Aptly
he entitled the little book he wrote on the subject
Prayer, An Adventure in Living (London 1966), because
in his own case prayer was an ‘adventure’, a total
surrender to the unknown, and it was ‘in living’
because, far from being one thing among many others
that one does, it pervaded the whole canvas of his
life.
His Oxford career was
one of sustained excellence: he achieved a triple
First in Classical Moderations, Greats, and Theology;
won every university prize in his fields, and was
head-hunted to become Tutor in Theology at Keble
College. But his reflections on Church History led
him to see the validity of the Papal claims as the
pivot of Church Unity, in spite of his aversion to
many features of contemporary Catholicism. He was
finally prompted to convert by Baron Friedrich von
Hügel’s presentation of the Church as needing three
elements for its completeness: the intellectual,
the mystical and the institutional. An introduction
to Abbot Ramsay led Butler to Downside where he soon
became a monk and went on to become Head Master,
and then to be elected Abbot for three successive
terms. In his capacity as Abbot President of the
English Benedictine Congregation he was summoned
to the Second Vatican Council where his qualities
were soon recognised and he was elected to the reconstructed
Central Theological Commission. He had a decisive
impact on the formulation of the Constitutions on
the Church and on divine Revelation.
Returning to England he
made it his mission to win hearts and minds to the
acceptance of the Council’s teaching, and his gifts
for communication to the general public through the
media soon made him a national figure. Cardinal Heenan
felt that the Church at large would benefit from
his services and secured his appointment as Auxiliary
Bishop of Westminster, and later on as Vice-Chairman
of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission
(ARCIC), a dialogue on which his heart was set.
Throughout Butler’s many
fields of operation, all close observers commented
that he was an unmistakeably prayerful man, pacing
the gardens of Sant’ Anselmo in Rome, or of St Edmund’s
College, Ware, as he communed with God. In almost
every respect his understanding of prayer was the
mirror image of Abbot Chapman’s, but Butler spoke
to the men and women of his own time, able to meet
their difficulties in their own language and able
to draw on his powers as a Christian apologist to
proffer a rational justification of prayer. But while
Chapman’s insights were sparked off by his dealings
with particular individuals, Butler arranged the
same lines of thought in an ordered synthesis – the
place of prayer in the human scheme of things as
a person’s process of adaptation to his ultimate
environment. Like Chapman too, he zoomed in on the
frustrations of those who felt the welter of distractions
that invaded their prayer had rendered it valueless,
an experience that often coincided with the point
when schematic meditations (what Butler called ‘prayerful
pondering’) had served their usefulness. The consequent
crisis he too saw as really a call to make the transition
to ‘forced acts’, Augustine Baker’s unexciting name
for repeated and short expressions of our desire
for God, which are a prelude to the silence of the
‘prayer of loving attention’.
Butler’s remedy for countering
the sense of discouragement that often attends these
growing-pains was to insist on the all-importance
of the initial intention of the person trying to
pray. When we begin to pray we should intend to set
aside and offer to God that time and our efforts.
Whatever happens afterwards, if we do not deliberately
retract that intention, it still undergirds our prayer
and gives it its own significance. ‘The intention
to attend lovingly to God the Unknown’ defines the
work of prayer.
By an extension of the
line of reasoning it results in the actuation of
the whole of our life by the intention to love God
with which we began our prayer, and refutes the charge
that Butler so often encountered in his contemporaries
that prayer is a private and recherché activity,
remote from ‘the real world’, indulged in by some
unusual people. In contrast with this view, Butler
accepted the teaching of the Dominican Garrigou-Lagrange
that contemplation was not just for those souls who
had been given a special grace, but is the universal
vocation of all Christians.
Butler contended that
perseverance in the way of prayer should result in
its ceasing to be something we do, and become what
we allow God to make of us. It leads to a growing
spirit of acceptance of the will of God. The rest
of our lives becomes unified with our prayer in the
sense that prayer is at its service; prayer is the
spiritual dynamic behind the other things we do,
but in the sense that everything else is drawn upon
so that we may pray, as St Benedict puts it, ‘with
an expanded heart’.
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