The purpose of our Lenten disciplines is to deepen our conscious awareness of and responsiveness to Divine Presence. One of these disciplines is, of course, prayer. In her reflection on the Jesuit mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, contemplative teacher Cynthia Bourgeault helps us to see the importance of prayer as an action of faith, an invitation to “step out of the boat”:

For Teilhard, faith was never a matter of doctrines and principles. It is first and foremost an action—an “operative” as he calls it. Faith in this way becomes a wager: if the premise is true, you can only live into it through action. Rather than trying to do faith from the “top down,” by first convincing yourself of the logic of the argument in question, begin from the “bottom up,” by acting in alignment with it, and see what happens next!

Perhaps this is what Teilhard means by “harnessing the energy of love” Teilhard’s conviction that faith is not something that we have but something that we do is perhaps the best antidote possible to the despair and distrust that paralyze so much of our postmodern moral resolve. It is a call to step out of the boat onto the ocean of love and discover—all our fear and skepticism to the contrary—that the water really does hold us up.