes me discover and experience God´s heart of mercy, this bottomless misericordia, in which the project of men´s salvation in Christ has its eternal origin.

"Dominic used sometimes to say to the brethren the text from Judith, "The prayer of the humble and meek has always been pleasing to you". It was by humility that the Canaanite woman obtained what she wanted and so did the prodigal son"[4].

The gesture of Dominic bowing and lying face down to the ground is a reminiscence of the Canaanite, the one who is excluded from the holy people, as she falls down to the feet of Christ. It is also a reminiscence of the prodigal son, the one who, having wasted his part of inheritance, is thrown down to the ground, until he gets the thought of going back home, back to his Father´s house and ask for his mercy:

^NT Luke 15:18 avnasta.j poreu,somai pro.j to.n pate,ra mou kai. evrw/ auvtw/|( Pa,ter( h[marton eivj to.n ouvrano.n kai. evnw,pio,n sou(

^VUL Luke 15:18 surgam et ibo ad patrem meum et dicam illi pater peccavi in caelum et coram te

It is certainly no coincidence if this gesture has become the most typical and eloquent feature of the Dominican ritual when someone, nun, brother, lay-person, does profession in the Order. "What do you want?" is the question to the candidate who is lying flat on the ground. "God´s mercy" - and of course "the mercy of my brothers and sisters", which flows from God´s mercy- is the answer. It is important to understand that this physical expression of one´s indignity is also, indissociably, a gesture of adoration. It the episode of the Canaanite, the word used for this gesture, proskunew, has the two meanings:

Matthew 15:25 h` de. evlqou/sa proseku,nei auvtw/| le,gousa( Ku,rie( boh,qei moiÅ

"first of all, bowing humbly before the altar as if Christ, whom the altar signifies, were really and personally present and not just symbolically".

The son who has not remained faithful worships the son who has remained faithful. Through this prostration before Christ, Dominic pays tribute to the One who has lowered himself down to the condition of man.

"And so the holy father, standing with his body erect, would bow his head and his heart humbly before Christ his head, considering his own servile condition and the oustanding nobility of Christ, and giving himself up entirely to venerating Him. He taught the brethren to do this whenever they passed before a crucifix showing the humiliation of Christ, so that Christ, who was so greatly humbled for us, should see us humbled before his greatness"[5]

As far as I can see, this passage contains a deep and subtle teaching. The text emphasizes that the gesture of Dominic reproduces the movement of the Incarnation, giving the impression of a peculiar visual symmetry. Dominic appears as a kind of mirror-image of the crucified Christ. Or is it Christ to show Dominic´s mirror-image? Anyway, the very idea of such a reflection is intriguing: how can a sinful human being find in the crucified Son of God his mirror-image, or conversely? However, one finds in the Epistle of James the idea that the Word of God serves as a mirror to sinful human beings:

James 1:23-24 ²³For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: ²⁴For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was.

Christ is indeed the mirror-image of human-beings in virtue of the very contrast involved between the model and its reflection. The former indicates to the former what they should be and are not, as well as what they are and should not be. Ecce homo: the crucified Christ is, at the difference of ourselves, a human being according to the truth of its condition, full of God´s grace. Yet he is also, at the same time and indissociably, an humiliated God- he is the innocent who has carried the marks of our sins on his face and martyrized body. The contemplation of the crucified Christ is therefore a powerful exercise in humility, that is, in human self-awareness. Yet here lies the reason why Dominic appears also as the mirror-image of the crucified Christ: the voluntary humiliation of a sinner has some proportion with the voluntary humiliation of the one and only innocent "(...) so that Christ, who was so greatly humbled for us, should see us humbled before his greatness".

As the text of Luke goes, "Every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted".

Humility, the perception and acceptance of one´s nothingness is paradoxically the only thing that can set us on some equal footing with God, the source of all being and power. One finds the same wisdom in the episode with the Canaanite woman. It is humility which opens the possibility to discuss with the one that God has sent, in spite of the radical divide that separates her from him. Thus the Canaanite woman argues on behalf of her sick daughter:

Matthew 15:25-28 Lord, help me. ²⁶But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs. ²⁷And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table. ²⁸Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.

As the Canaanite woman did, if one wants to talk to God, to argue about something, one has to grow up to his Height by letting oneself go down to the bottom of one´s truth. As I have said before, it is the place where we are one with our fellow humans, the place of human condition - it is called in the eastern Tradition the place of the heart. One does not need to be objectively a great sinner in order to discover it, but one cannot either become a disciple of Christ in the way of Dominic if one has not discovered it. To young brothers who had had the chance to avoid committing serious sins, Dominic would not give the advice of Luther, "Pecce fortiter!" in order to experience later on what grace is. It is enough to contemplate the connection between the pride which dwells in our hearts and the amount of suffering which weighs down on mankind, to acknowledge the sins of sinners as our own. Dominic would therefore give young brothers a different kind of advice, that is, to weep over the condition of sinners. It is according to Christ´s economy, that those who have not sinned should weep over those who have sinned, and yet weep not.

So much for the first step of our discussion or conversatio with God. The prayer of the humble achieves this common ground, this proportion of equality, without which no human being would be able to open his or her lips in presence of the King of the universe. At the same time, this prayer puts us in condition to hear what God has to say, to see what there is to see of the mystery of God´s will. The disciple of Christ dares to open his mouth in presence of the King - he or she will soon hear the answer coming from high. This the second step: our discussion with God has already begun.

"From after Compline till midnight", tells the Nine Ways, Dominic was "getting up and kneeling down again, (...) like the leper in the gospel who knelt down and said "Lord if you will, you can make me clean", and like Stephen who knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them"[6]. The same movement, kneeling down and getting up, alternatively expresses a personal request of God´s mercy, like the prayer of the leper, and a begging of God´s mercy to expand over all sinners and enemies of God, like the prayer of Stephen. We have just explained why: noone but the humble man, the one who knows that nothing - no merits of his whatsoever - entitles him to ask a favour from God, has some chance to be heard as he effectively asks a favour from God. The lines that immediately follow make us understand that it precisely went so: Dominic the humble was given to understand that he had been heard - somehow God had spoken in a way that met the desire and soothed the anxiety of Dominic:

"And a great confidence would grow in our holy father Dominic, confidence in God´s mercy for himself and for all sinners, and for the protection of the novices whom he used to send out all over the place to preach to the souls".

In a sense, Lutherans know exactly what grace is when they speak of justification as being the purely gratuitous act of divine kindness that lifts up the sentence of punishment which should follow from our misbehaviour and shortcomings. Limtso hen beinav in hebrew, "to find grace in his eyes", effectively implies the granting of a divine favour which has no other reason than the personal love of God for a given creature. However, in the Bible, this grace is always depicted as a corrolary to a certain action, like a decision or a prayer, which implies a movement of conversion from the part of the sinful creature. Of course, it does not mean that grace is the consequence of a human conversion, since a conversion is itself the consequence of an original grace. As far as I am allowed here to express a critical view the problem of Lutheranism is that the reality of God´s grace, this ontological event is only assumed from the point of view of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis : through our faith in Christ, the best we can do during this life-time is to realize mentally as well as possible the practical consequences of this eternal act of forgiveness. In the catholic, and especially in the Dominican mystical tradition, this eternal event is also, indissociably, something which happens in time, as God´s answer to the movement of the creature towards Him at a given moment. There are many such "moments of grace", since the eternal decision of God is vowed to be fragmented according to the divisibility of human time and space - but each one of those moments is a single, unique event, happening under precise circumstances and affecting the believers in such a way that their existence is transformed. Dominic´s prayer of penance embodies this mouvement of conversion to which God responds by bestowing the gift of his grace :

"Sometimes it seemed form the very way he looked that he had penetrated heaven in his mind, and then he would suddenly appear radiant with joy, wiping away the abundant tears running down his face. At such times he would come to an intensity of desire, like a thirsty man coming to a spring of water, or a traveller at last approaching his homeland"[7]

Since it is distinguishes the Dominican spirituality from any other, it is worth emphasizing that Dominic is not looking here after this extatic grace as after a goal. In our perspective, grace is rather a means than a goal. As we have said earlier, a sinner cannot discuss with God, because there is no proportion between him and God. Now, grace, as God´s answer to the disciple´s humility, is precisely what displays this proportion - with no other reason than his gratuitous love, God makes a friend out of a sinner - and a friend, Dominic knows that, is made to share the worries of his friends. Dominic, stretching his arms up to the sky, accompanies with his whole body and soul the impulse of the grace that moves him upwards to his Creator. He is transformed into an arrow. Yet arrows, during medieval ages, were often the carriers of important messages - which was precisely the case of Dominic:

"He was often found stretching his whole body up towards heaven in prayer, like a choice arrow shot straight up from a bow. He had his hands stretched right above his head, joined together or slightly open as if to catch something from heaven. And it is believed that at such times he received an increase of grace and was caught up in rapture, and that his prayer won from God for the Order he had founded the gifts of the holy Spirit (...)"[8].

Dominic comes to God with a message or as a sign which require an answer. And the same grace which lifts upward Dominic delivers the answer. In some way, the understanding God provides to Dominic transforms so radically the very operation of prayer, that one doubts whether the word prayer is still appropriate. Does a man need any longer to walk once he reaches his goal? The disciple of Christ is still praying of course-otherwise the experience of God´s grace would cease. However, the event which is taking place during his prayer is no more his prayer- it is a mysterious manifestation of God himself through his Spirit, an event at which his prayer is aimed. Therefore one cannot any longer speak about this prayer as featuring some linear movement from one point to another. The goal is already reached. Our mind welcomes, as it were, the movement of God towards itself, meaning that it contemplates the disclosure of God´s eternal and somehow motionless reality. The grace of God is at work in us, and this work consists in the renewal of our most intimate self. The priority given to the grace of God, as to the foreign element which achieves in ourselves this "being-in-God", this living picture of Christ that our good will, left to itself, is unable to achieve, is a most genuine feature of Dominican spirituality. Here the mystical teaching of Catherine of Sienna walks hand in hand with the insights of such Dominicans as Eckart, Tauler, Suso. Of course, the emphasis on the work of the grace of God is a common teaching to the whole Christian mystical tradition. However, the understanding of prayer, of our way to relate to God, as part of the work of God´s grace in us, of the way God relates to us, is typical of the Dominican school. If prayer is an art, it is not based on the possession nor on the development of outstanding mystical talents, but rather on the exploitation of some privation, of some positive absence of quality which is a feature of human beings in their generality.

" If the heart is to be ready for the highest, it must he vacant of all other things. If I wish to write on a white tablet, whatever else is written on the tablet, however noble its purport, is a hindrance to me. If I am to write, I must wipe the tablet clean of everything, and the tablet is most suitable for my purpose when it is blank. Similarly, if God is to write on my heart, everything else must come out of it till it is really sanctified. Only so can God work His highest will, and so the sanctified heart has no outward object at all".[9]

In every one of us there is some sort of ontological lack, of fundamental "breach". The "breach" of sin, once purified through the prayer of repentance, leads us back to ta more elementary breach from where it proceeds, not automatically, but with the help of our unfortunate consent: the breach of our finiteness as creatures. In regard to the being of God, the being which creatures are endowed with is not only of a lesser kind- the difference with the Creator is so radically essential that the being of the creature is not far from a nothing. To say it more adequately, the being of creatures, in virtue of their finite dimension, keeps a fundamental tie to nothingness whence it once surged. It is precisely our ontological nothingness which enables us to settle a relationship with a being so full of being that, having nothing in common with the finite dimensions we are familiar with, is experienced as a no-thing, an a-byss. Ab-grund is the ground without dimensions that reveals itself insofar as the creature´s let loose the finite ground of its familiar universe. This is the fundamental theme of the Rheinischemystiker. Let me quote here a beautiful passage of Tauler´s second homely on the feast of John the Baptist:

"The powers of the soul cannot attain to this divine ground; and the great wastes to be found in this divine ground have neither image, nor form, nor condition; for they are neither here nor there. They are like unto a fathomless abyss, bottomless and floating in itself. Even as water ebbs and flows, up and down, now sinking into a hollow, so that it looks as if there was no water there, and then again, in a little while, rushing forth as though it would engulf everything, so does it come to pass in this Abyss. This, truly, is much more God’s Dwelling-place than heaven or man. A man, who verily desires to enter in, will surely find God here, and himself simply in God, for God never separates Himself from this ground. God will be present with him, and he will find and enjoy eternity here. There is no past or present here; and no created light can reach unto or shine into this divine ground; for here only is the Dwelling-place of God and His sanctuary. Now this Divine Abyss can be fathomed by no creatures; it can be filled by none, and it satisfies none; God only can fill it in His Infinity. For this abyss belongs only to the Divine Abyss, of which it is written: Abyssus abyssum invocat."[10]

The fullness of God´s infinite abyss gets as it were magnetically attracted by the privation and the void associated with our finite condition. Instead of saying that we pray, it would be truer to say that it is prayed in us. Of course, it seems awkward to claim that God prays - can someone pray to himself ? Nevertheless, S. Paul alludes to something like the prayer of the Holy Spirit when he writes that, since (...)

^JV Romans 8:26 we know not what we should pray (...) the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

^GNT Romans 8:26 ~Wsau,twj de. kai. to. pneu/ma sunantilamba,netai th/| avsqenei,a| h`mw/n\ to. ga.r ti, proseuxw,meqa kaqo. dei/ ouvk oi;damen( avlla. auvto. to. pneu/ma u`perentugca,nei stenagmoi/j avlalh,toij\

^VUL Romans 8:26 similiter autem et Spiritus adiuvat infirmitatem nostram nam quid oremus sicut oportet nescimus sed ipse Spiritus postulat pro nobis gemitibus inenarrabilibus

In the indivisibility of God´s triarchichal being, the unutterable groanings of the Spirit echo the prayer of the Son agreed by the Father from all eternity. Our finite prayer is thus drawn into this eternal prayer which takes place in God himself, the object of which is the world. Accordingly, if we empty our mind in the process of prayer, it is in order to be able to receive a light which stems from another origin than our own mind - a ray that comes from God´s eternal wisdom. The instant of grace, as depicted by the Nine Ways and expressed by the great Dominican mystics, entails a glimpse of the mind into this eternal prayer or into this benevolent Word of God over the world. Eckhart calls it "the birth of the Word in us". Therefore, following Dominic in his "discussion" with God, we are led with him to a some kind of direct perception of his wisdom, to a contemplation of his eternal project of Salvation. By way of parenthesis, this makes us understand the preeminence of intelligence over will in the Dominican spiritual tradition. Dominic does not understand better God because he loves him more ; he loves Him more because he understands Him better. In this manner, everything happens as if Dominic could see in God the answer to the question he came with, the question bearing on the existence of Evil, and as if this answer would fill him with joy. The original objection, the potential point of disagreement which generated the prayer of Dominic, is gladfully dismissed, as Dominic discovers the utmost coincidence of the object of this prayer with the eternal desire of God. I see here a connection with the argument that Thomas Aquinas dedicates to the purpose of prayer, in his Summa Theologiae (IIa IIae, q.83, a.2). Two mutually opposite causes of errors concerning prayer are mentioned. For certains, one should not pray because it is impossible to change the decrees of God´s providence; for others, prayer can actually change those decrees. However, the fact that prayer cannot change the decrees of God´s providence does not make the act of praying less relevant, prayer being precisely an instrument through will the merciful decrees of God´s providence, determined from all eternity, are actually revealed at the moment associated with this prayer:

"In order to throw light on this question we must consider that Divine providence disposes not only what effects shall take place, but also from what causes and in what order these effects shall proceed. Now among other causes human acts are the causes of certain effects. Wherefore it must be that men do certain actions. not that thereby they may change the Divine disposition, but that by those actions they may achieve certain effects according to the order of the Divine disposition: and the same is to be said of natural causes. And so is it with regard to prayer. For we pray not that we may change the Divine disposition, but that we may impetrate that which God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers in other words "that by asking, men may deserve to receive what Almighty God from eternity has disposed to give," as Gregory says (Dialogorum i,8)"

In his prayer, Dominic contemplates the issue of Evil in the world, of apparently pointless suffering, of in injustice and sin, as handled from all eternity by God in the most gracious and merciful way thinkable. This reminds me of the powerful voice of God which resonates at the end of the book of Job, the book of the Bible which is precisely devoted to Evil as a metaphysical issue:

Job 40:1-9 ^JVJob 40:1 the LORD answered Job, and said, ²Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? he that reproveth God, let him answer it. ³Then Job answered the LORD, and said, ⁴Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. ⁵Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will proceed no further. ⁶Then answered the LORD unto Job out of the whirlwind, and said, ⁷Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. ⁸Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous? ⁹Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?

The voice of God, when it finally resonates at the end of the book of Job, sounds like a stern rebuke - but at the same time one should not forget that, in this manner, God wipes away the very issue that ceasessly tortured Job: what is God doing? Is it possible that God does not care about evil ? It is indeed a joyful event, when God himself, displaying his boundless power, blames us for having shown so little trust in him.

Now, is it possible to pursue the discussion after such a manifestation? God has answered. Was it precisely not what we wanted? Should not one keep his mouth close, as Job declares here:

, ⁴Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. ⁵Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will proceed no further.

However, as we have said at the beginning, there is no discussion if there is not at least three moments, a succession of three replies. "Twice", and it must be proceeded further, despite what Job says. But how is it possible? In what peculiar manner can there be a continuation to this discussion?

"Sitting there quietly he would open some book before him, arming himself first with the sign of the cross, and then he would read. And he would be moved in his mind as delightfully as as if he heard the Lord speaking to him. As the Psalm says "I will hear what the Lord God is saying in me". It was as if he were arguing with a friend; at one moment he would appear to be feeling impatient, nodding his head energetically, then he would seem to be listening quietly, then you would see him disputing and struggling, and laughing and weeping all at once, fixing his gaze, submitting, then again speaking quietly and beating his breast"[11]

The least one can say is that the graceful answer of God does not reduce Dominic to a state of passive silence. At the very instant of grace, when the mind of Dominic is "delightfully moved as if he heard the Lord speaking to him", our father does not remain speachless in front of God.. Yet it is a very peculiar discussion, since it seems to be deprived, at this stage, of any controversial matter. "It was as if he were arguing with a friend". The bitter sting which is present in the mildest and more civilized arguments men have together seems here utterly absent. Yet Dominic and God are really discussing. Although the argument is said to take place between friends, the matter discussed seems to be extremely controversial: Dominic shows at times impatient, as if wouldn´t be satisfied by the answers of God; he is "disputing and struggling" as if God would not take heed of what he is saying; then Dominic seems to understand God´s point, to realize something important, as if God had finally managed to convince him. On one hand, it is clear that only very good friends can discuss with such intensity, almost violence, without running the risk of one or both of the partners reacting angrily at the display of such a lack of respect. On the other hand, how can one of conceive of a real controversy where there is no place for distrust or reproach? How can people dispute, if they find themselves in fundamental agreement with each other? In my view, the fact that this strange discussion is reported as having its starting-point in the reading of the Scriptures is an interesting indication. For anyone slightly familiar with Jewish culture, this kind of friendly and notwithstanding heated discussion does not present anything so extraordinary. When it comes to commenting Scriptures and God´s law, students of the Talmud are precisely expected to wrestle in this manner against each other. Sometimes, it is said that God himself, through a bat-kol, a voice from above, takes part in the discussions of rabbis - besides not always successfully. When discussing about the interpretation of Scriptures, the partners are in fundamental agreement, because they all acknowledge the supreme authority of the latter. As a matter of fact, they argue about the best way to put the Word of God in accordance with itself. This is called in the Jewish tradition "raising a fence around the Torah", that is, defending the Word of God against seeming lacks of coherence. One finds the same principle at work, although with a different, more philosophical approach in the medieval disputatio as an academic genre. But if one takes a look at the content of Scriptures themselves, one will discover a similar kind of disputatio or struggle. The discussion that takes place between Abraham and God on the issue of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrhe is probably the best example of its kind:

²³ And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? ²⁴ Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? ²⁵ That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? ²⁶ And the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes. ²⁷ And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes: ²⁸ Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it.

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Instead of leaving, as a complacent servant after having heard the decision of his Master, he remains a while, WNd,îA[, standing. This can be interpreted as a gesture of opposition, and it is in some way. Abraham is apparently objecting to the decision of his Master. However, the same expression is also used to designate a gesture of intercession. The priest stands before God as he prays on behalf of his people. Precisely, Abraham is here interceding by resorting to a discussion with God. Now, there is no other way to discuss with God than, to play as it were God against himself. If God is, as He claims to be, the judge, the shophet, that is, the ruler of justice of the universe, how could He do some thing else than justice, mishpat? Destroying those who are just on behalf of those who are sinners, is this not injustice? Dominic stands in a similar manner in front of God. While his brothers are asleep or doing something else, he stands alone a little bit longer in front of God, with his arms extended, as Moses did for his people at the battle against Amalek (Ex.17), as priests did and still do when they celebrate the holy sacrifice at the temple of the living God, and ultimately like Christ on the cross. According to the Scriptures, God has justified the sinners in Christ. How could God renounce to his project of salvation by rejecting sinners, or, which amounts to the same, by refusing to grant them his all-powerful grace of conversion? For the sake of his own Glory, of his own honour, the God in whom Dominic believes, the One who has made himself definitively known in Christ, should renounce to any design of punishment.

As in the case of Abraham, the objection is not totally consistent though. The sacrifice of Christ, it is true, has the power to justify all men. However, it is not said that this sacrifice will actually justify all men. God remains legally justified in his desire to punish sinners who, consciously or unconsciously, reject their own merciful justification. According to his totally inaccessible wisdom, God knows from all eternity who will be saved and who will be rejected, since the final triumph of God´s justice on earth does include both the preeternal decision of granting grace to specific human individuals and the foreknowledge of their free decision to accept or to reject it. Dominic does not have the last word, because the word of God, as it gradually unveils itself during the discussion, removes the illusions of a short-sighted mind made to grasp things within the limits of time and space. The self-contradictory or antinomic state of Dominic´s soul, described as laughing and weeping at the same time, is reminiscent of the conditions of the blessed in God´s eternity, full of joy at the manifestation of God and at the same time filled with despair at the sight of the damned.

Yet on the other hand, as in the case of Abraham, God has not yet actually punished those who have rejected him. The measure of God´s eternal punishment is not settled as long as human and finite time is still running. Time means that something else than punishment, that is the fulfillement of grace, is still possible. This is the meaning of the intercession of saints like Abraham and Dominic: they make the best out of the chance which is still left, trying to convince God to send his grace before it is too late.

Therefore one wonder who, in this unequal fight, is the winner and who is defeated. Is there any? Should there be any? If you remember the mysterious fight of Jacob against the one who is traditionnally called an angel, although he is qualified as a "man" in the story, none of the opponents seems to prevail:

"Genesis 32:22-25 And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok. ²³ And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over that he had. ²⁴ And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. ²⁵ And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

This episode, which takes place at the night, during the time that Dominic used especially to dedicate to prayer, is probably the best illustration of this prayer´s meaning, of its very essence. At the end of the episode, it becomes clear that the mysterious opponent of Jacob is noother than God, as if God could take the form a man among human beings:

Genesis 32:29-30 ⁹ And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. ³⁰ And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.

Here, I want to call your attention to a particular of the text which I find illuminating. The hebrew verb which is translated as fighting, wrestling, avaq, which gives iabok, the name of the river, is not used anywhere else in the Bible, so that it designates a very remarkable fight of its kind- but the most remarkable feature of this fight is that it is not a fight against - it is a fight with:

If prayer is a fight, it is not against God, but with him. God wants us to fight with him on behalf of our own good, of our deepest good. God is keen on wrestling with us at the condition that we will win over Him in the end. Conversely, it is true to say that we are keen to wrestle with Him because we ardently hope to lose against Him. As the friendly fight goes on, something comes to existence, something of equal importance for both opponents. From all eternity, God has needed the prayer of Dominic in order for his surabondant mercy to be poured out over the world. Conversely, immersed in the anxiety of his time, Dominic hopes nothing more from God than the rejection of his doubts in order for his soul to find peace and comfort. This struggle is in its essence a synergy or cooperatio between man and God: God uses the prayer of men to share and multiply his divine mercy, and men who let themselves be used in such a way are driven, through the contemplation of Christ´s mercy, the ressemblance with God. There is no winner in the work, the synergeia of prayer- or rather, both partners are the winners:

Genesis 32:27-28 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. ²⁸ And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel (God prevails) for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.

^JV Genesis 32:25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

After this prayer, one is not the same - the hand of God has left its mark on all our movements, and this blessing has the form of a wound. Wherever we go, we will bear in our limping legs our struggle with the angel. It is from this wound of love that Dominic, I image, drew his amazing capacity to retrieve the word from the Word, the word of the Preacher out of the Word of Scripture - that which God wanted to say because people needed to hear it. As the brothers remembered, Dominic used to find out the substance of his preaching while walking along with them:

"When he was travelling, he would steal sudden moments of prayer, unobtrusively, and would stand with his whole mind instaneously concentrated on heaven, and soon you would have heard him pronouncing, with the utmost enjoyment and relish, some lovely text form the very heart of sacred scripture, which he would seem to have drawn fresh from the Saviour´s well"[12].

This necessary word of God, the one which does not come back to God without having produced its effect, is the fruit of the Dominican prayer. Without this adventurous, exhausting, bruising exercice of friendship with God, the words of a Preacher would remain unecessary, being nothing more than an empty sound, flatus vocis. As Catarina writes, prayer is ultimately what makes us understand the living word that God wants to tell us in the words that one finds in his Scripture :

If need still be to recapitulate the core of what Dominic taught us through the mere example of his life, I would say: there is no messenger of the word of God to men that has not started by being the messenger of the words of men in front of God; but there is no messenger of the words of men in front of God who has not finally been granted a new and life-giving understanding of the word of God.

Matthew 13:44-52 ⁴⁴ Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. ⁴⁵ Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: ⁴⁶ Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it. (...) Jesus saith unto them, Have ye understood all these things? They say unto him, Yea, Lord. ⁵² Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe which is instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old.

To draw the new from the old, to communicate personally to the living word of God which is still present in the Church and make this presence known to others, this is the office of the good scribe, the office of the sons and daughters of S. Dominic.

For those who are in search of the fullness of their Christian vocation, the Church of Christ, the Church of the saints offers different paths, the path of Dominic being only one among many others. But this path knows no barriers of status: in its core, it is one and the same for lay people, nuns, sisters and brothers bound by religious vows. The obstacles on the way are different, but they are not easier for the ones than for the others. Yet it is beyond doubt a beautiful way. Let those who experience how beauty is a difficult thing rely on the promise Dominic made to his disciples as he was on the point to go back to the house of the Father. We can be sure that, being where he now is, Dominic will more than ever provide his help and comfort to all, nuns, brothers, lay people, who have chosen to travel along with him, and sometimes wrestle with their Father.

[1] Lib.4, dist.15, q.4, art.1a (private translation).

[2] The second way, Early Dominicans, London 1982, p.95.

[3] Dialogues, book I, c.2.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

[6] p.96.

[7] p.97.

[8] p.99.

[9] Eckhart´s sermons, transl. Claud Fields, 1909, "On sanctification"

[10] Serm.11, in The Inner Way, transl. A. Wollaston, 1909.

[11] p.101.

[12] ibid, p.98.

[13] Dialogues, treatise on prayer, c.7.