Fr. John-Mary: Father in the last talk you spoke to us of seven acts of adoration each day. Since that is very practical, could you explain it to us in greater detail?

Fr. M.D. Philippe: I believe in fact that we need to multiply our acts of adoration in order for our prayer to grow constantly. I met someone who is a witness of Christ, someone now dead who told me that he had received that insight in profound prayer. I will describe this briefly. It was the abbot of the large abbey of Cîteaux in France who told me how that happened. He was a convert, a veterinarian and had served in the army, all of which prepared him to be an abbot. During his studies of veterinary medicine, he abandoned and rejected everything, and believed no more. One fine day he met a simple lay brother in a train. Finding conversation with him interesting, he followed him to the Trappist abbey of Cîteaux. There the Holy Spirit was waiting for him: not only did he rediscover his faith, but he entered the Order with a burning desire to give himself entirely to God. He thought that this was a Trappist abbey where everyone was the contemplative he was called to be. He was highly touched and moved by the Holy Spirit - a charismatic before the Renewal. On the evening of the day he took his solemn vows, he realized that he had made a mistake: the Trappists were marvelous men, completely consecrated to God and excellent workers, but they weren't contemplatives. So he complained to the Holy Spirit that he had fooled him. The Holy Spirit said to him, he told me, "Just accept being a Trappist, for I really did bring you here. Your being a contemplative is very good, whatever the others are. Continue your life of adoration, of prayer, of giving everything to Jesus." Then after a few years he was elected abbot. At that time he returned in prayer to ask the Holy Spirit: "Now I am responsible for this abbey, how can I change all these workers into contemplatives?" The Holy Spirit led him to understand that he should tell them - these men who recited the Divine Office every day but who had let themselves be led by the clock and by regulations so that their prayer became a routine - that he should tell each of them to make seven free, voluntary acts of adoration each day - on their knees if alone, or interiorly if at work. He explained to each of them that the first thing he should do on waking up is an immediate two minutes of adoration and that the last thing he should do at night before going to sleep is to adore God for two minutes - a very simple adoration,"My God, I place myself entirely in your hands." He asked each one to adore the Father, our Creator, with Jesus, to place everything in his hands to tell him, "I offer you this day that you have freely given me." And to repeat this twice each morning, once at noon and twice each afternoon. Everyone, every single person, can do that. Hence I insist that it is the breviary of the poor which every Christian can and should live. To punctuate one's day with seven acts of adoration is one of the finest ways we can call out to God. Adoration is the cry of a child in the desert, saying "Since I depend on God, who gave me everything freely, I ask him to help me and carry me". It is extremely important to seed one's day with seven short periods of adoration. Jesus teaches us how to adore, and adoration also gives us great insight into ourselves, into the fact that our spiritual soul was created by God and is totally dependent on him. If our body was biologically formed by our parents, our soul was created by God and I think that one can say, created from the first moments of our conception.
As a believer, I can say that the mystery of the Immaculate Conception shows us that Mary, our sister in humanity, was immediately, from her conception, filled with the grace of God and her soul created by God at that moment. We need the insights of faith to understand that faith gives us a thirst for truth. Jesus, the Beloved son of the Father, tells us that he is the Light of the world. This is very important for us because all too easily we look on Jesus as the one who teaches us in the supernatural order. This is normal, for he is the Son of God. But this creates division or separation. Many Christians today live with that separation: there are "scientific" truths on the one hand and truths of the faith on the other. As well as one can, one tries to relate the two, forgetting that scientific truths - those that are truly scientific - as well as philosophical and psychological truths we can acquire all come from the same God who also is our Father and gave us his Beloved Son. That God is Love and Light is affirmed constantly in Holy Scripture: every word of God is light, hence Jesus, the Beloved Son of God, is the Word of God, the fruit of his contemplation, the Father's contemplation. He is truth and light and all his teaching is light enlightening us not only in our divine life, our life of faith of a disciple of Christ, but he must enlighten us concerning all the truths that we can acquire. Obviously, one should always distinguish well. This means that we should neither confuse nor oppose the natural and the supernatural. I think that one of the greatest didactic errors of our contemporary world is to oppose faith and reason, science and dogma. One could see that recently in the latest instructions of the Church about in vitro fertilization. In that teaching given to us by the Church for the believer, it is the Holy Spirit who enlightens us concerning this very complex, very difficult problem. But people oppose scientific truth to divine truth. They forget that these scientific truths are not merely technical applications related to man but are scientific truths in which the Church intervenes in order to help us arrive at a right application, a good use of them. All the different possible uses of these truths are not necessarily good and may be dangerous. Even though scientifically true or possible, their use may not be humanly good or true, for human life is disproportionate to scientific truth but is in proportion to or in harmony with divine wisdom. Or, more precisely, the truth about human beings cannot be ordered harmoniously except by divine wisdom. That wisdom, given to us by Christ and always present and available when we need it, is the wisdom of the Cross and of Glory. That is why it is so important today to understand that Jesus comes to bring us a divine teaching, one that transcends all our distinctions, a teaching which enlightens us from on high, as Jesus says. The wisdom which Jesus gives us teaches us ultimate truths and has repercussions on the whole of human life. Human ethics, in fact the whole of human life, calls out for the inspiration of Jesus.

I would like to examine two aspects of this which seem to me very important: Jesus enlightens us through his teaching Nicodemus, the theologian of his time and doctor in Israel. There is no doubt about the fact that Nicodemus was very intelligent and very prudent: he came to see Jesus at night in order not to compromise himself. He is an honorable man, a Pharisee, a model for everyone - and he is aware of the fact. He comes to see Jesus at night because he finds Jesus intriguing. Perhaps he was taught by Jesus when he was l2 years old; it's possible, I don't know - it's one of the questions I'll ask in heaven, because it seems very important to me. Nicodemus remains intrigued by Jesus and wants to know who he is. People talk about him a great deal; he performs miracles and works wonders, but who is he? Nicodemus is not interested in the Apostles. They are from Galilee: nothing more need be said! Jesus recruited them around the lake of Galilee rather than in the synagogue or Sanhedrin, or among the doctors of the law - as he should have done, for it would have given him much more prestige. For Nicodemus, the disciples of Christ are insignificant. It's Jesus he wants to meet, and during the day there are too many people around him. Hence it's better to see him at night.

It is highly interesting to observe how John in his Gospel describes this extraordinary meeting of Nicodemus and Jesus. Face to face with a theologian, Jesus uses a theological approach entirely different from the one he uses with the Samaritan woman, and yet always leading insistently towards the truth. With the Samaritan woman, the approach is practical: the need for adorers in spirit and in truth. With Nicodemus the approach is much more profound, not in the practical order, for nothing is more profoundly practical than adoration, but more profound in doctrine. He reveals the mystery of grace to Nicodemus and shows him that even though he is a doctor of the law, he has forgotten the mystery of grace spoken of by all the prophets. Instead of greeting him or responding to his greeting, Jesus immediately begins by saying "Unless a man is born through water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God". Nicodemus is convinced that he will enter the Kingdom of God because he was born of the race of Abraham; perhaps non-Jews might also be welcomed into the kingdom of God because of being born of water and the spirit. But since Jesus says "nobody unless he is born of water and the Spirit", he gives no special place to the Jews or to Nicodemus. This Nicodemus finds intolerable and incomprehensible: how can one be reborn? That's impossible. Trying to gain time, he replies light-heartedly, "How can a grown man be born? Can he go back into his mother's womb and be born again?"

It is beautiful to observe the teaching given to Nicodemus, because it is what he most needs. This is perhaps where we can best recognize Jesus' vision of us, of our fragility, our weakness, our doubts - that we no longer recognize. Nicodemus, for example, was a thousand miles from recognizing that he, doctor of the law, was in fundamental error in doctrine. He forgot about being born again of water and the Spirit; he forgot that the mystery of grace is just as great for him as for a Galilean or an illiterate. I would almost go so far as to say that he believed that, because of his education, he had no need of grace. If one were to modernize Nicodemus, one would point out that certain theologians today are more or less Hegelian in their preference for reason over faith as more profound and more far-reaching. They don't see that it is faith that is all-important, for all of theology rests on faith, and all the profundity of theology is derived from the profundity of faith. Our intelligence is not the master but the servant of faith: Nicodemus seems to have completely forgotten that. For when Jesus tells him that nobody can enter the kingdom of God unless he is reborn of water and Spirit, he doesn't understand this new birth. Yet Jesus insists that it is absolutely necessary to accept this new birth which comes from the Holy Spirit, a birth of love, a purely gratuitous birth. Nevertheless, water symbolizes our good will, our acceptance. God never forces our will, but wants us to receive grace freely by cooperating with the gratuitousness of his love. Jesus thus gives Nicodemus an admirable lesson in theology, but before giving it, he humiliates him. When Nicodemus asks "How can a grown man be born again?" Jesus answers "You, a teacher in Israel, do not know such an elementary truth?" This doctrine of faith is, I would almost say, a mystical theology. He teaches us what the contemplation of a believer, of a Christian is: at each moment in the obscurity of faith we are being born to a new divine life through the breath of the Holy Spirit. We hear the sound of wind, but we don't know where it comes from. The believer hears the breath of the Spirit in the depths of himself, and depends on it, but it is beyond all his powers of understanding. Even a theologian is not fit to guide the Holy Spirit. It is rather the Holy Spirit who guides us all, and in order for this to happen we need to be fully docile towards him. This is why Jesus tells us that he thanks his Father for having taught the little ones rather than the wise and the prudent. The Holy Spirit wants to take us where we are most ourselves in giving us his love end causing us to be reborn to divine life. All this depends on the Father's love for us: "God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son." That grace is the fruit of the gratuitous love of the Father for us. It is marvelous and astonishing to see how this implicitly contains everything: the Holy Spirit, the will of the Father, Jesus on the Cross. And Jesus on the Cross is at the same time the Word of God and the heart of man joined to the Word of God, an instrument giving us grace through blood and water. The water symbolizes both our good will and, more profoundly, Mary, who becomes our mother at the Cross, our way to divine life.

Jesus gives us this divine teaching that we are children of God through grace. He also gives a very simple teaching, his practical teaching: "There must be adorers in Spirit and in truth." Jesus unceasingly reminds us that he can conform us to the will of the Father. We cannot know the will of the Father for us with absolute certainty, but we must want to accomplish that will fully and have no other desire in our lives than the fulfillment of the will of the Father in order to be fully docile towards the Holy Spirit. To accomplish that, we must enter into a divine poverty, i.e. the Spirit of Jesus, a wisdom ordering everything perfectly. We should as its first necessity clearly understand that Christian life demands adoration and contemplation - the contemplation of children living an ever-present love in which we are continually being born and living that divine life. it is Jesus who gives us complete certitude that this is the essence of Christian life - to live in obedience to God and in the desire of fulfilling the duties of our vocation in life. In the work we are called to do, we are servants, poor, docile servants, for we live above all to glorify the Father and help our brothers and sisters. Our everyday work through which we are servants of God directly serves our neighbors, helping them to be fully themselves so as to satisfy their need for love as fully as possible. I believe that it is very important for you to understand this teaching that the light of the World, Jesus, gives us. The truths of psychology are good, but they remain on a purely human level. The truths of philosophy are not harmful - I would be the last to say that, for I have taught philosophy all my life. Philosophical truths are not only good, they are human wisdom. It is important to recognize that we can discover the existence of God by our intelligence or philosophical reflection. There is a greatness, an intellectual nobility involved in being able to discover the existence of God, but our intelligence should be submissive to faith. By that I mean that it must accept its intrinsic limitations, must accept the fact that it cannot explain everything nor reach all levels of meaning. For the deepest levels of understanding can be attained only through the inspiration of a faith which comes from on high and raises us, raises our intelligence and will to birth, to life, on its level. Being born on high means depending directly on Jesus and on the Father.

Scientific truths are good, even prestigious as we all know. All our marvelous contemporary scientific truths such as biology have resulted in enormous technological progress. That technological progress is fine, can and does help us, and should not be opposed, but we should not allow it to absorb our attention so much that we no longer see that there is a thirst for contemplation in the innermost depths of ourselves, a need for probing ever deeper into the mystery of Jesus, the light of the world.