(LifeSiteNews) — Joining me on this episode of The John Henry Westen Show is Catholic theologian, author, speaker, and former “canceled” priest David Torkington. We discussed the importance of contemplative prayer, his new retreat initiative for the current Jubilee year, repentance, the crisis in the Church, and more.
I began the episode by asking Torkington about the importance of prayer and the need to devote special time to prayer.
Torkington emphasized that receiving Our Lord gives the faithful the power to truly change the world for the better, but because He is love, Our Lord won’t force the faithful to receive Him.
“Love of its very nature cannot be forced on anybody. A person has to freely choose to receive that love,” he said.
“Therefore, unless we create quality space and time somewhere in our life to freely position ourselves to receive that love of God, then that love of God cannot change us, because ‘forced love’ is a contradiction in terms,” he added. “That’s what, one way or the other, we have to learn what the early Christians learned to do: create quality space and time in our life for prayer.”
Torkington stressed that the early Christians recognized the need to know and love God, which ultimately led to their developing of contemplative prayer.
“When you come to love someone, when love is developed, you not only want to be near them, you not only want to be close to them, you want union with them,” he explained. “Now, frankly, you can’t be united with somebody who’s been dead for two or three years, any more than we can expect to be united with somebody who died 2,000 years ago. But we can, and we are called to be united with somebody who is alive now, and Jesus Christ is alive now.”
Torkington then dove into how contemplative prayer was developed and led the ancient Christians to grow in virtue:
So from meditation, gradually, this develops into what came to be called contemplation. When through love the Holy Spirit led them up into Jesus Christ, into His glorified and Mystical Body, so that they could contemplate the Father together with Him. Not only that but to receive what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the ‘fruits of contemplation.’ Because in the love that is received, what the fathers in the Church called the ‘pleroma’ that they received with Christ as they contemplated Him, within this love … were what we called later the theological virtues, the cardinal virtues, the moral virtues. In other words, we receive the inner strength to become more and more like Christ, along with the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
To hear more from David Torkington, watch or listen to my full interview.
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