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John Chapman, Fourth Abbot
of Downside, diffused the understanding of prayer,
both within and outside Downside and the Catholic
Church, more widely than any other Gregorian. Evelyn
Underhill, a renowned expert herself, acknowledged
that ‘he knew more about prayer than anyone I had
ever known.’ His teaching, contained in his Spiritual
Letters is serene, trustworthy and encouraging. It
has not dated, and is as fresh and relevant today
as when it was first delivered. |
It
is all the more effective because it is not arranged
as a treatise but in letters addressed personally
to his correspondents, which are clear, brief and
to the point.
Such a peaceful achievement
comes as a surprise when one learns what a whirlwind
Chapman had been throughout his life. He was a convert
who had first tried his vocation with the Jesuits,
then more successfully with the Belgian Benedictines
at Maredsous. They had made a foundation at Erdington
in Birmingham, and it was natural that, as an English
national, Chapman should be sent to play a leading
role there. Most of the community at Erdington were
German; during the First World War they were interned
and, after its end, the monastery was closed. This
brought Chapman to Downside in 1919. In the meantime
he had served as military chaplain, helped bring
the Anglican Benedictines of Caldey Island into the
Catholic Church, and served on the Vulgate commission
in Rome, where he helped to establish the authentic
text of St Jerome’s Latin Bible. At Downside his
rise to responsibility was meteoric, becoming Prior
after only three years, and Abbot after ten, and
his was an action-packed regime.
He arrived so quickly
at such high positions because he was a veritable
virtuoso – master of many languages, both ancient
and modern, and expert musician and art critic, and
well versed not only in the Fathers but also in Thomas
Aquinas and all the scholastic masters, a speciality
that was unusual for Downside. David Knowles, otherwise
an unsparing critic, said that Chapman had the most
brilliant mind he had ever encountered. It meant
that he was never over-awed by the scholarly consensus,
and the books he wrote on the New Testament and the
Early Church often advanced positions that are original
even to the point of outlandishness. It is all the
more remarkable therefore that his guidance on prayer
should be so sane, so adjusted to differences of
charism and temperament, so insistent on liberty
of spirit.
Through his close acquaintance
with the writings of John of the Cross, Chapman had
a firm grasp of the whole terrain that must be traversed
by all who have set their sights on union with God.
But this knowledge of his was more than theoretical:
he had given guidance to, and learnt from countless
people at every level of spiritual progress; he also
believed, in line with the Benedictine tradition,
that a spiritual director should know how to withdraw
when his usefulness was ended.
He devoted his attention
especially to the spiritual crisis that is felt by
those who no longer find structured meditation, where
prayer usually begins, rewarding. In this state of
frustration, people need to be urged to move on (in
the traditional categories) to the Prayer of Loving
Attention, and to turn to God rather than just think
about him. At his most practical and realistic, Chapman
articulated the much-quoted maxim, ‘Pray as you can,
not as you can’t.’ In order to encourage people to
maintain their efforts, another of his catchwords
went: ‘The less you pray, the worse it goes.’ He
spoke of just wanting God, and wanting nothing but
God. People may feel nervous about this at first,
because it can seem indistinguishable from doing
nothing, even to the point of idiocy. Chapman’s most
paradoxical description of this kind of prayer was
‘meanwhile the mind is concentrated on nothing in
particular – which is God of course.’ But this rested
on the wisdom of sound experience: for example, his
statements ‘an act of attention to God is an act
of inattention to everything else;’ or ‘the intellect
faces a blank and the will follows it.’
In the final years of
his life, Chapman became captivated by the French
Eighteenth century Jesuit, Jean de Caussade, whose
teaching can be summed up under two headings:
1) ‘The Sacrament of the Present Moment’, by which
he maintained that here and now God’s will in our
regard is revealed in the demands of the situation
that immediately confronts us;
2) ‘Abandonment to Divine Providence’, according
to which we can leave entirely in God’s hands without
any anxiety the outcome of the efforts we make on
this moment-to-moment basis.
This method is not to
be understood as total passivity, or as meaning that
we should cease to use the intelligence that God
has given us; rather it urges that we should set
out to co-operate actively and intelligently with
God in his dealings with us at any particular moment.
Chapman found great peace in this spiritual method
when, half-way through his term of office the affairs
of the monastery became quite tumultuous and he was
struck down with a mortal illness.
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