The Art Of Prayer

The Art of Prayer By

Martial Lekeux OFM

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Table of Contents The Art of Prayer.......................................................................................1 Foreward...............................................................................................3 General Considerations.............................................................................5 Underrating Prayer................................................................................5 We Do Not Know How to Pray..........................................................18 Preliminaries to Prayer........................................................................26 What Is Prayer?...................................................................................43 The Prayer of Conversation.....................................................................55 How We Can Pray Always.................................................................55 A Day Spent With God.......................................................................67 A Day Spent With God (continued)...................................................84 The Prayer of Conversation .............................................................100 Private Vocal Prayer.........................................................................120 Public Prayer.....................................................................................129 Reflection..........................................................................................149 How to Meditate...............................................................................164 Moral Mental Prayer.........................................................................186 Introduction to Affective Prayer.......................................................199 The Divine Friend.............................................................................208 Affective Prayer................................................................................219 The Prayer of Simplicity...................................................................237

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Foreward This is not a book to be read hastily, but rather an aid to action. It was not undertaken with the idea that the reader skim through it in one reading. Rather, it should be carried over into life. Sincere readers who wish to practice the art of prayer correctly should, as the reading progresses, apply it to themselves. To be acceptable for publication, the book had to be abridged by one-half. It is full of repetitions and tedious passages. My plan has been to follow the soul through the different stages of the life of prayer, and at each stage to furnish it with a maximum of practicable, basic principles for its spiritual advancement. I have done this even at the risk of offering an excess of details, which would most assuredly be irksome were the book intended to be read in one sitting. All of these stages, moreover, resemble one another in certain aspects. Hence, repetitions were necessary if each reader was to find not only what applies to his particular case but also the exact way in which it applies. Each one may then extract what he needs. This method of procedure, however, could lead some souls into the pitfall of trying to apply all these suggested practices at once. Were they to do this, they would become confused and would soon find themselves overburdened. All I have done is to offer suggestions. If I have presented an abundance of them, my only intention was to give the reader a choice. It is up to each one to take what is applicable to him and what he can reasonably shoulder, always leaving himself free to take on more as he progresses. Prayer is a complex art with many nuances where progress is not only slow but requires as much prudence as it does diligence. In the present volume I have limited myself to the ordinary forms of prayer. To explore the relationship which exists between ordinary prayer and mystical prayer would have been an interesting study, but the book would have assumed such proportions that it seemed preferable to defer the study of mystical prayer for a second work which will be directed to an entirely different class of readers. I offer this book to the modern public with some apprehension. It is no way flatters modern tendencies nor does it lay claim to any novelty. By preference, it is based on the foundations of time-tested traditions.

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The style is so simple that it can be understood by the most unlearned, and that at the risk of appearing to be somewhat puerile. Having this sacrificed art for utility, it is my fond prayer that this book will nonetheless bear much fruit, and that even its very shortcomings will help men of good will to find God in prayer. Martial Lekeux O.F.M.

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General Considerations Underrating Prayer Activism It is surprising how little men pray and how poorly they pray. Although they are children of God, they spend the best part of their life ignoring God. At most they give Him an occasional thought now and then or make some selfish appeal to him. This is one of the most evident proofs of our fallen state. What are the causes of this lack of prayer? They are numerous — as manifold as our defects. We are not addressing ourselves to those immature Christians whose sole concern is limited to "fulfilling their duties" and who say they will be satisfied if they barely escape the fire of hell. Prayer for them is an onerous burden except when fear of some unpleasantness reminds them that there is after all a God who could come to their aid. We likewise disregard those supine souls who lack the courage prayer requires. There is but one thing to say to this class of people: "For pity's sake bestir yourself. Ask God to give you the energy you so badly need." This is the first prayer they should say. Outside of these cases, the source of the evil lies in an erroneous concept of the nature of the usefulness of prayer. Some souls are strongly attached to external activity and underestimate the value of contemplative activities; others sincerely long for these activities but, because they do not understand them well or go about them in the wrong way, are never successful in achieving them. This book is written especially for the second group, with the hope that it will help their good will. But we must first have a word with the others. The trend today is toward action, struggle, movement, business, efficiency, better methods of production, and maximum yield. Activism, utilitarianism, and humanism are the formulas of the day. What people want is the concrete, the tangible, the immediate, the practical, whatever satisfies and brings out their personality. Even the apostolate has blithely

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taken on the tint of the times, and arrays its zealous regiments under the banner of "action." No one will contest the value, even the great value, of this. But it seems that there is too much emphasis on the material element to the detriment of the spiritual, on the "active" virtues at the expense of prayer. This lack of equilibrium is dangerous both for Christian activity itself, because it threatens to rob it of its spirit, and for Christians, too, because little by little it can cause them to deviate from the correct idea of Christianity. There is an all too noticeable undervaluation of the "interior" virtues, of unselfish activities, and especially of prayer, among youth. It is a bad sign, for love of prayer is the barometer of religious vitality. It is high time to put things back in their proper place.

The Primacy of Prayer The truth is that we are made primarily for prayer — provided we give the word its complete meaning which is one that far surpasses the simple prayer of petition. Prayer is the raising of the mind to God and the union of the soul with God. Of all our human actions it is the most important and should take precedence over all others. Prayer alone gives our entire soul to God, even its innermost recesses. It is its vital act, the act proper to love in the most profound acceptance of the word. In our other good works we go to God through some intermediary, whereas in prayer we reach God directly. "In the active life," St. Bernard says, "we busy ourselves with something other than God for God; in contemplative life we think of God himself." Now, that is the noblest, the most glorious, the most useful, and the most properly human occupation. God created man free and intelligent, as the object of His love. Having loved him even before creating him, God had no other purpose in creating man than to see him return to God whence He came so that the highest of unions might be realized: the spontaneous union of love. And God waits for that return. The soul that returns to God out of love gratifies God's wishes to the full and brings God's work to fruition. And when the soul is united to the Love that created it, it accomplishes its destiny; it lives in the state of perfection. There is nothing beyond that. Everything else, asceticism, good works, and the apostolate, hark back to

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prayer and are related to "the best part" (Lk. 10, 42) and the one thing necessary. Magdalene, lost in Christ, can withdraw to a grotto and Paul into the desert and there pray. Their life is full to overflowing. God has placed us, it is true, in such a condition that we must also attend to other work, and it is His will that we perform it faithfully. It would, however, be more correct to call it a service inspired by love, whereas prayer itself is love and for that reason, more pleasing to God than all the rest. He loves us. Now, what does love require if not to be paid in love? Only the gift of our heart can satisfy God. Our work pleases Him only when it is a proof of this gift. What God wishes above all else from His children is their affection, and this finds expression primarily in prayer. Contemplation is the activity essential to God himself. It is the unspeakable relationship eternally going on between the three divine Persons. Having formed us out of an outpouring of that love, which is His being, having made us in His own image and likeness, He wishes us to participate in His sovereign activity. For that reason were we created. Man, as well as the angels, is above all an adorer, a being constituted for prayer. The meaning of human life is adoration. Everything else will pass away. That alone will remain, for it will be our life in an eternity of blessedness. Here below, amidst all our necessary external work, we must serve the apprenticeship of our heavenly vocation. Thus holy contemplation rises like a peak above all other virtuous actions. Many of them are good and pleasing to God. It alone, by its very nature, is necessary. It is the goal, the term, and the crowning of our entire spiritual life. Penance, renunciation, all the virtues, are ordered to prayer. They correct the will and free the heart to this end. "The virtues are related to the contemplative life as dispositions necessary to that life." (Saint Thomas II-II, Q180, A2) The result and the very purpose of all asceticism is interior love, the gift of the heart to God, and union with God beyond all external contingencies. The fathers and doctors of the Church, basing themselves on the Master, unanimously proclaim the primacy of contemplation. The Church approves of orders that are purely contemplative and gives them first place in her esteem. Contemplative souls are the spiritual aristocracy of Christianity.

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"The Lord," says Cassian, "puts the principal good in divine contemplation. The other virtues, while good and useful, seem vile by comparison and must take second place. They are but means to attain it" (First Conference). "Our whole purpose," He writes on another occasion, "our entire perfection, is to pray unceasingly. That is the reason which helps us brave labor and seek contrition of heart.. .. The whole edifice of the virtues has but one purpose, namely, to attain perfection in prayer. Without this perfection, which unifies all the parts and makes for a solid ensemble, there will be neither solidity nor durability. This constancy in prayer is neither acquired nor achieved without virtues, but, on the other hand, without prayer the virtues, which serve as its foundation, would never attain perfection" (Ninth Conference). St. Gregory says the same thing: "The merits of the active life are great, but those of the contemplative are more excellent … The fervor derived from contemplation is a greater help in observing the rules of the active life" (In Ez.).

The Utility of Prayer We have seen that between the two expressions of love there is an interdependence and a reciprocal action. If there is no perfect prayer without the virtues, there are no perfect virtues without the interior life. The contemplative life is necessary for the perfection of the active life. For that reason St. Augustine could write: "That man has learned to live well who has learned to pray well." At the same time such a man has learned to be an authentic militant, the apostolate being, as St. Thomas says, but the overflow of contemplation that runs over into our other duties. Every other conception of Christian zeal is false. "Without contemplation," affirms Father Lallemant, "we will never make much progress in virtue, and we will never be able to help others advance" (La Doctrine Spirituelle, VII, Chap. 4, p. 4) Godliness is profitable in all respects," says St. Paul (I Tim. 4,8). Prayer — and again I am not speaking of the prayer of petition only — obtains the graces necessary for ourselves and for others. It supernaturalizes the apostolate and makes for an abundant harvest. It brings us to the very source of grace by uniting us to God.

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It keeps the supernatural sense alive in us. It heightens our whole life and stirs up all the virtues, being the immediate act of the queenvirtue, the mother of all the others, the love of God. But over and above all these happy effects, it is primarily in itself that prayer is the most excellent of all things. We should appreciate and practice it in itself and for itself. There is reason to guard against an idea which is tending to seep into certain militant groups. Some souls are indeed in favor of exercises of piety, but on condition that they can see the immediate yield: "Zest for action, a feeling of exaltation, recollection of fullness," to use the words of a Catholic Action chaplain. Such souls relegate prayer to the rank of an auxiliary to action or see in it but a way to arouse emotion and promote self-development. There is a principle that we must hold fast if we would guard ourselves completely against activism and a warped humanism. It is this: prayer is not only beneficial for everything, but for itself and independent of every extrinsic utility, it is the prime activity, the first perfection, and the primary duty of man. And if a man is truly a Christian, it will be His first need. Finally, from the fact that prayer is the art most connatural to man, it follows that it is also the most conducive to happiness. Every prayer has about it a joy, a comfort, and a soothing effect. It frees man from earthly hindrances and gives Him access to the serenity of the supernatural world. It gives Him the consoling consciousness of having a Father and a divine Friend — a thought that assuages His sorrows and strengthens His confidence. It re-establishes Him in truth, which is the sister of hope. How much more true all of this is of contemplation. Contemplation is the perfect prayer that introduces man into the intimacy of the Lord and transfigures his life. He who has discovered the high roads of prayer has set himself up in the very center of the kingdom of God. Wherever he is, he is with God. He finds Him and sees Him in everything. There is an over-abundance in His heart. He is rich. Having acquired the one and only good that gratifies the human heart, he is happy. Having fulfilled his purpose, he lives to the full. What words can express the happiness of the man who has established his abode near the all-lovable One? Who can describe his peace, his constantly renewed cheerfulness, the joy of his awakenings, the sweetness of the presence of God, the splendors that illumine his soul? He loves and knows that he is loved. He whom he loves and

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treasures is supreme Beauty, the final object of every desire. He possesses perfect love and love is the source of happiness. His life even here below is in heaven, in a heart-to-heart conversation with the eternal Beloved. As he treads the earth with royal indifference for its inferior goods, he is immunized against sadness. Nothing can harm him, for his home is above material things.

Aberration Such is the feast which God has prepared for those who are faithful to him, such the banquet to which He invites them. And what is man's answer? "I have bought a farm, and I must go out and see it; I pray thee hold me excused.... I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them; I pray thee hold me excused.... I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come" (Lk. 14, 18-20). And so, completely indifferent, He prefers the creature to the Creator. If angels could be dismayed, the attitude of the invited guests just alluded to would surely dismay them. Men "do not have time to pray!" When we stop to think of it, that is a very disconcerting statement. In view of the fact that time has been given to them for prayer, for prayer more than all else, they find time for everything except for the one thing that matters. They settle down in time and act as if eternity were a joke. They manifest a complete disinterestedness in the beyond that is so certain. Their main concern, apparently, is to forget God and all thought of the supernatural. And so eternal things become strange to them. Prayer for them loses its savor because it has lost its love-value. What ought to be their most spontaneous propensity, their constant desire, and their great joy in the disappointments of life is but a burden, wasted time, and a tedious duty which they discharge as hurriedly as the payment of a tax. (I am speaking of coarse-grained Christians.) Man's glory is to think. And his highest function is to withdraw himself from the material world and think about God, to contemplate and adore him. Surprisingly enough, the most difficult thing to do is to get men to lead an interior life. Speak to them about the "exterior" virtues, of courage, devotedness, and work, and they will not only understand you but they will follow you. But suggest that they enter into themselves, that they pray and meditate, and they are baffled. Their fear of meeting God

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is as great as their attempt to avoid a troublesome person. They have nothing interesting to say to Him and expect that His conversation with them will be equally tedious. Even for Catholics who are convinced of the necessity of prayer, prayer is often reduced to the recitation of formulas and to assisting at Mass. There is no soul, no profound life in their prayers, and consequently they are bored and are content with the very minimum imposed upon them. Even religious who are well disposed but absorbed by action trim off as much as they can from their prayer-exercises and give the time they should spend in prayer to what seems to them more useful employment. They have so forgotten the spiritual ways that they have forgotten how to meditate. The two or three half-hours set aside by their Rule for this exercise are for them the heaviest of burdens. They no longer know how to spend the time, so they fall back on some reading, provided they do not fall asleep or think of personal matters. They are much to be pitied. What joy can they find in religious life, and how can they consecrate their life to a God they no longer know how to speak to? They no longer live in constant habitual intimacy with Christ. If they did — and that is what they ought to do — it would indeed be a great treat to talk with him. There are, alas! priests who practically never meditate. It is soon evident that "their true home is not in heaven" and they become quite earthly, to the great detriment of their priestly work. They fail seriously in a duty essential to their vocation, for the priest is by function one who prays, an intercessor. The disrepute of prayer is a misfortune and one of the most detrimental perversions of the spirit. For at the base of this attitude there is an incorrect idea not only of prayer but even of life. To belittle prayer is to distort the meaning of the human person and of destiny. This erroneous attitude toward prayer is one of the capital errors of our times. For many — and among them are chosen souls — it denatures the notion of the apostolate, even that of religion, and makes excellent intentions and lofty generosities inoperative. Other omissions attack the spiritual organism from without; this one affects it at its very center and undermines it from within. It inverts the spiritual order of values, nibbles away at the spirit of faith, and opens the way to a sort of semi-naturalism, all the more dangerous for its not being known.

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Pretexts Those who neglect prayer are well supplied with weak arguments to justify themselves. "It is enough," they say, "to do one's work, for work is prayer." That is very true, but prayer is also part of our duty, it is even our prime duty. If we fail to fulfill it, we will discharge our other tasks poorly. Prayer must impregnate all our activities. It alone safeguards their supernatural value and efficiency by maintaining the permanency of our pure intention. "But," they allege, "I form my intention in the morning and offer all my actions of the day to God. As long as I do not retract it, it remains valid and stamps everything I do." Indeed! That would be far too easy. If our good disposition is not frequently renewed, our morning offering becomes inactive. Nothing evaporates more quickly. You decided this morning to do everything for God. That is very fine. But when in the course of the day you let yourself go so far as to act out of purely worldly, egotistical, and even reprehensible, motives, do you think that your morning intention still influences your actions to any appreciable degree? True, you have not retracted it formally, but your conduct has. Under these conditions, your work is the opposite of a prayer. It alienates you from God and makes you self-centered. Work is prayer when the work is done under the eye of God, offered to Him, and done to please Him. And it will be so the more your attention, your intention, and your offering are more present, more conscious, purer, and more fervent. Such a sanctification of work is possible only when the interior life has become a habit. Which means that only contemplatives can make work a constant prayer. "But," certain ones object further, "there is nothing contemplative about me. I was made for action. It is my way of serving God. But, meditate, no. I do not feel capable of it. Moreover, I have tried and have never succeeded." It is not a question of having succeeded, but of praying our best, for the simple reason that it is a duty. In this matter success is ours when we do what we can. And then, was not your attempt a poor one, or an inadequate one? It is easy to say "I can't." Once you have read this book, you will perhaps understand that after all it is not so very difficult. It is

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an established fact that every man can pray in one way or another, because it is what He was made for. The only difficulty is that you have allowed this field to lie fallow. You have given yourself over too much to action that pleases you at the expense of prayer that weighs heavily on your shoulders. It is a form of laziness. You need reeducating and the teacher is prayer. Practice makes perfect. Give prayer, the interior life, the time and the effort it requires. In this way you will succeed. Believe me, you will work the better for it, for you never work better than when you pray. And that is where the shoe pinches. "I don't have time to pray. I cannot neglect my work. The duties of one's state in life come before prayer. We must know how to leave God for God." Oh, you don't have time to pray? Well, may I say that your life is poorly organized. You should re-examine it. In every Christian life, in every rightly planned human life, a place must be found for prayer — and the most important place must be reserved for it. Everyone will agree that now and then and in urgent cases we must "leave God for God," although contemplative souls never really "leave" him, for they carry prayer into the most absorbing types of work. But to neglect prayer for action habitually, systematically, even constantly, is utterly wrong. Let us suppose that one day you are pressed for time or that you are faced with a difficult task, and that you go without food and sleep. The toll will be negligible. But if you attempt to deprive yourself of food altogether, you will not last long. The busiest man finds time and takes time to eat. He knows it is indispensible. If you believed in the necessity of supernatural nourishment, you would find time to pray. You would "make time," as do all genuine Catholics, whatever their occupation may be. It is only too clear that at the basis of all this there is a lack of faith rather than a lack of time, as well as a naturalistic concept of life. For what does all this pressing work serve? Earthly ends that are as important as regards your supernatural end as the games that absorbed your attention when you were seven years old. And you prefer such trifles to the one thing necessary? "Excuse me, but I work for the good of souls." Wonderful. The case is even more serious. You seem to forget that the source of the apostolate is interior fervor, and that to accomplish good for souls the first condition is not to forget your own. "To be an

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effective preacher," says St. Gregory, "we must take extreme care that through purity of heart we reach contemplation" (In I Reg., II, Chap.v.). The Superior of an active religious Order asked Pope Pius XII one day: "Your Holiness, my subjects are men engaged in the active life. What should I recommend to them?" "The interior life," the Holy Father answered. And He repeated: "The interior life, a very deep interior life." That was all He said. On another occasion, the Holy Father gave this advice to some Catholics: "What is of prime importance for the action of the priest and the laity is the interior life, the life of union with God, the life of prayer, the life which St. Paul speaks of when He cries out: "Your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Col. 3,3). The periodical, Documentation Catholique, goes on to add that "the Holy Father repeated the text of St. Paul several times, and later, He strongly insisted on the uselessness of exterior works when they are not fecundated by union with Christ. Without divine grace, nothing holds together, nothing counts, nothing has supernatural value. Without the interior life we fall into the heresy of action" (Documentation Catholique, December 24, 1944) It is always profitable to reread the following strong words of St. John of the Cross: "Those who are given to intense activity and imagine that they can convert the world by their preaching and exterior works would do well to reflect on the following. They would be much more useful to the Church and more pleasing to God, not to speak of the good example they would give, if they devoted to prayer but half the time they spend otherwise. They would accomplish more with one work than they do now with a thousand, and that with less labor, since their prayer would provide them with grace and spiritual strength. To act otherwise is to strike the hammer on the anvil, to do a little more than nothing; at times absolutely nothing, at other times, even do harm. Superficially, activity gives the impression of producing something, but in reality it will have no substantial effect, so true is it that nothing good can be accomplished save by the power of God" (Cantique Spirituel, stanze 28). That is authentic Christian doctrine. But it is to be feared that besides a real concern for duty and a laudable zeal, you unconsciously bring to your work a good dose of personal interest. Self-love easily finds its own satisfaction in external works. There is a natural satisfaction in using one's own resources. They have a tangible yield and 14

they bring us the esteem of others. You have grown fond of it, whereas you have come to look upon prayer, that "life hidden in God," as something useless, as an obstacle to action, as wasted time.

The Remedy You have organized your life in this activist sense, stuffing it to the brim with temporalities and leaving no room for the interior life. It is not surprising that you no longer find time to pray. You have deliberately robbed from your prayer time for your other duties. To begin with, then, you must revise your life and, if necessary, strike out of it all excessive activity in order to reintegrate into your program what you should have put there in the first place, the work par excellence, the work of God. It is a duty, a vital one. For the rest, do not be frightened. You are not being asked the impossible, not even something very difficult. You are not being asked to drop any of your work, but you are asked to apply yourself to think of God, to regain contact with Him in the morning, in the evening, and on certain occasions, to offer Him your work as it presents itself, to take advantage of those lost moments in your life, to say a short prayer, to substitute some pious reading for some pleasure. If you accomplish this, you will improve your spiritual life tremendously. This practice will restore and maintain in you a preoccupation with the supernatural. Little by little you will develop a taste for it. You will try to do more, and you will experience the need of finding the time to pray. In truth, changing the exterior of your life is not the important thing, but rather supernaturalizing it from within, by interior attention to God. The interior life is a virtue for men of the world as well as for religious. It would be even truer to say that it is more so, because it is more indispensable for people in the world than for religious. The more one is drawn to action, the more necessary it is to protect the flame of prayer in order to avoid having it blown out by the wind of distractions. The interior life is possible even in a life brimming with activity. See the great saints who moved crowds and spent themselves with utter self-abandon in the labors of the apostolate. As they went about their work, they prayed, for they carried God in their heart. There was their strength and the secret of their successes. The great apostles were men of

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prayer, and prayer is the source of efficiency. It is an interior attitude to be acquired. No state of life is incompatible with contemplation. But for it, you need first of all a high regard and a liking for prayer. If you have lost it, you must begin again with an even greater effort. You need a retreat. Organize one to your liking. But you must regain contact with your soul and find God there again. If you were sick, you would not hesitate to put aside your occupation in order to take care of yourself and, if necessary, you would go to a hospital for an operation. You are incapacitated until such time as your health is restored. You are sick spiritually. Go to a hospital.

The Master's Lesson "Mary has chosen the best part, and it will not be taken from her" (Lk. lo, 42). If we had been at Bethany, we would surely have chosen Martha's part. "It is all well and good to pray," we would have said to the slothful Mary, "but duty comes first." How much more true, since Martha was performing a pious work. It was thoughtful of her to practice the virtue of hospitality and to prepare a good dinner for Christ. Yet, that is not the way the Master looked at it. "Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about many things: and yet only one thing is needful" (Lk. 10, 41-42) and that is to give Him your mind and heart. Christ has a greater and deeper vision than we. The entire gospel is ordered to this idea, to this attitude, however paradoxical to our short-sighted wisdom. The Son of God thought as God, and He came to propose a divine ideal to us, a transcendent ideal, one that is purely supernatural. And hence the prodigious reversal of values announced in the Sermon on the Mount. One thing is important, only one: the Kingdom of God, that kingdom which is within us and which is the love of our heavenly Father. The rest is surplus. Does not the gospel in so many words say: hatred for the world is supreme wisdom? Few understand this language. It requires a deeper insight than we are accustomed to and an extraordinary interior detachment. Alas! we are but too inclined to murmur with the still earthly-minded disciples: "To what purpose is this waste?" (Mt. 26,8). For that reason there will always be few contemplatives.

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What can we expect? We are near-sighted and constantly tempted to limit reality to the visible and the immediate. Now, the kingdom of God is invisible, and prayer does not always have immediate and tangible results. Consequently, contemplatives easily give the impression of being dreamers, fanatics, and idlers. Hence the eternal misunderstanding between Martha and Mary. In this conflict those in the active life will always have the masses with them. They will speak the language of common sense. They will have their feet on the ground, and they will have their works to show. The silent contemplatives, who are on the fringe of all endeavors and with no apparent harvests to their credit, will seem unproductive, as contributing nothing "practical" to the community. The argument will be advanced: "To what purpose is this waste for this might have been sold for much and given to the poor?" (Mt. 26,9). This seems pertinent to narrow-minded men such as we are. At bottom, it is but a lack of supernatural elevation. As soon as we put ourselves in the order of grace, all of this crumbles with one blow. In the light of the Gospel, the contemplative life victoriously reassumes its first place. Thus the Master solemnly affirmed: it is the best part, the one thing necessary. Not to admit this is to betray the Gospel and for that matter, to cease being Christian. Wisdom suggests that we practice a harmonious and integral religion, a religion that gives an equitable part to prayer and action. They are not opposed to each other, they are complementary, and God asks both from us. There must be love in our work as well as love in our heart. Let everyone see that He guards against His personal deficiencies in one or the other of these domains in such a way as to go to God with all His soul, to love Him with all His strength, and to give Him everything. That is the voice of common sense — supernatural common sense.

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We Do Not Know How to Pray All spiritual directors have heard this complaint from pious souls: "I do not know how to pray," or "I can no longer pray. I do not know how to meditate. I have tried every method, but all in vain. As soon as I begin to pray my mind is paralyzed, my heart cold, and my will limp. I have tried over and over, but I spend the time in distractions. My soul recoils from such a sterile exercise. It all seems so artificial. Finally, to make a long story short, I have been unsuccessful. It seems to me that things will never improve. And yet, I would like so very much to be able to pray." And ordinarily the complaint ends with this urgent plea: "Father, teach me a good method of prayer." These souls of good will must be helped. Such is the purpose of this book. O, Holy Ghost, teacher of holy prayer, behold a soul who is looking for you. This soul is reading these pages for the sole purpose of finding you. Enlighten him; set Him afire. He stands before you. Teach Him how to knock at your door. Do open it to him.

First Cause of Failure: Over-Concern For the Temporal You claim that you do not know how to pray, and I maintain you do. Our Lord's injunction that "they must always pray" (Lk. 18,1) was addressed to every son of Adam. If God, then, obliges man to pray and moreover to pray always, we cannot say that the obligation is impossible of fulfillment. The argument is incontestable. Your present inability to pray is, therefore, only accidental. You know how to walk but there is an obstacle in your path, or it may be that you have an injured foot. The first thing to do, then, is to recognize the obstacle, to locate the injury. Once that has been done, it is easy to prescribe a remedy. Let us put our finger on the wound. Let us irritate the sore spot so that you may be aware of it. I suggest the following experiment. Before going any farther with the reading of this book, put the book aside, join your hands, recollect yourself, and forthwith meditate for five minutes on the goodness of God, on heaven, or on the Passion of our divine Savior. 18

Please close the book and begin your meditation. Good! Your meditation is over. What was the train of your thoughts? You say you were distracted, that you are habitually so. And yet, this time you were roused to do your best. You devoted greater attention and expended more effort on this meditation than you ordinarily do. So the first symptom is that there is a certain lack of energy in your prayer (and perhaps in the whole gamut of your life). There is a lack of selfcontrol. But there are other troublesome elements of a more general and of a more profound nature. Recall other meditations where, despite praiseworthy efforts, distractions had the upper hand. We shall try to discover what these elements are. I fear that the answer will not be very flattering. Most of the time (I speak to those souls who "do not know how to pray") after five minutes you found yourself a hundred miles away from the thought of God's goodness, from heaven, or from Calvary. What happened? You began well, then your eyes lighted on a newspaper, a picture, or some object, and through one or the other of these your mind set sail unconsciously on an ocean of reveries: politics, friends, pleasures, work, and so on. Perhaps at a given moment you became aware of being distracted and you again fixed your thoughts on your meditation. You even closed your eyes, only to discover that the enemy was within you. In thinking of the happiness of heaven, you soon slipped into caressing the joys of this earth; in contemplating Calvary, you remembered a trip you took to the Holy Land, and from there your thoughts wandered to the hotel where you stayed, then to a person you met there, then of the odd feather she wore in her hat, then the fur piece you had intended to buy, then the household purchases you have to make. And so on and so forth. You are well aware of this cascading of ideas, of these clashing pictures which succeed one another without any apparent order and which, once we lose control of our thoughts, are linked together by the tiniest details. The most insignificant thought is food for musing. The enemy is waiting at every crossroad. He has millions of thoughts ready to propose to you, His strategy being to make you deviate from the one thought you set out to concentrate on. How can you spot so manifold, so subtle, and so elusive an adversary? With a fairly certain degree of probability I could venture a guess as to the leading thoughts which caused your mind to wander. I can even 19

quite safely tell you the ones which distract you most frequently, even though I know nothing about your life, your temperament, your state in life, your worries, your surroundings, or the persons with whom you come in contact. If you are a business man and some important business matter engrosses your attention, then your thoughts tend, by preference, in that direction. If you are a housewife, chances are that your mind is preoccupied with the evening meal and with some shopping you have to do. If you are preparing some speech, how can you help thinking about it? If, on the contrary, you are idle, the first object you come upon will capture your attention, providing, of course, that it has nothing to do with prayer. And how often your musing flatters your secret propensitites. You have a cold, so your cold distracts you. You are worried, so your worries distract you. You have good reason to rejoice, and that attracts your attention. And so on and so forth. You will admit that these distractions certainly range over a wide field. At first sight they seem to. But analysis will discover that ninety-nine per cent of them stem from worldly preoccupations. If it was the thought of the Blessed Sacrament that turned your thoughts to that of the Passion, I would have no objecion. That could be the hundredth distraction and would be a good one. In all the other cases the things of the world distract you from heavenly things. It is our own self that distracts us from God.

The Second Cause: Attachment Let us continue our analysis. Why do the things of this world distract you from heavenly things? You will say to me: "Because material objects are easier to see and to think of than are heavenly things." But that is no answer. The basic question is why do the things of the world hold more attraction. And, furthermore, your answer is wrong. The things of the world are easier for you to see, but the opposite is true of the saints. They must exert an effort to turn their thoughts from God to creatures. The solution, then, must be sought elsewhere. Try another little experiment and you will immediately discover the cause. Supposing I were to ask you to meditate for five minutes on, let us say, the manufacture of faucets. I wager that you would find this impossible. Why? Because such a thing does not interest you and you know nothing about their fabrication. Now, suppose that faucets happen

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to be your neighbor's line of business and that He was thinking of taking out a patent for a new model which He is in the process of perfecting. During Mass his problem distracts him. No matter how hard he tries, the thought persistently plagues him. He delights in thinking about it. Why? Because, at the moment, it interests him more than anything else in the world. Try the opposite experiment. Take up those things which a short while ago were the very source of your distractions: a particular dinner, a discourse which you are preparing, the visit that you are to make to your fiancee this evening, a serial story that you have just read, a new dress that you intend to buy, and begin meditating on them. It is not difficult to picture you prolonging this exercise for half an hour without becoming tired or distracted. Why, I ask once again? Because the subject interests you, because it is the habitual food of your mind, the secret treasure it cherishes, and because where "thy treasure is, there also will thy heart be" (Mt. 6,21). To be separated from it would be painful. You are attracted to it and seek every opportunity to return to it, like a dog to His bone. There, then, is the enemy of your prayer, the one who sows the crab grass in the garden of your soul and clutters your prayer with knotted distractions. He is in everything, and hence his deadly power. Or rather, it is you who are in everything and who instigate the enemy, you who bring him into everything you touch, for he resides in your heart. Let us immediately call him by his rightful name: attachment to the world. Yes, your distractions are your present condition; they are the things of this world. They are all the things that surround you because everything interests you more than God and because, practically speaking, contrary to the charity which you profess, you love all things more than God. "That is not true," you protest. "I love God above all things, and when I make an act of love I am sincere and have resolved to sacrifice everything rather than offend Him." I agree with you. I certainly do not think that you are devoid of the virtue of charity. Love is in your will but it has not yet reached your heart, or at least not very much. There is not yet that enthusiasm of the heart toward the object of its complacency of which St. Francis de Sales speaks. Now if the love of will is essential to charity, affective love is very useful for the perfection of prayer which, according to the same saint, is precisely the function of affective love. Affective love makes the 21

things of God interesting and savory. It carries us toward God, as it were, naturally and without effort, drawing the will which has but to let itself be led by it. Furthermore, by attaching us to God, it detaches us from everything else, thereby stemming the flood of distractions at their very source. Normally, the heart and head work in concert. The heart should cooperate with the head. Picture a man who has a big dog on a leash. If the animal pulls in the direction the man is going, all is well. But, if the dog pulls to one side or is attracted by some object in back of him, the man will have difficulty going forward. If the dog is stronger than he, the man will strive in vain; the dog will pull him. What should he do? Train the dog. Your heart is not trained. There lies the evil, and the sickness is quite serious for some people, especially women, because in them sentiment is usually stronger than the will. "Your heart leads your head." There lies the dualism, the internal rending from which you suffer. In saying that you love all things more than God, I was speaking of your heart. Your will is good, but your heart is sick. Your will is attached to God, but your heart clings to creatures. The things of the world tug at your heart. Consequently, when your mind wants to concentrate on God, your heart drags it despite itself towards the object of its love. As long as you fail to restrain your heart, it will be impossible for you to pray.

The Third Cause: Lack of Faith Let us proceed further and ask ourself what is the cause of this disordered attachment. It is easy to find. We love things according to the way in which we see them, I mean, according to the amount of good and beauty we discover -in them and, consequently, according to the value we attach to them. "Our love is proportionate to our knowledge," says the adage. If, therefore, we are more attracted toward creatures than toward God, it is because we discover more good in them than we do in Him and because, practically speaking, we esteem them more highly. The soul falls sick before the heart does. Lack of faith precedes lack of love. You object once more: "I believe; I know that God is the absolute good; I love Him above everything else." Not only do I agree with you

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wholeheartedly but I again restate the distinction I laid down regarding love. There are two kinds of faith: one which directs reason and whereby, aided by divine grace, we resolutely adhere to the truths of our religion, and the other which has penetrated to the very depths of our soul, where our ideas are woven into the very fabric of our lives. They are always there and on every occasion we are conscious of them, without there being any need for reflex thought. Resolute faith alone is necessary for salvation. But how useful the other is! It is impossible to be recollected before each action. Now count up the number of non-reflected actions which fill every one of your days. Count up all these actions which are no better than their principle, and you will agree that perfection is impossible without that immanent faith which alone can affect all the acts of your life down to the smallest detail by reaching to its very depths. If we must love with all our heart, we must also believe with all our heart. We must reach the point of believing without giving any thought to it, like the musician whose fingers light on the correct notes without having to look at the keys. And here again is where the evil lies. You have a speculative faith, a reasonable faith, but not a vital faith. You believe that God is there, but this belief comes to the fore only on rare occasions. You ought to think of Him, and yet there are so many other things to think of. You live for all practical purposes as if God did not exist, as if He were not there. You spend hours, perhaps entire days, without paying the least attention to Him. He has become a stranger to you. You say that God infinitely surpasses everything, yet in reality, although unconsciously, the hundred things you prefer to Him each day are so many proofs that creatures are better than He, that it is befitting to dedicate more time and care to the kingdom of the world than to the kingdom of heaven. 1

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The same thing is being constantly applied to the domain of morals. Many of our small actions seem to be peccadillos, because they are not deliberate and because at the moment we perform them we cannot say that our will is free. And so generally we look upon these actions as imperfections. In reality, they are logical outcome and sign of a general defecting state of the soul, and it is there in this profound habitual fault where the culpability must be found. On the contrary, the spontaneous acts of virtue are imputed to their credit because they proceed from a perfect will which in all things makes them act naturally in the direction fo good. As we will, so we live. And the will is, first of all, informed by faith.

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A reversal of values has taken place, and, since the law of the mind is the mind is the law of the heart, it has, by that very fact, provoked a reversal of love.

The Fourth Cause: Our Way of Living We now come to the final question: whence comes this lack the faith and, consequently, this disordered attachment? The answer is: it comes from your life. For, if we live as we think, it is inversely true and a matter of experience to say that we think as we live. Look at your past and present life. Since childhood you have been brought up in this paganism from which you now suffer. You were taught to give God an hour a day (perhaps) and the remainder of the day to your studies and relaxation — in other words, to get along without Him. For you, God became some far-off, nebulous being, in some way unreal, outside of life, whereas visible things took on an ever more intense reality. Thus, there was implanted in your soul, almost unconsciously, the practical idea that the earth was much more interesting than heaven. When you consider that you have lived this way for twenty, forty, sixty years, giving your best thoughts and efforts to your business, to your projects, to your daily life, forgetting God, limiting your relationships with Him to a strict minimum; when you remember that repeated acts inevitably produce a more and more marked attitude of soul, that these pagan days have followed one another thousands of times and without interruption, you will understand that this mental twist must have necessarily assumed in you the strength and rigidity of a gnarled old oak tree. Perhaps there was a replenishment, a well-made retreat, now and then. If you are a religious, then the novitiate broke the spell for a time. But weariness, habit, and loss of perspective soon got the better of these weak impulses to lead a deeper spiritual life and, even in the cloister, the world, concern for things present, and the fascination for trifles little by little reasserted their rights. You believe one thing and live another. Meanwhile, you and your faith have been swept along in the current of the passing world. Imagine what you would be today had you been brought up by a saint! (There was such a thing, for example, among the fathers of the

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desert.) He would have accustomed you from your earliest years to think only of God and to refer all things to Him. He would have spoken to you of Him a hundred times a day and in reference to everything. He would have trained you to live in God's presence, to love Him in all things, and to pray to Him always. Supposing you had lived a life steeped in God all these past years instead of a miserable, natural existence. Measure the abyss which has been dug between what you are and what you ought to be, and realize that you must fill it to recapture your ideal. Yes, see what you have made of your life and how necessary it is to look at it straight in the face. That is why you do not know how to pray, why prayer seems artificial to you, why you are bored with it, and why like a bird in a cage you are always trying to escape from it. A man has two houses. One He habitually occupies. He has furnished it to His liking, and there He lives with His family and His books. He is familiar with every nook and corner. He dwells in the other but rarely and only for a few days at a time. It is empty and without charm. The furniture is covered with dust; the rooms smell musty and close. When He goes there He is ill at ease and lonesome; He does not feel at home. Although much more beautiful and larger than the first, He cannot become accustomed to it. His one desire is to return as quickly as possible to His true home. You have been habitually living in your terrestial house. You have furnished it. You have filled it with objects that have become necessary to you. You have become accustomed to it. Your heavenly home you hardly frequent. It is abandoned. When you go there you find it empty and cold. You quickly become bored and do not feel at ease. So, what do you do? What you must do is break up housekeeping once and for all, furnish your spiritual home, settle down there, and make it definitely your home. Once you do that you will be indescribably happy.

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Preliminaries to Prayer A correct diagnosis of a sickness is half the cure We have seen that two very closely linked imperfections lie at the root of your inability to pray: lack of practical faith and an attachment to created things, and that both are fostered by a worldly life. This twofold sickness needs medication. You will take care of your mind if you intensify and strengthen your faith. Your heart will be free if you sever its ties. And lastly, in order to make this interior reform an actuality, you must change your life. Logic requires that you begin by strengthening your faith. Your intellect must be set right before you can correct your will. But in reality, in practical life, that is not the way things go. We are much more men of action than logical beings. Action, for the majority of us, is far more natural than thinking. As we have seen, your sickness began with living. So it would be better to proceed in a practical way by beginning at once with a definite improvement in your way of living, and in that way reach your heart and mind.

A method of prayer or a method of life As long as a person lives habitually removed from supernatural things, there is no such thing as a good method of meditation, any more than cream can be made with sand. The only method in that case is to reexamine your life, make up your mind once and for all that a change for the better must be made, and then take the proper steps to carry out the proposed reform. Without that, any and all methods will be useless. Even the best thought out ones, the most learned ones, will yield nothing — or practically nothing. They will be so many excellent, but free-wheeling, machines. To attempt mental prayer under these conditions would be equivalent to presenting yourself for an examination without having opened a book, or the same as opening a business with nothing in the bank and no merchandise on the shelves. He who wills the end must will the means, that is, the means adapted to the end. Machines designed to manufacture nails do not turn out screws. You adjusted your soul to produce earthly things. It would be 26

useless then to try and make it produce supernatural articles without having first reset the machine. How can you suddenly hope to fix your attention on prayer after having spent the entire day thinking of everything and anything but God? After having associated with so many people all day and loved everyone and everything except God, do you think that you can straightway begin to love God to the exclusion of everything else? After having led a very worldly life, do you think that you can kneel down at the hour of prayer and suddenly become a heavenly man, capable of taking your place with the choirs of the angels? It would be as impossible as trying suddenly to reverse the flow of a river. Would you like to know what prayer is — I mean prayer said on your knees, when all other activity ceases? During those moments the soul recollects itself in order to live a more intense life. Please understand, the soul recollects itself. It is your soul that must be recollected, that is, your soul as it is, with the life it leads, and not a spare soul that you would like to see rise up and one that is suddenly adorned with all virtue. (That is precisely why prayer impresses you as something artificial. For you it is.) As we live, so we pray. Our prayer is our life, condensed into its essential act. If our life is habitually oriented toward God, our prayer will naturally be coupled with it as soon as we apply ourself to it. But with you the two are at loggerheads. You continue to pursue temporal interests without any interruption. The river current makes its bed and, as it follows the slope, it acquires speed and power. When the time for prayer arrives, it is useless to put your head in your hands and try to engross yourself in thinking about God. The movement continues in virtue of the force it has acquired. It is impossible to check it. The river pursues its course, and your life sweeps away your prayer, like a piece of straw caught in a torrent. "Everything we have been thinking of previous to the hour of prayer is fatally conjured up in our memory during prayer," so Abbe Isaac taught His monks. "What we would like to be during the time of prayer that we must strive beforehand to be. The dispositions of our soul during prayer depend on the preceding state of the soul. 2 And the state of the soul before prayer depends on the habitual state of our life. Everyone is eloquent in His particular field; the 2

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astronomer speaks fluently about astronomy and the business man about accounts. A man never grows tired talking about what He likes. If the love of God becomes your specialized field, you will be a master at mental prayer. If it does not, then you will have nothing to say to God and you will find no supernatural thought. You will meditate on faucets. Regardless of the method or the book you use, it cannot be otherwise. A book on some boring subject will not fail to put you to sleep. Methods of prayer without an intense life to enliven them resemble that type of composition method still used in certain schools. It is the expedient used by lazy students. It consists in developing a composition by using the commonplace questions: who, why, where, how, and when. It is a convenient method, so it seems. The student has the impression that the composition is all but written. If He is intelligent, if He has some ideas, it will help Him to organize them. But He perhaps might have written a better composition had He not been cramped by such a formula. The dolt, however, will repeat the questions over and over only to come up with nothing but inconsequentials. There was a day when this method was applied to mental prayer. Why not? "Every plan is good," Napoleon said. "Everything hinges on the way it is executed." Methods of prayer are good, too. All of them are. When used intelligently, they are both useful and beneficial. But they are nothing more than outlines to which each one must contribute His own part. And that is the important thing: to have something to add to it.

The conditions for prayer Let us conclude, therefore, by saying that instead of talking about a method of prayer it would be far better to talk first about the conditions of prayer. For all practical purposes these conditions can be reduced to one: the subject you choose for prayer must appeal to you. To pray, you must be interested in the things of God. To pray well, you must be preoccupied with God. For your prayer to be perfect, you must have a passion for God. Interest in things divine proceeds from "devotion" which is the attachment of the soul to God and the concern to please him. And this in turn is schooled and nourished by the exercise of detachment, fidelity, and the interior life. Live for God, live with God as constantly as possible, and you will be able to speak to him.

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At some time in your life you have undoubtedly met a man whom you had not seen in many years and who means nothing to you. Yet you had to be polite and speak to him. But about what? The conversation revolved around such questions as "How are you?" "Where are you now living?" "Where do you work?" and dragged on and on. Between each question there was an uneasy silence during which you deeply regretted not having taken another train, or strayed into a different street. The search for subjects of conversation grew even more painful. In the end you fell back on exchanging views on politics. What a sigh of relief when the bore departed! But on the other hand, what a joy to meet a dear, old friend! You always have something to say to him, even if it is nothing new. The conversation goes on, effortlessly and easily. It matters not whether the conversation continues or whether you remain silent. You are happy just to be with him. Become the close friend of God. Then, prayer will take care of itself. If, however, His company bores you, if you have to look for subjects of conversation, if you are anxious for the conversation to come to a halt, it is very possible, although there are exceptions, that you have been neglecting him. Break up housekeeping in your old establishment, settle down in the house of God, and associate with Him frequently. That is the first condition of prayer. Without it, everything is artificial, sterile, and doomed to failure, as surely as is the desire to speak Greek before having studied it. And that is what makes those methods of prayer ineffective. Lack of close friendship with God also accounts for your distaste of and discouragement with prayer. But with it, on the contrary, these technical systems will regain their usefulness and will give their maximum yield. Often, however, they will be no longer necessary or, at least, only for a time.

The Kick-Off The correct method of mental prayer is then, first of all, a method of life. The entire program of your Christian life must be reviewed. For the moment, however, all I wish to do is point out to you in a general way what you can do as a start.

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The important thing is to regain your interest in the supernatural, and the practical way to achieve this is to live it and to live by it. Therefore, the first question is: to what an extent do you live your faith? An examination of conscience will provide you with the answer. This is the natural way to proceed. In everything we plan, the first thing is to know what we want, and the second is to know how far advanced we are. There is no question of making an extensive examination of conscience in view of a general confession, but of a short, cursory, and above all, a practical one — a simple survey of your way of life, but directed towards a precise goal: one that will uncover the occasions in which you lack a supernatural spirit, the acts you habitually do as a lover of the world. You will immediately find an abundance of these points, so many, in fact that, unless you are already very advanced in the spiritual life, you will find it impossible to note them all. The self-evident ones will prove the most interesting. Begin with them. It will be a particular fault into which you fall as it were automatically without ever thinking of combating it. It may well be your awakening and first thoughts of the day from which God is regularly absent; or your way of going about your work, that is, with a completely temporal preoccupation; the tooselfish way in which you treat others; your concern for comfort or the esteem of others; your reactions when contradicted, negligence in your exercises of piety, which you skim through hastily or completely omit either for lack of appeal, or because of discouragement or simply out of indifference; lack of control over your interior attitudes; a thought which you leave unchecked and never attempt to win back to God. You will come to the conclusion that there is much to correct. So, why not put your hand to the plow at once? Profit by the inquiry you have just made and proceed without further delay toward an initial attempt at improvement. Choose one or, at most, two of the points you have observed, and decide on some remedial measure. However trifling it may seem to be, in reality it will be a great help. You will have started the mechanism rolling once again. The important thing, if you would get out of your stagnation, is to do something. It will put tone back into your spiritual organism and rouse it to action. We might compare it to old notes that have been filed away and are now taken out of the file because they have now become a current item, an interesting matter. 30

An effort of this kind done for God will re-introduce into your soul concern for God, an effective desire for your sanctification, and an attraction for the supernatural. It will, moreover, sow in your heart the seeds of contentment which is a source of spiritual power. You will also notice that this alone will immediately make your prayer easier and improve it. The next time you pray it will seem completely natural for you to speak to God about what you have just done to please him, that with His help you have been looking for ways to do even better, and that you have been asking Him to assist you. The subject of prayer will be ready at hand, and it will prove an interesting one because it will be part of your life. There will be distractions, to be sure. The conversation will still be meager. To renew relations demands a certain amount of time, but whatever remedial procedures you adopt will unquestionably be a step in the right direction, an initial progress. And that is what is important for the moment — the first step.

Reflection This will be a beginning, although a humble one. You will soon note that it is not so easy as you thought, that you are not making progress to your liking, that you forget; and ... you will be tempted to give up. Be careful! That is the danger spot. It is relatively easy to begin. The secret is perseverance. You must not only put your shoulder to the wheel but keep it there. Otherwise your enthusiasm will flag and eventually you will find yourself once again at a standstill. You perhaps have already had experience with similar attempts at conversion and have found that each time they misfired. How can the momentum be sustained? By reflection. Thoughts feed the will. And this brings us back to what I called the first point in the order of logic: faith, but faith viewed under its practical aspect, as a component of your daily life, so in need of reform. Bernard Shaw opened one of His lectures with these words: "You have invited me to speak to you because you think I am more intelligent than you. Of course, I am not. The difference between us is that you think on an average of twice a year, whereas I do some serious thinking at least once a week." We must admit that the "thinking animal" really does very little serious thinking. I have in mind thinking that goes beyond the immediate

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in search of wisdom. "With desolation is all the land made desolate," says the Holy Ghost, "because there is none that considers in the heart" (Jer. 12,11). A misfortune, indeed, because we must think to live, and a man is worth what His thoughts are worth. Every undertaking requires reflection. Before launching a business, a man gives it serious thought. And if, in the course of a complex business matter, He runs the risk of losing sight of basic principles, He is careful to recall them to mind whenever necessary. The business we are discussing is the most important there is. It is likewise the most complex, for it involves your life. So, too, is it the most difficult one because everything tends to distract you from it. In fact, everything turns your attention away from the basic facts of the problem. What you will have to do is remind yourself of them so often that, despite everything else, they will be constantly before your mind's eye. Now, tell me, how many times a day — no, that would be asking too much — how many times a month do you give serious thought to supernatural things? How many times do you seriously, intensely, and profoundly reflect on such important thoughts as the following: "God is here; He is looking at me." "I was created for God, for eternal life. Heaven is everything; earth, nothing. Creatures are nothing. What will they be and what will I be in a few years? The sole purpose of my life is to love God and reach heaven. That is the one thing necessary. God is infinitely good, beautiful, and desirable. He alone is worthy of my love and of my best efforts." The important thing is that these thoughts become habitual, and familiar, that you live them, that they always form the background of your other thoughts and actions, that they be the driving force stimulating your way of acting. As long as the "one thing necessary" is not truly and practically the business of your life, the one thing that preoccupies you, that pursues you from morning until night, you will be unable to live by faith, practice renunciation, love God, and pray as you should. A serious and indispensable effort remains to be made in this direction. Do I hear you say: "You are asking me to meditate, are you not? That is precisely what I do not know how to do. To pray, well and good; but meditate —!"

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Don't panic. If you do not know how to meditate, you can learn. Anyhow, everyone knows how to meditate. Like everyone else, you have a brain to think about God and a heart to love him. That is all you need for mental prayer. Besides, all I am asking you for the present is to make a rudimentary meditation and one that aims at the most urgent need. Later on, we shall treat of this exercise ex professo. Now, we are only on the threshold of meditation. Rather than call it meditation, let us call it reflection: thinking on some spiritual subject in a simple, free, and natural way, without forcing your mind or tying yourself down to a plan; thinking it over as you would any other subject. You do that kind of meditating every day regarding temporal matters. To be specific, this is what I am asking of you: choose some point of faith, which you think will be of help to you, one of those, for example, I have already suggested. Select one that fits you, one that strikes you as the most apropos. Recall it to mind when you say your morning prayers. I presume that you say them. If not, that is the first reform to undertake. However brief they are, you should begin the day with God, if you do not want it to be spent far from God. Having chosen your point, reflect on it as best you can, and not necessarily for a long time. You might even repeat a formula such as the following several times: "I have been given this day to merit heaven." See to it, however, that you conclude with a practical thought, that you inject into the concrete details of the day before you. Say to yourself: "In a little while I shall have to do this or that. I shall try and make this occupation meritorious by thinking of God and by offering it to him. I shall be tempted to do such and such a thing, but it would be far better not to do it. If I do, I would be losing merit instead of acquiring it. So, I shall not do it. I shall be careful not to say anything uncharitable about so and so. Then too, as I pass by the church, I could step inside a minute. My visit would please God." Two or three points would suffice. You must not overburden yourself. Your reflection might last two to five minutes. In that way you would start the day fortified with resolutions deeply impregnated with faith. See to it that the day is more meritorious than the preceding one. That is what is meant by carrying your faith over into your life, and thereby sustaining and quickening it. Come night, recall your thought again, but this time you should examine whether in the course of the day you have gained or lost merit, whether you have put your good morning resolutions to work or not. 33

Make this examination of conscience in a general way, without looking too searchingly into the corners of your soul. As a conclusion, you should form some new resolutions. The best ones are based on experience, and especially those that result from an awareness of your failings. Your prayer will be to ask God to help you do better. Between the time of your morning prayers and your evening examination, you must, as the day progresses, recall your good thought to mind every now and then and make it stand out from among the mass of temporal things. An especially good time to be conscious of it would be when you are about to carry out your morning resolution, during moments of relaxation when you are more at leisure to enter within yourself and finally at certain turning points of the day — upon beginning a different type of work, or when you return home. Try this, and ... shortly you may say: "My efforts have been useless. I forget; I am distracted. What can you expect? I have my work to do, and there are so many things to distract one." Since you are not a saint, all you say is no surprise. It is quite natural. So, here are three ways to help you not to forget. During your morning reflection give deep and serious thought to those few occasions when you will have to recall your motivating idea, and make your thinking very concrete by representing the event to yourself as actually present. When the occasion does arise, chances are that you will recall your motivating thought. Then, ask yourself what you do when you are afraid of forgetting something. You might tie a knot in the corner of your handkerchief. Why not do the same thing for God? Matt Talbot, the longshoreman, crossed two common pins in the form of a cross on His sleeve as a reminder. Would it be so terribly difficult for you to use some such discreet sign which would catch your attention at the desired moment, something that would serve as a warning? Perhaps it would bring you back on the highway of the spiritual life much more frequently than you had resolved. If you truly wish to find and love God, you will find the need of using some such small means, and you will set about at once looking, for some. Finally, an excellent and practical procedure is to choose a formula or, to use the modern term, a slogan, which you will regard as a rule of life to be applied as often as possible to everything that comes your way and to everything you do. You might write it down in your engagement-book, or some place where your eye will frequently light on 34

it. As a slogan, you might choose one of the following: "To please God." "Of what value is this for eternity?" "How can I gain some merit here?" "For you, God; help me" and so forth. Repeat it frequently, at every given opportunity. There is nothing better to sustain your ever-wandering attention. And every time you recall your formula to mind you will be praying. You will be praying without knowing it.

Spiritual Reading Besides giving yourself over to some serious thinking, you must do some spiritual reading. Spiritual reading is always necessary. It is particularly indispensable for beginners, especially if they are lay people. From lack of frequent contact with the supernatural world, your mind is very poorly furnished with spiritual thoughts. You have precious few ideas with which to bolster your meditation. Let the ideas of others make up for your poverty. Reading stimulates the mind, feeds it, gives it new ideas. How often it happens that one sentence opens up a complete, unexplored field to the mind. If such reading bores you, that is definite proof of how necessary it is for you. You have grown too accustomed to reading Readers' Digests, mystery stories, or that book that everyone is talking about. Your mind has outgrown the habit of doing some serious reading, especially the reading of religious books, the kind that help you to live. If you prefer, begin by reading the lives of the saints as an easy and alluring way to introduce yourself to spiritual reading. Eventually you must, however, take up books which treat expressly of the spiritual life. If you find that spiritual reading does not take hold of you, that it does not attract you, that you are aware of no appreciable result, rest assured that that is normal in the beginning. It is also true that reading does not produce the same effect every day. You must give it time to take hold of you. So, continue despite your boredom and lack of success. One day you will be paid for your trouble. Of course, one sure way for spiritual reading not to become appealing is not to do any. If you think that you do not have the time, you must make time. You find it for ever so many less important things. If you are really quite busy, set aside at least five minutes, but use them for spiritual reading. There is a world of difference between a daily, spiritual reading of five minutes and no reading at all. This daily contact, however brief, with the

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things of God keeps the lamp lit and wards off the attacks of naturalism. A man can live a long time on insufficient food; but deprive yourself of all food, as I have said, and you order your own hearse. You need this spiritual nourishment to improve your cast of mind and thereby your life. Repeated reading has a surprising hidden action. It is the drop of water which in the course of time wears away the rock.

Detachment from worldly things In the preceding chapter we said that lack of faith brought about an attachment to temporal things and an estrangement from God. Here, we are trying to reascend that slope. Having restored and fortified your faith, you must now make it bear fruit. You must equate your will with your faith; you must be logical with yourself. You have now regained contact with the supernatural. The great basic truths which define the meaning of your life now begin to become somewhat familiar to you, or at least they occasionally brush across your consciousness: "Heaven is everything." "The only important thing is to love God." What is the logical conclusion? That the world is nothing and nothing outside of God deserves your love. Or better still, that the world has value only in so far as it is a means to heaven; that God must be loved in and through every creature; that no one or no thing, come what may, must be an obstacle between you and God. The practical problem to be solved is to detach yourself from the world and attach yourself to God. These two correlative movements must be imprinted on your life. That you must detach yourself from the world goes without saying. It is impossible to take even one step forward as long as you are chained. The bonds must be broken. You must free your heart after having sobered your mind. After reflection comes renunciation — and the one by means of the other. It is equally necessary for prayer. I said that you have charity in your will, but no love in your heart. Your heart goes out to what attracts it, and everything holds a far greater attraction for it than God: hence your distractions. They are so many bonds all the more annoying not only because they hold you back but draw you in the direction diametrically opposed to all supernatural enthusiasm.

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They must be broken. "This is a hard saying" (Jn. 6,62), yet a necessary one. Mount Tabor is not reached except by climbing. We must "bury ourselves with Christ to rise with Him to a newness of life." The life of the just man is both a death and a resurrection; but the death comes first. You do not want to die? Then, you will not rise. You will still have your sickness, like the man who refused to undergo a necessary operation. Could it be that you truly prefer to drag out your empty and ordinary life, to be a slave to everything that happens, tortured by distractions, lukewarm, unable to find God, your soul, your life? After all, this medicine, like many another, is bitter; but it is a life-giving tonic. The death we speak of, rest assured, is only an apparent one. It is the destruction of what is ugly, vile, and bad in you. It is not a death, but a transformation. For the rest, there is no question of subjecting you to a sudden and violent death. The saints did so by renouncing everything in one magnanimous gesture. But heroism is not within the reach of all, and generally it is better to proceed with moderation. I cannot but repeat that we are only on the thresh-hold of the spiritual life. What is being asked of you for the present is really not very difficult. Moreover, you will see that it will give you joy. It is, first of all, important to distinguish between detachment and renunciation. Renunciation involves depriving yourself of something, actually rejecting it. In detachment you still retain it, but you cease to be its slave. Here, we are more concerned with detachment. You may find it necessary to renounce certain ways of acting that are sinful or that are proximate occasions of sin, because voluntary sin is the mortal enemy of mental prayer. Or it might be certain things from which it is impossible to detach yourself without actually renouncing them. Such is the case when passion is involved. I once knew a man who had a passion for stamps, an innocent mania in itself, but it led Him to neglect the duties of His state of life. The only way He could free himself of it was to sell His collection. In many other domains, however, a partial renunciation will suffice. For example, you may have a passion for sports. In itself there is nothing wrong about sports, but with you they are a dominating love; they distract you and occupy your thoughts in season and out of season. You need to discipline this passion, to subject it to a little asceticism in order to break its hold on you. And to do that you must resolve to 37

sacrifice some of your sport activities. Only by actions do we improve the mind. Renunciation is not in itself the objective. It is a means of combatting a disorderly interior disposition, of loosening the shackles gripping the heart. And you should know quite well what, for you, proves an obstacle to divine love. Would you like to put a finger on the wound? Then ask yourself what it is that hinders you from praying. Analyze your distractions, and try to discover their source. Before long you might become aware that you are a little too concerned with your external appearance. Your prayer might turn around such matters as your hair-do, your suits or some other detail of your appearance. Or the cause of your distractions may well be curiosity: you are far too interested in political disputes or in the World Series, neither of which is your direct concern. Or it might quite simply be an itching to know everything: the news of the day down to the last piece of gossip, what your neighbor is doing, and what is going on in town. And, one evil leading to another, your wound might be caused by your passion for gossip; too much time wasted in idle talk, too much visiting, too many useless social calls, or an over-indulgence in diversions: movies, novels, excursions, golf, races, parties, or social events. All of these things gnaw away at your interior life and impede your supernatural development. The Word cannot take root. Our divine Savior once said that some "seeds fell by the wayside, and the birds came and ate them up" (Mt. 13,4). The least you must do is chase the birds away. Sacrifice whatever is necessary in order to make some recollection possible. Perhaps you will say: "You have not quite hit the nail on the head. I am a serious person and I lead a rather austere life, but my work, my business, consume all my time. I have to earn my livelihood; my family depends on me; and I must meet important social obligations." Very well. There is nothing wrong in that. In fact, it is all very legitimate. But pause for just a moment and ask yourself whether you are not fostering some exaggerated ambitions, whether you are not overpreoccupied with personal success and hungry for esteem, whether your liking for work is not really a passion monopolizing for its own profit all your interest, your attention, and your efforts to the detriment of your supernatural life. Such a fondness for work is for many people the essential obstacle to prayer. Ask yourself likewise if you are not overly 38

concerned about the future, if some false goal, which modern technology has so profusely created, has not slipped into your life. False goals generate false anxieties with the result that the seed falls among thorns where it is choked. Such are the usual motives for work: motives that are very earthly, motives that dull the supernatural sense in you. If you make this examination of conscience in a spirit of real faith (and do not forget your directive formula) , if you truly believe in the primacy of the supernatural, I wager that you will eventually dispense with some of these "necessary" things. You will curtail your needs, moderate your fever for work, and make more room for confidence in divine Providence. You will learn the art of occupying yourself without being preoccupied, and you will regain freedom of mind and serenity of heart. As for the rest, you must neutralize the harmful effect of whatever you cannot reasonably suppress by teaching yourself to consider them in a supernatural light, as Christian duties, as a service to God and no longer simply as earthly things and egotistical undertakings. You must look beyond your personal interests and see in them the accomplishment of the will of God. Introduce God into them by those frequent returns of which I have already spoken and which purify your work by maintaining a good intention. Frequently repeat your morning offering and say as often as possible: "For you, my God." In that way your occupations, however earthly in themselves and however absorbing, will be supernaturalized, sanctified, and transposed to a divine plane. Gradually they will lose their tyrannical power and in the end they will turn out to be a help to you. Work will become prayer. I should add a few words on penance, since it is a form of renunciation, but for the present I shall restrict myself to this wise bit of counsel. To pray well, as well as to think well, requires good health. Sickness unquestionably has its blessings — and its blessings of prayer, too — but we have no right to handicap ourselves deliberately and run counter to the order established by God. The body is the instrument of the soul. We think and love with our mind, and its condition depends on that of our entire organism. Many difficulties in prayer are nothing more than questions of health. So do your best to keep physically fit. Now, the best way to do that is to practice penance. There are exceptions, of course. I have in mind a reasonable, even a rational, kind of penance, one that is essentially a discipline. The dinner table, it has 39

been said more than once, kills more men than fasting does. Every abuse, every lack of control, takes its toll: sensuality, excessive eating and drinking, late hours, night work, exhausting sports, uncontrolled intellectual passions, all these result in a deterioration of the body and in turn reflect on your spiritual condition. Let moderation and discipline be your rule of asceticism. The candidate for a sports prize does penance for a period of time before the contest begins in order to be in the best of condition when the time comes. Shall you who are in the run for the spiritual prize, which St. Paul speaks of, do less?

Repress self-love Detachment consists in dominating things instead of them dominating you. It likewise includes domination of one's self, for of all things from which we must detach ourselves comes our own self first. In truth, all other renunciations center around this one, which alone is essential. Christ said: "Let Him deny himself" (Mk. 8,34). You will not have to search long before being convinced that self-love is the fundamental obstacle in your attempts at prayer. Over and above the fact that the tendency to refer everything to yourself generates an attachment for everything else, self-worship is a source of endless troubles: wounded self-love torments you for days on end, every contradiction is a black cloud in your ever-changing sky; excessive attention to your person, your reputation, your interests, your likes, bestirs all other passions: anger, resentment, ambition, anxiety, sadness, undue tension in your work from which you no longer know how to detach yourself, and also those disordinate dreams of which you are the hero and the center. All of this surges back at the time of prayer and floods your prayer. Self-love, then, is the fundamental passion that must, above all, be calmed, neutralized, and cooled. The combat is far more arduous and complicated than all the rest, for self-love is deeply rooted in our being. We shall return to this later. For the time being, besides the preceding practices which all contribute to this victory, I shall ask only two things of you:

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First, try to suppress the external manifestations of self-love: vanity, susceptibility, egotism, etc. Secondly, when you are thwarted, accept it inwardly and offer the unpleasantness to God. Recall to mind your directive thought: "What does this have to do with heaven? Just this, that through it I can gain merit. Therefore, so much the better." If you feel that the "so much the better" is a little too strong, then at least say: "Yes, God; your will be done." All I ask you to do is to say it. You need not necessarily feel it. If you reach this point, you will have made great strides toward that interior peace where love of God and prayer flourish.

Attachment to God Attachment to God is the objective of all that has preceded. Christian renunciation is not something to be sought for itself. It has a definite goal, an eminently constructive one, namely to unchain love. We detach ourselves of things only to attach ourselves to God. Self-renunciation means moving out of the slums into the house of our Father. This second step is accomplished by prayer, piety, and an intimate life in the sweet society of the Lord. It will form the subject of the remainder of this book. But, for the time being, here are three points which you can and must observe: If you have given up your exercises of piety, the first thing you must do is begin them again. If there has been an overabundance of them, then cut down on them. If they were insufficient, then add some: for example holy mass, communion, a visit to the Blessed Sacrament, the rosary, and some other vocal prayer. But once the program has been fixed, observe it. Attraction or no, success or no, you must remain faithful to it. Perhaps prayer will be but an exercise of asceticism. Very well; asceticism is the way to win divine consolations. If, for want of doing better, these practices reduce themselves to a purely material devotion, they will assure you of contact with God; they will be proof of your good will, and they will keep open the door through which divine grace can enter. Secondly, pray for grace. No one can pray without help from God. What a consolation to know that we are not alone in the struggle, that there is something better than our notoriously insufficient resources and that the more we are aware of our weakness the more we can count

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on this divine help. But we must ask for it. Frequently repeat such invocations as the following: "Lord, teach me how to pray. My God, I would like to pray but I am not making much headway. Help me." Have no fear that some day your prayer will be heard. For the rest, such a prayer will be the easiest and the most natural one for you because it will bespeak the real state of your soul and your deep desire. Lastly, try to live in the presence of God. This will form the subject of a later chapter. The present chapter is already rather long and you may well be saying: "What a lot of exercises for a beginning — and quite complicated, too." Actually it is not. I could have said all these things in a very few words. But it would have remained abstract. At the risk of being verbose, I preferred for your convenience to follow out the basic principles in the ramifications of your concrete life, and that is what is complex. What I have proposed to you is in itself quite simple because it is natural. Any sensible man would do the same thing in any undertaking. May I draw your attention once more to a remark I made in the opening pages of this book and which you should keep in mind when reading the chapters that follow: All these practices are no more than suggestions. It is up to you to make a judicious choice. A store displays articles for all tastes and all needs. Yet each buyer selects what He needs. It would be unreasonable, not to say impossible, to want to do everything at one time. Discouragement would soon set in. In the beginning take only a part of the program suggested, or take only one of the little exercises offered. You must admit that any child could perform them. And begin wherever you please. In practice, the order has scarcely any importance because it is all one, and one point naturally leads to another. The one and only important thing is to do something. "Sufficient for the day is its own trouble" (Mt. 6, 34).

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What Is Prayer? Must i, you ask, cover the entire cycle of these exercises and reorganize my whole life before I begin to pray? God forbid. So true is this that I would straightway like to teach you a very simple way to pray and one that is worth many a mental prayer. But before coming to that point, a closer examination as to just what mental prayer is would be profitable. Over and above the difficulties relative to the conditions for prayer already mentioned, there are others which more deeply concern the very nature and mechanism of prayer. There are many false ideas on this subject and many incorrect habits.

Imperfect ideas Some people — they are the least advanced in the spiritual life — know of no other form of prayer but the prayer of petition, which in most cases they restrict to temporal favors. For the rest, they content themselves with vocal prayers and formulas taken from prayerbooks, or with prayers they have memorized. Both these forms of prayer are good and commendable. From certain unlettered souls not much more could be expected and it is better not to disturb them. All things considered, they are doing very well. But many other souls could do much better. For if, to speak first of all of the prayer of petition, our heavenly Father loves to have us beg Him for favors (and the Our Father is definite proof of this) , there are, all the same, other ways of approaching Him besides dogging Him for temporal favors. With these we must become acquainted. There is one sure way of having our prayer heard. If a person habitually ignored you, except when He wanted a favor of you, you would not be inclined to help Him any more than is necessary. Unless He is a beggar, you would consider Him extremely selfish. But for the other person who visits you frequently out of pure friendship, come the day He has a favor to ask of you, you are only too happy to accomodate him. And if He should be ever on the alert to please you and be of service to you, you will expend every effort to fulfill His requests.

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And so it is in our relationship with God. Do you want Him to be disposed to hear your prayers? Then, maintain friendly relations with him; apply yourself to serve Him and to please him, in such a way that He will consider himself somewhat obligated to you. The saints obtained all they wanted from him, even miracles, because He received from them all He desired. Our prayers are always heard, in the sense that God always answers them by giving some grace, which will be at least partially measured by our merit. It may not always be the favor we ask, for our heavenly Father knows better than we what is best for us. Once we have expressed our needs, leave the decision of what is best for us up to him. If it seems that He has not heard us, we have no reason to be discouraged because we know that no prayer is lost. But above all, if we would merit His favor, let us try to make ourselves pleasing in His eyes. For the rest, we can ask Him for anything, even temporal favors. There can be no doubt, however, that our prayer will be that much more beautiful and more in accord with His wishes if we ask Him for spiritual blessings. Some souls never ask for anything else. They never ask God for a particular favor, except, of course, for the grace to love Him better and to surrender themselves like children to His wisdom and love. Such an attitude is very Christian and proof of great confidence and detachment. As for prayer formulas, there are some excellent ones. Some, indeed, are hallowed, such as the Our Father and the liturgical prayers, and they are of priceless help. But over and above these, our devotion must have something more spontaneous and more personal about it. The former are meant as a stimulant for the latter. The most beautiful and holiest of formulas will take on their full value only if the person using them makes them His own and lives them. God wants to be adored in spirit and in truth. Now, the thoughts of others ordinarily strike us less forcefully than our own thoughts. Then too, many prayers books are written in an obsolete style. Add to this that constant repetition makes these formulas wear thin and eventually become almost meaningless, another source of distraction. How many prayers are mumbled in this way with the mind a thousand miles away! The term currently used adequately describes this widespread fault: these formulas are recited instead of prayed. And finally, many good souls cram their life with so many devotional practices that these become a burden, a hindrance to

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concentration, and to love for prayer. Such souls are the galley slaves of devotion. Other souls complicate prayer. Someone has taught them a good method; for example, "Go to the Father through the Son under the influence of the Holy Ghost." In itself this is a perfectly good formula, but they become its slave and in the end it hampers their spiritual advancement. They can no longer bid God the time of day without going through the whole mill. There are others whose method of prayer calls for six or fourteen points and, under no circumstances, regardless of their current needs, the state of their soul, or the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, would they ever think of omitting one. If God appeared to them in person, they would still say: "Excuse me, I still have four points to go." They confuse the means with the end. They remind me of the man who refused to get off the train although He had reached His destination. Such people might be dubbed maniacs of prayer. Another fault encountered is the abuse of reflection. There are some who spend the greater part of the time of meditation in analyzing the subject proposed by the meditation book from various aspects. All they do is turn over ideas. As the end of the period approaches, they quickly make resolutions and formulate affections because that is the correct thing to do. As a consequence, these will be reduced to a minimum. Their affection will be addressed to a far-off, impersonal God. Perhaps they have not even thought of putting themselves in His presence. They have spent the time in a deep-freeze. They confuse mental prayer, which is really prayer, with meditation, which is reflection. So intent are they on the latter that they are coiled up in an egotistical knot. Their exercise does not tend to unite them with God. Everything was there, except the one thing necessary: love. Sometimes the situation is even worse. The time set aside for mental prayer is spent reading a book explaining some point of Catholic teaching, and that is all. This case is more serious, for prayer is completely absent. Here the confusion is between mental prayer and study. Study is necessary, but each thing must be in its proper place. There are, likewise, some souls who know nothing but sentimentality. Nothing would please them more than to experience sweet, soul-stirring ,affections. In that case they more often seek themselves than God. For the rest, they leave their soul fallow and forget to improve their life. Although this sentimental enjoyment is impossible in times of aridity, these souls, nevertheless, expend great effort to 45

extract at least a sigh or a tear from their aridity. They rarely succeed — and less and less as time goes on, because thoughts must feed sentiment. And so, they grow discouraged and become disgusted with prayer. Finally, there is a group who make prayer something artificial, something divorced from life, one of many exercises completely unrelated to their other tasks. Each day they take the subject assigned in the meditation book, however foreign it may be to their personal duties and their present spiritual state. They meditate on it, for what it is worth, point by point. Then, when the time allotted for prayer has elapsed, they no longer think of it. I once saw a good brother gardener make His meditation of the "Duties of a Teacher." That is what the book said. And so He conscientiously plunged himself into the prayer of "quietude," seasoned now and then with snores! Needless to say, such an exercise, save for the merit of good will, adds up to about zero. It is not, therefore, surprising that after having subjected oneself in this way to the most disheartening conditions, people come and say: "I am distracted during prayer; I do not know how to pray."

Prayer: union with God What, then, is prayer? It is surely not limited to the prayer of petition, to getting on one's knees and reciting the rosary or the breviary, to meditating on heaven, hell, the virtues or the Passion of our Lord. It is all that plus something more. It is something at once more complex and more simple, something more profound, which soars above these types of prayer and communicates its essence to them. To pray is to be conscious of being with God. It is speaking to him, contemplating him, being attentive to His desires. To pray is to leap out of oneself in order to join God and embrace Him in mind, heart, and will. To pray is to love. Prayer is the act proper to love. It might be expressed very concisely in two words by saying that to pray is to unite oneself with God.3 3

The classic definition of St. John Damascene is now widely used. "Prayer is the elevation of the mind to God." The definition is certainly an excellent one provided we understand that the elevation of the mind terminates in union with God. Union with God gives the elevation meaning and constitutes the essential element of mental prayer. That is why I preferred the word "union" to that of "elevation, prayer provided we take the word "union" in a rather broad sense.

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Please note that I said it is to unite oneself with God, and not to be united with God. By sanctifying grace we are indwelt by God: it is a state. Whereas on God's part this union is always active, it is not active on our part during the moments when we are not thinking of him. We activate it by prayer. God has already stooped down to us, and we raise ourselves up to Him in a spontaneous thrust. Prayer is an act which can and must be continuous. It is a spiritual act — the movement of the soul toward God. A distinction is made between vocal prayer and mental prayer. Wise most natural thing is to express our feelings in words. But this external act takes its entire value from the interior disposition that prompts it. When we give expression to our inner dispositions through words, posture or actions, these are but the indication or the underpinnings of that spiritual activity which is the essence of prayer. The man who loves God without moving His lips certainly prays. He who speaks to Him without love or attention adores Him with His lips, but His heart is far from the Lord. He goes through the gestures of prayer, but He does not pray, except for the intention that inspired the act. Prayer is simple, although it assumes many forms. According to the object of prayer, four kinds of prayer are usually enumerated: adoration, expiation, petition and thanksgiving. They are the principal ones, but there are many, many more: as many as there are things we can speak to God about. But underlying all these forms, the substratum of prayer remains the same. Whether the soul asks God for some grace, or thanks him, whether it offers Him some act or sacrifice, whether it sings His praises in church or loses itself in contemplation, being content to adore him, these are but modes of one and the same act: the soul ascends toward God in order to unite itself with him. The beloved pays a visit to His divine Friend. The soul in love will have much or little to say to him. (The more it loves Him the less, it seems, it will have to say to him.) It will ask Him a favor or will offer Him a present; it will sing in His presence or simply smile at him. They all take their value from the heart that prompted them. Prayer is that visit to God. Prayer is the easiest thing in the world and our attitude toward it should be a natural one: a simple conversation with Him who always loves us and listens to us. Two friends engaged in a conversation do not encumber themselves with formulas. They follow no preconceived plan — unless one of them, in the course of His reading has found a passage 47

that better expresses His ideas and sentiments than He could have worded them. Beyond that, they chat at ease and follow the chain of their ideas. There is, of course, public prayer. It is a duty to take part in liturgical prayer. Here we must use the accepted prayers and observe the prescribed rites. This prayer, moreover, takes on the character of a cult. It is the official and corporate method of approach to a King. But God is not only King, He is our Father, and it is His expressed wish that we call Him our friend. In private prayer, which is what we are concerned with at the present, we should bear our Savior's invitation in mind and learn to dispense with protocol without, however, any loss of respect. Private prayer is essentially a personal affair. Each man goes to God as an individual. It remains for each one, then, to express His own feelings. Do it in all simplicity. Frequently, it will not be as easy to speak to God as it is to a human friend. We are so earthly. When we find we have nothing to say to him, we may then find it useful to follow a plan or use a book and seek inspiration. We will be trying to spark some thought or sentiment which for the time being escapes us. But these are simply aids to our temporary inability. In general and abstracting from public prayer, the most spontaneous prayer is the best prayer. Instead of going directly to God, everyone is free to approach Him through the intermediary of some saint, if by so doing He experiences more devotion or more confidence. Since the saints are God's friends, their prayer is more powerful than ours, especially if we choose our Blessed Mother as our mediatrix. But the saints will ever remain intermediaries. All prayer finally ends with God. Finally, prayer is an act of the soul. To pray is to occupy oneself with God, not only by using the mind, like the theologian who studies about God and His divine perfections, but using all our faculties, the mind, the will, and the heart, in wise that a union of the soul and God be brought about. In the last analysis, that is what prayer is: union with God. Its principal element lies in the affections, which are a unitive force. But the affections must be nourished by thought and supported by the action of the will. A distinction must be made between meditation and mental prayer. The first is a reflection of the mind. We talk to ourselves, and that in itself is not prayer. The second is a conversation. The soul goes to God and speaks to him. This is prayer. 48

Both are necessary, more or less depending on the times and e needs. It will often be useful to combine both in one and the same exercise. Meditation, to be completely effective, must end in mental prayer or better, be at one and the same time mental prayer: we must think in God's presence, tell Him our thoughts, and ask Him for light. Only then can it be said to be a prayer.

Prayer is love Prayer is union with God through love. But what love are we concerned with? Since in the practical order the will is man's superior faculty, the one held accountable for the good as well as the bad He does, the will then is the seat of love. And so, love has been defined as the conformity of our will with the will of God. This rectitude of the will induces man to do what God wants, and will translate itself into good works, zeal, and the practice of the virtues. St. Zita, patroness of housemaids, took this motto as a rule of life: "To do what pleases God." The first aspect of love is called "effective" love. Today, we would call it the love of the will. It directs our active life and embraces not only our external activity, but all our spiritual life, every voluntary effort internal as well as external, done to please God. Perfection is attained when this dovetailing of our will with God has become our one constant concern, when it motivates all our activity: an ideal, it seems, difficult of attainment. But love is still far from satisfied. Contemplating the adorable face of the Lord, the soul is moved by His beauty and fathomless love and, touched by the deep-rooted desire to return to God, it cries out: "No longer only your will, my God, but yourself!" Goaded by this need for God, it will strive to know Him better, to give itself to him, and to possess him. That is the second aspect of love: "affective" love, or love of the heart, the seed of the contemplative life. Love of the heart is less essential than the love of the will. Love of the will is sufficient to maintain that charity in us which preserves us in the state of grace: "He who has my commandments and keeps them, He it is who loves me" (Jn. 14,21). But love of the heart perfects the love

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of the will. Whereas effective love is limited to the will, affective love embraces all our faculties. When we recollect ourselves and contemplate God, the mind is more profoundly absorbed than when it is simply concerned with serving Him. All our occupations should be shot through with the thought of God. It must become a sort of idee fixe (in the good meaning of the expression) and eventually become a motivating idea. But we know from our own psychological experience that an idea persists in the mind only if the heart has been touched. For then, the heart will also be a part and parcel of affective love, even a principal part of it, as the word indicates. Then love will have its full meaning: it will correspond to the idea which the word "love" spontaneously evokes and which is also its present-day meaning, the one St. Francis de Sales chose when He defined love as "the movement, the outpouring, and the yearning of the heart toward good, the object of its pleasure." When this disposition of the heart becomes a passion that invades, urges, and carries the soul along in a blessed violence, then will our love have been brought to perfection. Only such passionate love can succeed in filling the void in us. When we have given everything to God, only then are we truly living. The importance of this affective element in the spiritual life is immediately evident. Because it is unstable, at least in the ways by which it makes itself felt and because these emotional manifestations are not necessary to establish charity in us, affective love is secondary. But, in general, it will be necessary to strive for the perfection of love and, especially, to perfection in prayer. The more this affective love overflows into the will and induces it to do everything with zeal and courage in order to please God, the more it will be the best helpmate of effective love. Better still, love of the heart, if genuine, will itself necessarily be love of the will. That is what is meant by loving God with our whole soul and all our faculties. The result is the contemplative life. Please note in passing, the word "contemplation" may lead to confusion: for, though the faculties are engaged in it, the heart plays the principal role, and not reflection. We think of God in order to awaken our love; and the resolutions of the will are the fruit of this love. St. Bonaventure defined contemplation as "an affection based on meditation." It is essentially love.

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And love need not necessarily be felt. Sentiment, we shall see, is only one facet of the will. Again I repeat, the seat of love is the will, and love is the state of a will that has been conquered.

Perfect Prayer Prayer is always an act of love of God. Even in the most humble prayer of petition there is an element of love, for the request gives evidence of great filial confidence in our heavenly Father and touches His heart. But that is but an inferior degree of love. It can and must grow constantly if prayer is to be perfect, for our prayer will be proportionate to our love. This "ladder of Paradise," as Guigues the Carthusian calls it, has an infinity of degrees. Between the love of the good woman who recites an Our Father before a statue of St. Anthony so that He may send her a tenant and the love which St. Francis of Assisi had while sharing on La Verna the Passion of Christ, there is an abyss. It is readily seen that to climb from one degree to another between these two extremes, many an effort at purification and interior concentration is necessary. Let us admit outright that such an ascent exceeds our efforts. But God is there. If He assists a Christian in the performance of the smallest good work, He most certainly assists in the work par excellence, the opus dei, the one thing above all others expected of us. His grace is ever active in us. The gifts of the Holy Ghost are in our soul as soon as charity reigns there, awaiting but our good will to awaken the divine possibilities in us. Prayer is an act, but not exclusively ours. It is the action of God as much as, and more so than, our own. In proportion as the soul gives itself, this divine operation becomes stronger, more invading. In the end, it dominates the part man plays. The soul becomes docile under this divine ascendancy — a docility, however, eminently active. And the spirit of love there kindles a furnace of love, which from then on burns deep within the soul and devours every other interest. "I have sought Him whom my heart loves." The man who has fallen in love with sovereign Beauty goes in search of the Beloved. No matter what He does or what happens to him, His thoughts, His sighs,

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and His desires constantly ascend heavenward. He seeks God, and calls God His good, His hope, His love. And God answers in His own ineffable way. The soul has soared up toward him, and He who is love and but waited this gesture stoops to draw the soul to himself, to embrace it and give it every good. And in this embrace He makes the soul forget the world, gently detaches it from everything, and captivates it with His love. Then, filled to overflowing, the soul cries out: "I have found Him whom my heart loves, and I shall never let Him go." This elan, this meeting and repose in God, are what make perfect prayer. The soul has become a contemplative soul. Henceforth, prayer is a habit, a permanent act, a life.

Prayer and life This is what God in His infinite love expects of us and holds out to us. Behold the blessed transformation toward which we should strive with all our strength as the goal of our earthly existence, a state already heavenly, and one which will be prolonged and reach full bloom in the beatific vision: to reach the point where there are not only prayers in our life, but where our life becomes a prayer. The central truth of the doctrine of prayer is that prayer is our life, because to love is our life, and prayer is the expression of love. We must pray always because we must love always. Lovers indeed understand this doctrine very well and ingeniously apply it to their human love. Ask them what they are thinking of and the answer will be of their love. Ask them why they do this or that: for their love; why they beautify themselves: again, for their love. This thought, this passion is the very center of their being; it never leaves them; it pursues them even in their dreams. Their love is their life. It should be the same with the love of God. Has he, infinite Beauty, Good, and Love, less rights than a poor creature to our fervor and the total gift of self? Should He have less attraction for us than an imperfect creature whose every charm comes from God? The truth is that for the man who loves God, all is love and everything becomes a prayer: His work, His diversions as well as His sorrows are prayers. Whether He talks, eats, or sleeps, all is quickened

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by a very real and habitual intention of love and is all done to please God. All is prayer. His heart is a constantly burning censer scenting every place He goes with a perfume and transforming it into a sanctuary. And what we in a more special way call prayer is for Him but a more profound opportunity for recollection, a long-desired moment when, free of all cares, He withdraws to the center of His love in order to perfect an indissoluble union. This seclusion of the soul at certain hours is necessary because of its weakness and the many causes which constantly loosen the bond. With perfect souls it is a need: they sigh for the time when, free of their secondary obligations, they can devote themselves to the essential business to which they are attracted. Since their hearts tend toward God, they have but to hand the reins to Him in order to live their life fully. With the imperfect, it is a necessity: the spring has been released and needs rewinding. Their hearts veer to the earthly. It must be taken in hand, like a spirited horse, by the bit and bridle, and brought back on the right road. Two excesses must be avoided. Under the pretext that prayer is a life, some would minimize the role of the hour set aside for prayer. "If one lives habitually with God," they say, "the goal has been attained. Why this hour of prayer? To do so is but a temptation to assign one's prayer to this time and then forget it the remainder of the day, as so frequently happens." The answer is that it is one thing to be ideal and another to be practical, that in general we do not reach the state of living habitually with God if we do not do so in a special way at certain times (if we do not rewind the spring). Secondly, we must avoid the error of those who put everything in the time of prayer or in certain formalistic practices. The latter imagine that everything is finished once they have attended Mass, recited their office or the rosary and made two half-hours of meditation. Once that is over, they give no thought to prayer. For them it is one of their many daily duties severed from their other occupations. They have lost sight of the central truth, the very meaning of prayer, which is to be a life, and the purpose of the exercises of piety, which is to impregnate our day with piety. Thus partitioned off, mental prayer is sterile. This is one of the most habitual causes of failure. The truth is that a life of prayer and the special exercise of mental prayer are both necessary and that one must bolster the other. Spiritual exercises are needed to nourish piety and, if we would persevere, they must be disciplined and assigned fixed times. On the other hand, they 53

cannot be isolated from life: they must be prepared by the life that precedes them and be a preparation for the life that follows. We pray well during the time of mental prayer only if we pray always. We will pray always only if we make our mental prayer well. For the rest, understand that to pray is to love, and strive to love God always and perfectly. Experience will teach you without anyone having to tell you, that both are necessary.

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The Prayer of Conversation How We Can Pray Always Life of prayer and exercises of piety Prayer is a life sustained by exercises. of its very nature it is a continuous act. All our efforts must tend toward this continuity of prayer; over and above the exercises of piety, there is the life of piety; besides prayers, there is prayer, the life of prayer. Prayer is a vital act: it must take root in life and bear fruit in life. It must be a life itself. That explains why, in order to treat of prayer, we have been led — and we shall be led again — to talk of renunciation, faith, the virtues, good works, of the entire gamut of the spiritual life. It is all one. Sanctity is perfect union with God. Now, to pray is to be united with God. Prayer is the soul of all other good works and transforms them into itself: which shows how the act of prayer is the most necessary act there is, and that it is constantly necessary. We must always pray, just as we must always breathe. Many Christians fulfill certain exercises of piety, but forget the life of prayer. Of the two, the second is the most frequently neglected — sometimes completely ignored. Yet it is the most deeply important; the life of prayer is the goal of life. The ultimate purpose of prayers themselves is the life of prayer, the life of love. It alone fulfills the wish of the Master: we "must always pray and not lose heart" (Lk. 18, 1) do it three times? Perhaps, alas, night comes without your having once reestablished this indispensable contact, and you despair. But why, since you want to, since you are trying? I know what your answer is: "I never think of it; I never happen to think of it. My work always distracts me, despite my good intentions." Well, since your memory is at fault, improve your memory. That is what you must work on primarily in order to set this little exercise in motion. Rectify the attention. That evidently is the first thing to do. There is one difficuly, however. To think of God, it is necessary to think of thinking of him, to be careful to pay attention. So we are in a vicious circle. There lies the faulty mechanism, the answer to why the spring does not catch and why the machine runs wild. 55

What can be done? Get out of the circle. We can escape from the vicious circle through an expedient. Since you cannot at once reduce the cause of your distractions (which is your erring heart), do something about the occasions of the distractions. What are these occasions? What is it that takes your attention away from God? It is what you see, hear, do, and what happens to you: it is the entire sensible world that appeals to the natural tendency of your mind to be impressed by the things of earth. These enemies must be made friends. Induce them to change their language. Make them speak of God — since that is their role — instead of talking nonsense. Here is how you can do it. Fortunately, the circle is not unbroken. There are times when you are attentive to supernatural things. Right now, for example, while you are reading this. Take advantage of these wonderful moments in order to foresee the bad ones. Be prepared for the attack. Think now, for example, what will occasion the first distraction, and neutralize it in advance. Suppose that the next thing you do after this reading is eat dinner. The table, the food, the companionship of your family will be an almost infallible occasion of relapsing into the natural world: the farewell to prayer. Well, couple a supernatural thought to these things right now. Say to yourself: "God is there in the dining room (or in the refectory). As I enter it and see the head of the house or my superior, or perhaps take my own place at the head of the table, I shall think of the presence of my heavenly Father, and I will greet Him first as the real Master of the house." Think about this seriously; live that moment in spirit; see it in all its detail, and make it very definite. When you cross the threshold and stand before the table it will all spontaneously come back to you. Why? What has taken place is what is known in psychology as an association of ideas, or the association of a picture with an idea. They were so well tied together in the preceding reflection that when the one presents itself the other immediately and almost infallibly comes to mind. What you did was to couple the idea of God in your mind with the sight of a person (you could just have well taken an object). A solidarity was established between them. The sight of the person made you think of God. Some associations are automatic things, for example, objects whose very reason for existence stimulate piety, such as the crucifix and holy pictures, practices inaugurated for that very reason, such as prayers 56

said in common, grace before meals, for instance — provided we do not say them too poorly. Often, however, through repetition or habitual dissipation, the solder becomes loose. We look at pious pictures; we recite prayers ... and we pursue the flow of our thoughts. We must reestablish the association between the words or signs and the idea they are intended to suggest, by saying to ourselves in advance: "When I shall look at a crucifix, I will greet Christ; when I make the sign of the cross for grace before or after meals, I will remind myself that I am talking to God." In other words, we first live in thought what we want to live later on in action. As a proof of your good will, suppose you do a little rehearsing right now. It will be all the better. Go and look at a crucifix and say a short prayer. The next time you look at it, the same prayer will come to your lips. "What a lot of drilling," you may say! Perhaps, but that is what I call taking life seriously; and it is far more intelligent than living like a scatterbrain on the fringe of "reality." Other associations have to be manufactured. And, according to your needs, you must create as many of them as possible. It is your attention that breaks loose and wanders. Since you cannot follow such a flighty thing nor keep a sharp eye on it, you must set some traps for it ahead of time, put some stones in its road for it to stumble over. I recommended the same procedure as a means of reminding yourself of your thought of faith. You now see that the two exercises can become one; and it will be an excellent idea to unite the two. Then, you adopted as your slogan "To please God." Change such an impersonal formula, and imagine now that God is looking at you. Talk to Him and not to yourself. "My God, I adore you; I would like to make you happy. To show you my good will, I will try to do this well. Help me." You immediately realize that such a small exercise becomes more alive. It takes on the complexion of love and is a flight towards God, a prayer. With a little good will you will find a store of these little schemes, beginning, perhaps, with a knot in your handkerchief, that will enable you to regain contact with God a hundred times a day; and this contact will rehabilitate you in the life of prayer. You say that you are habitually distracted in your work. Put a holy picture on your table or in some conspicuous place and let it serve as a memory-aid, a signal, a notice. What will happen? At a given moment your eyes will fall on the picture. Since you put it there to remind you of the presence of God, the idea of that holy Presence will 57

swoop down upon your mind and you will cry out: "My Lord and my God!" Then, go on with your work under the eye of God and try to keep yourself in that disposition for as long as possible without straining your mind or distracting yourself from your work. The thought may not remain with you very long, but a little later on another glance at the picture and a new flight will unite you with God. Everything will go well for two or three days. Then, little by little, you will notice that you look at the picture and think of everything else under the sun. But do not be discouraged. That is normal. These means quickly wear out, because they are artificial. What should you do? Replace the ineffectual sign by another, just as a dull blade is replaced by a new one. In place of the picture put a piece of paper, a book, any object, no matter what, as long as it attracts attention. When that has served its purpose, replace it by something else. The sign need not necessarily be something pious. It will be adequate if it plays the pious role of associating itself with God and of reminding you to return to God. Whether it be a picture, a flower, or a pebble, it will be good provided it fulfills its function. If, however, you work with others, it is almost always better to limit yourself to discreet signs, ones that attract only your attention. Such things ought to be personal. If you work in a factory, for example, you could use a small chalk mark on your machine or on the ground, or a belt which gives the appearance of being there purely by chance. If you work in a bank, it might very well be a displaced piece of paper, or your notebook set in an unusual place, and so on. In reality, all creation ought to play this role. That is why creatures were made. All of them have been given us by God and should co-operate in making us praise and love Him. The saints did just that. St. Francis immortalized this thought in His Canticle of the Creatures. Although we are not saints, we should try to become saints. We know that lovers exchange pictures, flowers, and presents. God acts in the same way with us, because He loves us: He gives us presents. He has given us not just a few flowers, but all the flowers of creation. He has surrounded us with almost an infinity of good and beautiful things. Why? To make us think of him, to think of Him again and again and always.... The beings created by Him are so many signs which ought to remind us of him. Why cause Him sorrow and inflict injury on Him by not profiting by them, by turning His gifts against Him and separating ourselves from Him through the things He has given us? 58

Let us be frank about it and admit our bad manners. We pocket the gifts and forget to say thanks. Cease being ungrateful to Him who loves you. Recapture one by one all of these things He has given you, and may all of them, little by little, regain their reason for existence which is to make you think of Him always in order that you may love Him always. This awareness of the presence of God, this "exercise of the presence of God," to use a consecrated expression, is most necessary for the life of prayer. It is a prerequisite for all the others and it naturally stimulates them. Out of sight, out of mind. Remoteness, silence, distraction, slowly kill love. This is exactly your history. For want of seeing God, your love for Him grew cold. Yet, He was not far away. He was always there, but you did not look at him. He was close to you, in you, and you were unmindful of him. Return to him. He is always waiting for you. Think of Him and lovingly look at him. This look will re-awaken whatever dormant love there is in you. Put Him within range of your vision and He will soon be in your heart. To walk always in the presence of God would suffice to make us saints, for everything else, prayer and virtues, will follow. Look at a lover in the presence of His beloved. He is a different man. Look at the soldier who feels He is being watched by His commander. The least movement is done to perfection. If the officer goes away, the tension slackens. We should always be conscious of the eye of God on us in order to act at all times with perfection. We should always be looking at Him in order to be always praying. It is the surest remedy for all our weaknesses and all our temptations. The times when you sinned were the times you forgot God. You were far from him, or, at least, your closeness to Him had relaxed. For the person united to God in thought and heart, sin is morally impossible as long as the union lasts. Fire and water never mix. Such a soul is always ready to receive divine inspirations and to follow them enthusiastically. St. Benedict added this solemn advice to His rule: "We must above all things avoid forgetting God." Do not be surprised if I insist on this point and urge you to use an abundance of means. Perhaps you find all this very artificial and a little childish. I agree; but before God are we not children and students? Remember that 59

to preserve the habitual memory of God we have temporarily sidetracked the intermediate steps and that our only purpose is to make the best of whatever ability you may have along these lines. To make up for your shortcomings you must use artificial means. These means are crutches. The man who stands on two solid legs has no need of them; but the man who limps is very glad to have them. With them He can at least walk around after a fashion. All these precautions, these little inventions and manifold reminders, mnemonically bring God back into your life. The will is given the opportunity to unite itself with Him despite the contrary tendencies of the heart. The use of these eye-catchers gradually corrects the latter. These repeated acts develop a habit, a disposition that helps the soul to live in the presence of God. The soul grows accustomed to living in its spiritual home. It removes the old furniture we have spoken of and buys new things. In the end it will come to feel much more at home than it ever did before. There will be no thought of returning to its former condition. Thinking of God will have become natural. The soul will be able to leave the little reminders aside, just as a recovered sick person does His crutches. But use crutches as long as you need them.

Seeing God But how can we see God? He is invisible. The answer is, through faith. Faith is the eye of the soul. Through it we discern the supernatural world. Perhaps that does not mean very much to you. We are so clumsy when it comes to handling spiritual truths! So, let us try to understand this by attempting something easier. In the charming fairy tale, The Bluebird, Princess Florine adores Prince Charming. But her stepmother locks her up in the tower and the prince is changed into a bird. Florine calls to Him from her opened window: "Bluebird, bluebird, blue as the sky, "Fly to me now, there's nobody by." And the bluebird comes immediately. That is how they find one another and converse pleasantly, until the day the enchantment is broken. The story ends, as we might expect, with their being happily married.

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That is your history. The King of Heaven loves you. Not being able to show himself directly to you during the time of this exile, He comes to you hidden under the veil of creatures. As soon as you call him, He is there, quicker than the bluebird, for He was expecting your call. He is always close to you, and He has resolved not to leave you until the day when, once the evil spirits have been vanquished, He will lead you into His palace of glory where He will show himself to you and will espouse you forever. Is it not wonderful to have such assurance? Think of the person you love most in the world. Suppose that while He is absent a magician allows Him to return, to be there, hidden, near you, looking at you, listening to you and speaking to you. Would that not be a festive occasion, and would it not be enough to brighten your hours of solitude? Would you find it difficult to be attentive to His close presence, to see Him constantly through the eyes of your soul, to speak to Him and love him? That is the way you should act with God. You do not see him. Your bodily eyes discern only matter; but you know that He is there, that He is looking at you, listening to you, helping you, and showering you with love and care. You can talk to him, tell Him of your love, your good will, your desires, your cares, your difficulties, knowing all the time that He understands them all and that everything will heal, for He is the allpowerful King who loves you infinitely. Your eyes do not see His face, your ears do not hear His voice; but He has touched your soul and has given you the gift of faith. This you know with certainty. And if you are attentive, you will hear the sweet and mysterious voice of the Spirit in you talking to your soul, and you will understand what He is saying to you. To know that God is there, to believe it, truly and intensely, such is the happy science, the firm and fond faith that makes God present to us. For presence means not only being close one to another, but to be aware of it and to be able to converse with each other. Two men asleep in the same room are not present to each other. They are unaware of each other. But as soon as they awaken, there is presence. So God is always present. All that is needed to make Him present is for us to become aware of it, to open the eyes of our soul with the look of faith. That is what we mean by seeing God spiritually.

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By frequent and constant exercises, this look of the soul becomes keener, our faith becomes stronger. Finally, our certitude approaches evidence. Then, the soul is happy. Yes, in the beginning it may be difficult, not only because of a lack of supernatural habits, but also because the imagination is constantly thwarting the spiritual glances of God. Our imagination is in truth an irritating companion, and all the more annoying because it does not listen to reason. Well, if you cannot subjugate it, why not interest it in the undertaking? It, too, was made for God, just as the mind and heart. Let it do its work, which is to support, instead of oppose, your periodic thinking of God. If, in the beginning we do not succeed in keeping our eyes fixed on God, it is often advisable to muster the imagination. Imagine, for example, your heavenly Father as an august, majestic, and venerable old man, as you have seen Him depicted. Self-opinionated people will object: "God is not an old man walking around in the clouds." Let them be. Curiously enough, they poke fun at a pious soul who tries to imagine God as best it can, yet they are the very ones who go into ecstacies before Michelangelo's Creator in the Sistine chapel. See how illogical they are. The truth is that our thoughts are always tinged by our imagination, even unconsciously. When men pretend to conceive of God without it, they are the ones who relegate Him to the clouds. They have no reason to be proud. Every human concept applied to God is necessarily as deficient as is a product of the imagination. Both are but analogies, ways of coming closer to the Infinite. The Church is no iconoclast. She loves beautiful representations. If she fills her sanctuaries with them, she does so to bolster our devotion. The Church knows man. For the rest, if you fear falling into reality, remember that since the Incarnation God, in the person of the Word, has a bodily form. He knows our needs; He knows that we can neither think nor love without the world of sense. So, wishing to make love easy He became one of us and showed himself under the lovable traits of His humanity. Hence, if you want to see God easily and love Him ardently, look especially at the Word become Man, Jesus, our Savior — the meekest, greatest, the most beautiful of the children of men. You know His life, what He did, what He said, what He thought, and the extent of His love during His earthly sojourn which He undertook to save you, how He still loves, and how He shows you His heart aglow with love to touch yours. It is easy to picture

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Him such as the Gospel depicts him. And that corresponds with a safe reality. There are some souls who find it easier to speak to the Father, the Holy Ghost, or to the glorious Trinity. Their look goes directly to the Divinity. Let them follow their attraction, provided God so seconds it. But ordinarily it is easier to attain to God through Christ. He is the natural intermediary, being both God and man, both the way and the goal. He is God within our reach, yet sufficiently accessible as man for us to know and love Him according to the normal way our faculties act. And so, through Him the majority of souls easily find the road of prayer. Represent Jesus as He was, for example, in the crib, a sweet, gracious child already full of love; or as the good Master walking along the roads of Galilee teaching His disciples, preaching to the people, multiplying His miracles; so patient, so understanding, so wonderfully sympathetic; or contemplate your Savior suffering for you on the cross, so beautiful in His boundless sorrow and sublime generosity; or see Him risen from the grave appearing to Magdalene and the amazed apostles. Transport yourself to the country of Palestine at the time of these happenings, and follow Him with the disciples and the holy women. It will not be a simple incursion into history, as it would be for any one else, for even then He knew you and you were present to him. Or change your perspective and imagine that He is close to you, in your room, your office, your workshop, wherever you are, that He is following you everywhere, looking at you, smiling at you, and helping you. You are walking. Imagine that He is accompanying you, not like a material body, but in a divine way. You are working. See Him hovering over you and interested in what you are doing. You are at table and He is next to you. You are in bed and He stays near you, and keeps vigil while you sleep. There is the danger, of course, that a too prolonged effort will tire the mind and also that we may want a too exact and detailed picture of His face. It is better to let Him keep His mystery. If you have no imagination, you can make use of the most beautiful holy picture you can find. In the course of time, as your faith sharpens, these traits will become blurred and give way to a more spiritual form. Then, the role of the imagination will be unnecessary. It will not be so much a question of seeing God "near you" as of seeing Him "in you," "not closer to your body," but closer to your soul, as united to your soul. 63

But, in the beginning, the first method is ordinarily easier. It is more adapted to our habitual way of seeing things. The exercise should be restricted to these two points: seeing God near you through faith, and this is essential; and using your imagination as long as it is useful, abandoning it as soon as it no longer is. Everyone will know this from experience.

Speaking to God The last thing is: What shall we say to God when we look at Him? To tie a knot in your handkerchief is easy; and so, too, is it easy to picture our Lord. But to talk to him! For certain souls this is where the exercise seems to become complicated. Well, it need not. This is the simplest thing of all. I shall prove it to you in one word. What should you talk to God about? Anything. You see, you need not look far. I have told you that prayer is an affectionate visit paid to God, and intimate conversation, a heart-to-heart talk. When you talk with your parents, do you tire yourself out couching your thoughts in beautiful language? Do you look for an abstract and profound subject of conversation? Do you prepare a discourse before coming into their presence? That would be ridiculous. You talk simply of the things that interest you and them, and, if you feel at ease, you will talk about the first thing that comes to your mind. Do the same with God. When you pray, speak to Him of what you are interested in at the moment. He will always be interested in it, since He loves you. Artificiality kills prayer. Are you working? Then, talk to Jesus about your work. He knows from experience what it is, having toiled in the workshop of St. Joseph. Furthermore, work is a virtue and He made it a law. You are doing His work. Offer it to him. It is the correct way to unite yourself to Him at the moment. You are eating? That, too, is a good work. Yes, it is. Do it under His glance, with the intention of serving Him better, and thank Him for His divine Providence. You are very much concerned about something? You surely have to give it some thought. So how can you pray at the same time? Think it over with Him and talk to Him about it.

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You may perhaps be asking yourself: how can it be fitting that I engage His attention with such trivial things, matters that are so removed from the supernatural world? Is that really praying? And can He be interested in such humdrum things, he, the Eternal Word? O man of little faith! When will you begin to believe in the love of your God and that if He says to you: "I love you," He means it, and divinely so. Certainly, He loves you, and He himself said that He wanted to treat you as a friend. Every intimacy is allowed you and He delights in it, without derogating in any way from the adoration which is His due. And that for the very reason of His greatness and sublime perfection. The mark of true greatness is simplicity. The more intelligent, understanding, and good a friend is the more He puts you at ease and inspires confidence. Your Savior is absolute intelligence and love. That is His greatness. You pay homage to His divinity when you use no roundabout ways with him. With men you have to watch your words somewhat. They are so easily offended, so slow to understand, so inclined to rash judgment. But Christ understands everything and excuses everything, as soon as your heart is sincere, for He understands and loves to perfection. He will never find you ridiculous and will never interpret your words wrongly. He asks of you but one thing: don't be a naughty child. He will accept everything, save sin. You say these things are natural things. No, they are not. As soon as you talk to Him about them, as soon as you lift them up to him, as soon as you offer them to him, they are supernatural. "Whether you eat or drink, or do anything else, do all for the glory of God" (I Cor. to, 31). If we are to do everything for His glory, then we can talk to Him about anything and everything, and transform it into a prayer. You have been taught to pray in a style that is foreign to your life, whereas prayer ought to be your life, ought to be impregnated with all the details of your real existence and well up constantly from all that constitutes it. Are you annoyed about something? Tell Him about it. Ask Him to help you bear it, and offer Him your sorrow. It you are happy, say to him: "Thanks, Jesus." If you have been distracted, excuse yourself, and under His eye, examine how you can avoid forgetting Him again. You have committed some fault. Well, offer that to Him also, by asking His pardon. I mentioned before that He does not accept sin. He does, as soon as we join repentence to it, for He loves to forgive. Sin and the sorrow

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with it is one of the presents we can give him. And who of us does not have an inexhaustible mine of such presents? Supposing you have just had a good thought. Mull it over with him. It will germinate better that way. You see a beautiful flower-bed in bloom. Offer it to Him for His art and power. If you are tempted, call on His help and lean on him, your Protector. Your struggle against temptation will be just that many subjects of conversation with him. Do these little exercises of faith and detachment while talking to him. In brief, let what you say in prayer be an integral part of your life, let it spring from it and penetrate it. That is the practical way to pray. Your prayer, furthermore, will interest you. And the simpler it is, the better it will be. It sometimes happens that your mind is so tired that you can think of nothing to say. Well, don't say anything. Be satisfied to look at him. But if you cannot do that without words, if words are necessary to sustain your faith — and such is the case for many people — then, have some words ready. It matters not what they are as long as they are practical, that they are related to your life, and repeat them very simply. For example: "My God, have mercy on me! Lord, help me!" Or: "My Jesus, I love you; you know very well that I love you; or: Mary, my Mother, teach me to love your Son." And after that? After that, begin all over, and say the same invocation as much as you want and can and each time that you raise your eyes to God. What a wonderful prayer! Love, you know, dispenses with variants. Or say some prayer that you know from memory: the Our Father, or the Hail Mary. Say it slowly with as much attention and affection as possible, without trying to put anymore into it than that. If, on the contrary, your mind is quick and fervent, then all is very simple, and I have nothing for the time being to teach you. Give your heart free rein.

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A Day Spent With God Application What follows is extremely important for the success of your spiritual life. If you are intent on transforming your life and on making rapid progress in the art of prayer, all you need do is apply what I am about to propose. You will be shown how the matter thus far treated can be applied in a concrete way to the details of your everyday life. Since this chapter is so basically down to earth, you should read it in a practical way. As each exercise is suggested, you must try to find a way to transpose it into your life. There is no longer any question of understanding, but of acting. Read this intelligently, and apply it with common sense. You will perhaps be surprised at the great number of recommended practices and, taken together, they will seem very complicated and difficult to execute. I shall, indeed, enter into a multiplicity of details; and I shall not hesitate to offer you a great deal of advice and to suggest many practices, for it is my personal conviction that too much emphasis cannot be placed on actually achieving a life in union with God. A passing exhortation to walk in the presence of God is not enough, nor does it suffice to dwell on it theoretically. You have already been told to walk in His presence a hundred times. Have you practiced it that often? Experience proves that few persevere very long in the practice of this exercise if they are not helped in a very concrete and pointed way. Cognizant of our weakness and of the infinite number of distractions which tend to turn us away from God, it is but right that I facilitate your task, that I offer it to you all prepared, that I go, if need be into the minutiae and urge you to recollect yourself with as much insistence as the enemy does to alienate you from God. Above all, keep this important advice in mind: of all the points treated, it does not follow that you must use them all from the very beginning. Such an excess would only beget discouragement and fickleness. 4 Go about this energetically but progressively. Of the means 4

"The method I have chosen makes it imperative that I repeat this admonition at the risk of making it threadbare. My method of procedure is not the most appealing possible. The dabbler who merely reads these pages will find them very trying. But those who try to find help from them will not complain about the great number of

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I am about to suggest to you, take what you can shoulder without doing harm to your other duties. Several will undoubtedly suffice for a beginning. In brief, take as many as possible, but do not take more than you can reasonably practice. Both of these recommendations are equally important. And finally, approach this exercise with noble generosity and with a fervent desire to make progress. Be sold on its importance. You must take this spiritual exercise quite seriously. Despite the thousand and one little things of which it is comprised, its consequences for you will be immeasurable. You will rediscover your wasted life; you will recenter it on Truth, and decide on the strategy that will give you access to the kingdom of the lovers of God. All great things are made up of countless details. Count the stones in a cathedral, the brush strokes that went into the adornment of the Sistine Chapel. Do not be disheartened over the fact that the method is somewhat artificial and makes use of material objects, that it is made up of small practices which seem to weigh it down and "mechanize" devotion. Yes, it is material, complex, and quite artificial, as are the crutches, the bandages, the wheelchair a sick person uses. As for him, so too for you, all these aids are necessary. Once you can dispense with all that "physical therapy," so much the better to be sure; but you must wait for that day to dawn. Meanwhile, use the methods of a novice. In the beginning you will think that they are complicated and tedious, but take courage. It will not always be so. Once you have acquired the habit, they will become easy. 5 Soon, results will make them interesting and you will spontaneously look for them. Just as a scab falls off a healed wound, so too at the given moment you will lay these methods aside, and all your patient labor will be rewarded. Yes, that is the way novices proceed.... Yet, advanced souls could still profitably take up some of these humble means, especially when they notice that their life of union with God is beginning to lose its tone or when they become aware that some contingency habitually severs this union. practical suggestions I have given. Experience will show them how beneficial this very multiplicity is. They are the only ones for whom this book is written. A grammar is never an enticing book to read, but the student who desires to master his mother-tongue will always find that his grammar textbook is not complete enough. 5 It only takes 21 days to make a new good habit.

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Relay methods and reminders: evening exercise You must prepare for the following day the night before. In the evening before you retire, recollect yourself for a few minutes with the intention of preparing your strategy for the following day. Having recalled to mind the presence of God, say to him: "My God, you are here ... I adore you. I thank you for the graces you have given me today. Good Shepherd that You are, You have held out your hand to me. You have brought me closer to You and I wish to express my gratitude. Tomorrow, I wish to offer You to the best of my ability a day that will be consecrated to You from morning to night. At this moment, I am going to see what I can do about not forgetting You tomorrow. Help me, I beg of You." Then, without losing sight of Him, under his eye and with Him examine how you will behave tomorrow. A day, twenty-four hours, is a long time. There is every reason to fear that, despite your good will, you will not reach the end without having lost the thread. So what are you going to do about it? Proceed by steps. Arrange relays throughout the course of the day, moments when you will be at leisure to enter within yourself, to restock yourself for the next period. From relay to relay you will reach the end of the day without too many hindrances. Your first concern tonight will be to decide on the relays, to discover opportunities for recollection. If you are a religious, the time set aside for meditation is ideal for this purpose. If you are not, you must find some, and with just a little good will, you will. To be specific, your morning prayers, or attendance at holy mass might be your first relay. Next, pause for a second relay around noontime, either before or after lunch, and do a little forecasting. Where are you at that time of day? At home? If so, then there will be no difficulty in isolating yourself and concentrating for two minutes. If you are on your way home, is there no church close by you might enter for a few minutes? If you had some weighty problem to solve, you would find some easy way to withdraw yourself and mull it over. Then, do the same for this matter. A third relay toward the end of the afternoon would be beneficial, while your night prayer could be the fourth.

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Having arranged that part, go on to prepare the next leg of the journey: the period of time that will elapse until the morning relay. Do not say: "I have nothing to do during that time; it is night." We must pray always, even at night. Not that I am asking you to rob some of your sleep and to spend the night on your knees, as is reported of some of the saints. Sleep well, but sleep in the presence of God. Pious souls keep themselves so well in the "state of prayer" that on awakening they spontaneously raise their thoughts to God. This is the state of prayer that you must try to preserve in yourself. The first thing to do is to steep yourself deeply in the divine presence. Think about it intensely. Since this first relay takes place most of the time in your room, you must once and for all install Our Lord there. Look at your room, where God is with you, and think of your past: "My God, to think that you have always been here and I have been so unaware of it! How many times have I consciously entered this room with you? How many times have I talked to you here? Alas! I abandoned you at the door and, completely occupied with myself, I spent hours forgetting about you. Forgive me, Jesus; forgive me. I will no longer inflict this sorrow on You. Henceforth, my bedroom will be an oratory and the sanctuary of Your love." Next, prepare a few helps for the night and the morning: a number of reminders that will automatically bring your thoughts back to God. Go to the extent of displacing a few small pieces of furniture. And see to it right now as you begin to take definite steps to better your spiritual life that you are united to God, that you are imbued with the prayer you have just said. It is easy now: you are alone; your attention is not divided. The time is favorable to prayer, to the art of learning to join prayer to humble actions. It is up to you to find your own remindersignals. To help you, here are a few suggestions. If you sometimes awaken during the night, each awakening must be sanctified by prayer. In order to remember to do this, hang a rosary around your neck, or wind it around your wrist, and so forth. As reminders for when you get up, use a displaced chair, an object on the table, a picture on the wall facing your bed, a cross on your alarm clock: something unusual and very apparent; a sign on the sink: a holy picture on the mirror, or some other object that will catch your attention as you wash. And then this too: a reminder on your doorknob, a paper, a handkerchief, anything in order not to forget God as you are about to 70

leave your room. And do all this smiling at the Lord: He is pleased with you. One remark: if you are married, there will surely be reason (unless there is an agreement between you and your spouse) to reduce these measures and to proceed with discretion. For the rest, if the number of these frightens you, take only one or two to begin with, and vary them from one day to the next. Circumstances so that you may be able to find him there when the time comes. Say for example: "As I sit down to lunch, I shall renew my faith in the presence of God." (I presuppose that you say grace before meals.) "When I turn a certain corner where there is a fruit store, I will greet our Lord and I shall thank him for giving us fruit." Every time the clock strikes, or every time I look at my wrist watch, I shall repeat my ejaculatory prayer." Or, according to the nature of your work: "As I enter my office, stop my drill, turn on my stove, every time I pick up a pencil, open my file, as soon as the train or the bus starts, I shall say a prayer to God. I shall put myself in his presence and shall try to remain so." I am aware that I have drawn up these sundry resolutions very poorly. In trying to help you remain in the presence of God, I must remind you not forget to do so right now. All this must be done in union with God — by speaking to Him. Consequently, correct the preceding formulas. Instead of saying: "I shall renew my faith in the presence of God... I shall greet our Lord," say rather: "My God, in sitting down to lunch, I shall renew my faith in your holy presence. Jesus, as I pass that street corner, I shall greet You," and so forth. What will happen? During the course of the morning these various associations of ideas will go to work — at least some of them will. They will either re-establish or strengthen your contact with God. As you proceed from one guide mark to another, you will succeed in maintaining yourself in rather good dispositions. Even if the union does not persist, you will at least have said a certain number of prayers, all of which concurs in creating a habit. Furthermore, see if you cannot, between now and noontime, find a few occasions to recollect yourself for one or two minutes in order to examine the state of affairs and prepare for the hour about to begin. Such intermediary relays will help you pass over into the next period in far better condition. Do not forget that this is difficult. You are like a regimented officer crossing a country surrounded by the enemy. He takes every precaution, keeps a close eye on the terrain, disposes his guards on 71

his flanks and, at each crossroad, has the roads reconnoitered before entering them. Distractions are your enemy, and you know only too well how they infest your life and seek every occasion to filter into your mind. Give some thought to the warning signals you intend to use in the various incidents which will present themselves: a marble in your pocket, a cross on your watch or lighter, a paper on your table, an object on your counter, a branch tied to your tractor, a holy picture in front of your stove, a dot of ink on your fingernail or on your glasses ... Those who find such means ridiculous should and must look for others. Some people use a small instrument of penance, a cross or bracelet. A hundred such reminders can be invented. And there must also be some replacements, for, as I have already mentioned, by force of use they quickly lose their value. When that occurs, they must be replaced by others. Moreover, it would be better not to adopt too many at one time. Finally, choose an ejaculatory prayer that will serve as your leitmotif of the day, and repeat it as often as possible during the course of the day. It should be the breathing of your soul. If need be, it could take the place of all the other prayers and aspirations which you would say at each one of your guide marks. But above all, before you leave the church, steep yourself with the following thought, for it will be the soul of all these practices: "I have been given this day to love and serve You, my God. My greatest anxiety must be think of You, to remain united to You so as to do everything for You. Everything else must be subordinated and concur in that. Everything I do must become prayer. Over and above all my occupations and through all of them, to pray to you is my business. It must quicken all the others. Without it, the others run the risk of being sterile." A pious Franciscan once epitomized this very pointedly in the following way: "Time spent in not praying is time wasted." 6

Street-prayer Having thus prepared yourself for the morning, you must now see to it that you reap a rather rich harvest of prayer. 6

Blessed Roger of Provence, Meditations.

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In a short time you will be sitting down to breakfast. Your resolution will come to mind and will make your breakfast a prayer. If you become aware that you have forgotten it, you must provide some sign that will remind you of it tomorrow. I presume that you must travel to get to work. Before you leave home, prepare the few reminders mentioned before. As you walk down the street on a cold morning, you put your hands in your pocket and find a marble that you put there to remind you to raise your thoughts to God. You look at your watch: another lifting up of your mind to God. Then, there is that black speck on your glasses, the fruit store on the corner. Each reminder will lead you back to God and will set prayer in motion. With just a little attention you will make the entire trip united with God. How would you have otherwise spent the time? You would have looked from right to left and let your thoughts wander from one trifle to another: time wasted. Street-prayer can be an excellent prayer, and an easy one. To pray at such times you need not keep your eyes lowered and run the risk of being hit by an automobile. Look around freely, but look with Jesus and speak to Him of what strikes you. You see two friends or newlyweds talking to one another. But talking about what? About anything and everything that comes to their mind, about themselves or their interests. They stop before a window display; both admire it, and both discuss the possibility of some purchase. The whole thing, their unity in details, fosters their affection and brings them closer together. What a model they are of the kind of prayer you are engaging in at that very moment! We shall discuss that kind of prayer, which I shall call "the prayer of conversation," at great length further on. Our Lord has told you that He wishes to be treated as a friend. He invites you, therefore, to enjoy a lovable familiarity with Him. How happy you ought to be for this privilege which the King of Heaven grants to you! Profit by it and, with an ever-increasing veneration, walk with him in the intimacy he offers you. Talk with Him, just as newlyweds do to each other. Talk to Him of everything that comes up. With Him admire that object of art in the window of the antique shop. Is it not a pale reflection of His sovereign artistry? Offer Him those orchids in the florist shop. They are not yours. For that matter, since everything belongs to Him, what can we offer Him except His own gifts? What you offer Him, of course, is your intention. Bless Him for the clear sky and the spring air He gives you this morning. 73

Should it be raining, have enough faith to bless Him for that, too. The rain is a blessing to the farmer and an opportunity for you to do penance. Tell Him that you trust in His wisdom and that, since He it is who disposes all things, whatever He sends is always for the best. Pray to Him for the people you meet: for that poor man or woman who impresses you as not having had a full meal for months; and if here and there you raise your eyes to Our Lord, you will be tempted to slip a coin into the hand of that other Christ. Do so if possible. Then, there is that smug gentleman who does not have the external appearance of giving very much time or thought to God. He is far more miserable than the poor man. Give him the alms of your prayer. And so on, for all those whom you meet. Each has his needs, and God alone knows the dramas, the anguish you rub elbows with every day. Offer Christ the present, for it is most dear to Him. Offer Him your charity, your compassion for everyone. And then, talk to Him about yourself, about your petty concerns: about that tedious job waiting for you, that difficult, unsolved question, about your cantankerous boss or foreman. Ask your divine Friend for help and advice. Show Him that you have enough faith in His love to count on him. And shortly you will face all those difficulties more courageously and with a deeper sense of the supernatural. Tell Him especially of your desire to love Him more and of your wish to pray better. That is where you need His grace, and it is precisely the point on which you must be certain that your prayer will be heard. No request gives him greater pleasure. Thus, in regard to everything and nothing, you can tell Him a host of nice things — and the telling will be full of grace for you. This conversation-prayer, which is so simple and so easy, has a surprising sweetness about it, and you ought to be convinced that it is just as pleasing to Our Lord as it is to you. Act in the same way if you have to travel to work. The train or the bus is one of the best places to pray. Ordinarily you have nothing to do at that time. In fact, you have to look for something to do to pass the time. Now, God is there, too. What an honor and what a joy to be able to make the entire trip in His holy company! Has it never been your experience to notice how uneasy a certain passenger was, even before the bus started? A friend comes along and his face lights up. They share the same seat and have a pleasant trip. What an enjoyable ride you could take with your divine Friend just by looking at the scenery that unrolls 74

before your eyes and telling him what you are seeing and by talking to him about yourself and others! And what a useful trip when all this time is spent in such simple prayer! If you are going to do your shopping, you should anticipate beforehand some way of thinking of God at each store you visit. You could, for example, stop for a moment in front of the store window before entering, not to look at the merchandise — which you certainly can also do, naturally — but to regain contact again with Our Lord and to ask him to keep you in his presence. In that way, each store will be a chapel. If you have to wait for a clerk, gladly accept the opportunity afforded you to pray rather than to become impatient. The opportunity is yours to wonderfully enhance what would otherwise be a rather dull chore. Whether you buy vegetables, a brush or a new towel — all things which our Blessed Mother had to buy, too — all is sanctified as soon as it is offered to God. There are no such things as insignificant offerings. God uses, so to speak, as much wisdom in making a daisy blossom as he does in governing the course of the stars.

Work-prayer Let us now suppose that you are at work. St. Francis of Assisi says: "Those ... to whom the Lord has given the ability to work shall work faithfully and devotedly in such wise that avoiding idleness, the enemy of the soul, they do not quench the spirit of holy prayer and devotion, to which all other temporal activities must be subordinate." How well he spotted the danger in work! And yet, it is such an indispensable necessity in our lives. In fact, it seems that work by its very nature is an obstacle to prayer and tends "to extinguish the spirit of prayer." To begin with, we must concentrate on what we are doing. How can we think of God and do our work at the same time? Julius Caesar dictated several letters at the same time, but we are not Julius Caesar. Yet the truth is that we accomplish that feat with ease in our everyday life. An example will convince you. A young man named Joseph visits Joan, his fiancée. Since she has a beautiful voice, he asks her to sing something for him. (Such things still happen in this age of the radio and television.) So, she sits down at the piano and he gallantly turns the pages. But notice the young girl. To play and sing simultaneously is a rather absorbing task. But can you make yourself

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believe that, absorbing as it is, she forgets the presence of her fiance? Never on your life, and I even would go so far as to surmise that that night there is a special tremolo in her voice because of the one listening. Far from distracting her from her music, Joseph's presence spurs her on to pay closer attention to it and to avoid striking any wrong note. Why? Because she is playing for him. You see, doing two things at the same thing is not so difficult after all. The differences between the two friends and yourself and God is that Joan loves Joseph — whereas your love for God is not yet ardent enough. Then, too — it must be said and may the good Lord forgive my way of expressing it — God, as far as we are concerned, has one glaring fault: he is invisible. The fault, however, is entirely of our own making: we are near-sighted when it comes to spiritual things. So, your love and faith must be intensified. Love will come in time with the help of the Holy Ghost. It is your faith, your recalling God to mind, which you can work on for the present, and that is where your reminders are helpful. You have returned from your shopping and are now in your kitchen. If you planned your strategy well, you greeted Our Lord as you entered your home. If you forgot to, the holy picture you placed near the stove will serve as a reminder. From then on, the kitchen will be illuminated by his holy presence; you will no longer be alone. You will find it a great joy to work with him as he looks on. Presently you will start preparing your vegetables. Offer them to the Lord. Such a simple act will be as acceptable to him as the sacrifice of Abel. Then, there will be the object which you have chosen, one of your cooking utensils to which you have given the honor today of being your reminder of God and which, each time you handle it, will remind you: "God is looking at you. Pray to him." And, as you go about preparing dinner why not repeat this little prayer: "For You, my Jesus.... For You, my Jesus." Then too, you might interrupt yourself once in a while and say: "Jesus, I do not have time for long prayers. Look at all the work I have to do. But since it is Your holy will, help me to do the work of Martha with the heart of Mary. For You, my Jesus.... " In that way, each and every one of your actions will ascend before his throne like the verse of a psalm. Many housewives have a charming poem hung on their kitchen wall. It was composed by Cecily Hallack to console a woman violinist who ruined her fingers during the war by cooking. We reproduce it here for those who have never read it. 76

The divine office of the kitchen God walks among the pots and pipkins. — St. Teresa. Lord of the pots and pipkins, since I have no time to be a Saint by doing lovely things and vigiling with thee, By watching in the twilight dawn, and storming Heaven's gates, Make me a saint by getting meals, and washing up the plates! Lord of the pots and pipkins, please, I offer Thee for souls, The tiresomeness of tea leaves, and the sticky porridge bowls! Remind me of the things I need, not to just save the stairs, But so that I may perfectly lay tables into prayers. Accept my roughened hands because I made them so for Thee! Pretend my dishmop is a bow, which, heavenly harmony makes a fiddle frying pan; it is so hard to clean, And oh, so horrid! Hear, dear Lord, the music that I mean! Although I must have Martha hands, I have a Mary mind, And when I black the boots, I try thy sandals, Lord, to find, I think of how they trod our earth, what time I scrub the floor, Accept this meditation when I haven't time for more! Vespers and Compline come to pass by washing supper things And, mostly, I am very tired; and all the heart that sings About the morning's work, is gone, before me, into bed. Lend me, dear Lord, thy tireless Heart, to work in me instead! My Matins are said overnight to praise and bless Thy Name Beforehand for tomorrow's work, which will be just the same; So that it seems I go to bed still in my working dress, Lord, make thy Cinderella soon a heavenly Princess! Warm all the kitchen with thy love, and light it with thy peace! Forgive the worrying, and make the grumbling words to cease, Lord who laid breakfast on the shore, forgive the world which saith "Can any good thing come to God out of poor Nazareth?" Nazareth! Yes, turn your thoughts often to that humble kitchen and to our Lady as she went about doing her chores "faithfully and devotedly" with her Son watching her so intently. She, too, prepared meals, peeled vegetables, scrubbed, and was busy about many things; but her work was centered on the look and on the love of her Son and, although she did not express it in so many words, every one of her actions said: "For You, my Jesus."

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Do you sew? So did our Blessed Mother. As she patched clothes, her fingers wove a garment of love. Each and every stitch was an offering and an adoration, for her mind never lost contact with her Jesus, for He was near her gathering wood for the fire she needed for the evening meal. I imagine, too, that as He worked in the adjoining room, St. Joseph was sometimes a little envious. And so, he would call the Son of God: "Would you like to help me saw this plank?" Both would take hold of the rip-saw. Joseph would pull Jesus in his direction and Jesus would pull Joseph in His. For both of them every tense muscle was an act of love. In the end, Joseph, overcome by the smile of the gracious apprentice, would have to stop and wipe away the tear that glistened in his eye. There you have the perfect work-prayer that you should imitate. To be sure, yours is not the love of Mary and Joseph, but they can still act as your models. Imitate them to the best of your ability by using the humble means proposed to you: renewing your attention, using the signs, and saying ejaculatory prayers to compensate for your lack of fervor. I once lived with a wonderful Flemish brother, a gardener, whom we nicknamed Fonske. He worked like a horse, as the expression goes, and prayed like an angel. One day as he was digging a hole, I thought I heard him grumble. I went over to him. "Hail Mary," he was saying with each spade-full of earth: "Hail, Mary, hail, Mary," from morning until night. And at each corner of the square he was digging, he made the sign of the cross before a small cross he had made of two pieces of a branch and had planted in the ground. Who can compute the harvest he reaped each day! Then, there was the brother tailor who hummed hymns all day long as he sewed. He, too, had a whole liturgy of holy pictures and small statues which he alternately displayed on his workbench, depending on the feast or his devotional taste. There was another all-around brother handyman who understood St. John of the Cross. He never spoke unless spoken to, but was always smiling. When he raised his eyes, you could see the unmistakable light of those whose conversation is in heaven. How fortunate are they who do manual work! That type of work is less engrossing than intellectual pursuits and leaves greater freedom of thought, provided care is taken to control the attention.

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First of all, manual laborers have less difficulty dividing their attention between their work and their prayer, for their mind is not too overtaxed. Furthermore, once they are quietly seated at their work, they can easily surround themselves with a 'host of signs: holy pictures, notices, any number of objects within their range of view; and too, they can interrupt their work to regain contact with God. By the way, why don't you put a book mark in your book to remind you of God's presence? Is it such a complicated process to recollect yourself a moment, to pay greater attention to reality and rectify your intention, to offer God your present occupation, to ask him for light to solve a difficulty? You call yourself an intellectual, and yet you are not capable of exerting this minimum of intellectual effort? Come, now. Regardless of whether you are engaged in accounting, administration work, in a literary, artistic, or scientific endeavor, such a thing is always possible. It is even extremely easy once you have good will and take the matter seriously. The first necessary step is to admit the importance, the primacy of the sanctification of work. Fra Angelico knelt down to paint his Madonnas. His piety inspired his genius. St. Bonaventure, a man of deep study, wished intellectual work to be an asceticism and a contemplation. In a life vowed completely to intellectual labor, to teaching, to the governing of his order, and to the solicitude for the greatest interests of the Church, he knew how to give prayer its primary place; and this man, so overburdened and active with work, was an exalted contemplative. "It is not work as such," Cardinal Mercier said, "that hinders you from praying, it is the faulty way you go about working." Many employees are often clustered in one room. Under such conditions, discretion is called for. As mementoes, a displaced object will often suffice, a sign on a piece of paper, a small notice that will have meaning for you alone. Adapt the other means I have mentioned to your circumstances. The closeness of your colleagues may demand a little more mental effort on your part, but it will none the less be quite easy to do. The whole thing is to put yourself in the spirit of Joan at her piano. Teaching is undoubtedly one career that presents the greatest difficulty for the practice of the presence of God. The teacher's attention must remain constantly fixed, buried, as it were in the matter being presented and at times riveted on an irrepressible audience whose attention must be held. Can one really do that and pray too? Why not? 79

Maggie, the author's sister, found a good solution to this problem. She noticed that when an inspector came to her class she applied herself more than usual. So, in her own simple way, she imagined —it was nothing but the simple truth — that Our Lord was always there, and he was the Inspector. From then on, she taught class in his presence and, to please him, she put all her zeal and love into it. Do you spend your day at a ticket window? That, too, is another distracting occupation. And yet, what is there to prevent you from carrying out your duty in the presence of God, from having a sign that will remind you of him, from offering him the boredom of such tedious work, from considering it a service to him — and as a public service also to whose poor people who are bored to death waiting for their turn. If you look upon your duty as an exercise of patience and kindness which the meek Savior asks of you, you will be the most pleasant of employees. You are a merchant? Act toward your clients in the same spirit. The Lord is in your store. You can say the "Divine Office of the Store," as well as your wife can say hers in the kitchen. And with each sale, think of the "treasures in heaven, where neither rust nor moth consumes, nor thieves break in and steal (Mt. 6, 20)" and sprinkle it with a little prayer, even if it is no more than saying interior thanks to the Lord. You will at the same time be doing some spiritual banking for your future life. Even business transactions, those "enterprises of Mammon," which you have to pursue for a livelihood, can also become a profoundly supernatural work. You may find all this rather commonplace. But is not your life a great part spent in doing commonplace things? Must this portion of your life be refused to God? For those in love, nothing is commonplace. Love transposes everything into a cult, into adoration, into prayer. Everything must be offered to the Lord: "Whatever you do," says the Apostle St. Paul. That is the prayer of life, the prayer of all of one's life. Someone complained one day to St. Catherine of Siena of being absorbed in temporal occupations. "You are the one who makes them temporal," she retorted. Everything, then, depends on our mental attitude. It is up to us to give everything an external value.

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Afternoon relays The minute inspection we have just made of the morning will dispense us from a lengthy examination of the remainder of the day. Many circumstances will undoubtedly re-occur in more or less the same way, and the procedure, under whatever form it takes, will always be the same. I shall therefore limit myself to a few specific details. Make your second examination around noontime the second relay. Since the meal with its accompanying conversation and the recreation which follow are of their nature quite distracting, it would in general be better to postpone your examination until after your repast so as to be in a better frame of mind to resume your work. But because of the distractions so unavoidably interwoven into that hour of the day, you will have to foresee and carefully prepare the afternoon in your morning examination, the more so because it is so far removed. It would furthermore be wise to set aside for yourself a short, additional, intermediary relay before beginning the afternoon. Enter a church on your way back to work, or reflect as you walk to work, or if you stay home, withdraw for a few minutes to your room, to the garden. If you cannot make your examination after lunch, then it should be made before. During this short period of recollection, renew the thought of the presence of God, who is as present to you as he was to his apostles when he partook of their meal. And, under his divine gaze, prepare for that "exercise of piety" which the meal you are about to eat should be. Recall to mind what the apostle said: "Whether you eat or drink, or do anything else, do all for the glory of God" (I Cor. 10, 31). How? By doing it in front of Him and for Him. Mindful, too, of the weakness of your faith and of the countless times you failed to observe this precept, see that you create some associations of ideas that will help you, such as I indicated in Chapter III. Choose an object that is to remind you of God, whether it be the salt shaker, the flowers on the table, a slight mark on the table cloth, or some detail in the picture on the wall that faces your places at table. Once you are seated, imagine, as an old Franciscan writer said, 7 "imagine that you are seated at the poor, humble table of Our Lord, and see Him eating with you out of the same plate." (He ate in that fashion at Nazareth and it is the way Orientals still eat.) Or imagine Him as your 7

* Rev. Boniface Maes, Theologie Mystique.

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host, or as you proceed to serve yourself, thank him in a simple way for the daily bread he gives you. For the lay person eating alone in a restaurant or elsewhere, as well as for the religious eating with the community, isolation and spiritual reading will foster this loving tete-a-tete with Our Lord. Even the animal function of eating becomes one of the best prayers of the day. If, however, you are dining in society, it will naturally be more difficult to put these suggestions into practice. To keep the conversation moving, to eat, and maintain your interior attention on God is a small feat few are capable of; and as for succeeding in doing it constantly it is scarcely possible without special help from God. Such efforts, however, are not demanded of you. It will suffice for the present if you do your best. You might, though, give this some thought. If you were to invite an outstanding person or a very dear friend to your home today, no conversation would make you forget his presence. As you talk you would keep him in mind, and even as you talk to the others, you would have him in mind by doing everything possible to interest him and to please him. You must conclude that as a rule it should not be so difficult to act in the same way toward God who is also present. Later, when love will have invaded your soul, your faith will be so alive that this will be extremely easy for you and to some extent natural. For the time being, do your best to keep yourself in the presence of God and at the same time follow the conversation around you freely and relaxed. Renew your faith in the presence of God each time one of your signs awakens your supernatural attention. Say a word then to your Lord, or cast an interior glance in his direction. See that what you are about to say to others is said to please him, and preserve in that disposition as long as possible. Close your eyes a half-second to regain consciousness of his presence. No one will be aware of these little maneuvers — and you will be all the more gay and more pleasant to everyone. When the time comes for your second relay, you must grapple with a new exercise, which henceforth becomes part of all your examinations. Analyze the hours that have just passed in order to improve the ones to follow. See how the morning leaves much to be desired so as to do better in the afternoon. Try to find the causes, the difficulties that provoked your distractions, and think up ways to avoid them or overcome them in the future. Certain circumstances that arose in 82

the morning may very well crop up again in the afternoon. Your examination must be brought to bear on these repetitious points. Here especially is where you can be concrete and practical. The exercise just mentioned is one of the most efficacious there is. One of the main reasons for our lack of success in our ascetical efforts is that very often we keep them in the abstract. But here you are working with full reality. It is an art to profit by one's mistakes. Moreover, take one or at most two points a day. The rest will come in time. Having done that, proceed to stake out the afternoon with signs, landmarks, association of ideas, just as you did for the morning. At the third relay you will act in the same way. Only here, the retrospective examination will notably concern itself with the noon hour, for the same occupations will, most likely, repeat themselves in the evening: association with the family, conversation, evening meal, and recreation — reading, perhaps, in which case I remind you again of the book-mark. And your efforts will be directed to doing little better than at noontime, at least on one or the other point. The time has now come for the evening relay. We have already spoken about it at the beginning of the chapter, but it should now include the examination of the past as well as the future, the one helping you to improve the other. At night go over the entire day, not by going into the corners and digging out all the lapses you have committed (even if you attempted such a thing you would not find them all), but by limiting your scrutiny to the main ones: those which to you are the most regrettable ones, or those which you think are the easiest to correct. Whichever ones you choose, examine them in detail, asking yourself why they happened, and resolve that they will not happen tomorrow. It is far better to treat one lapse in this way than to collect thirty-six faults all to no avail. An examination of conscience with practical conclusions for the future is like an act of contrition with a good purpose of amendment. The results of this evening examination will furnish you with material for the examinations of the next day. Thanks to them, your day examinations will become more concrete, closer to reality, because they are based on experience. Day by day you will succeed in making them more practical and more efficacious.

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A Day Spent With God (continued) I. Application to places and circumstances Finding God everywhere by way of completing this review of the day, here are A few more suggestions which you might apply at different times. In the course of your day's work, you go from one place to another: from one room to another, down corridors, up and down stairs, and so forth. To circulate in this way requires no particular effort of attention. You could, however, if you were so minded, turn these goings and comings into excellent opportunities for prayer. "Time spent walking up and down stairs," a saintly religious said, and a busy man he was at that, "is time that belongs to God," because there is nothing to do except think about him. The attention requisite for prayer is at your disposal. Add up all these goings and comings and see what a beautiful harvest of prayers could be yours at the end of a day! But once again, the problem is to think of it. Fortunately, you know the answer. It may be rather difficult to put reminders in these places (do so, of course, if possible, by leaving a "forgotten" object at a certain place, an umbrella in a corner, a knick-knack on the end-table, and so forth). You can, however, always foresee these occasions, live them in spirit at the time of the preceding relay. Say to yourself during that examination: "Each time I go by a certain place in my house, reach a certain landing on the stairway — a certain corner of the cloister — I shall greet Christ who is present there." Repeat it to yourself two or three times so that the idea will be impressed on your mind and will come to the forefront of your consciousness at the desired time. Should your memory fail you, begin over tomorrow and the following days until you succeed. And continue until the very sight of the place you have selected sets prayer in motion, as it were, automatically. Prayer and solicitude for prayer will come to be associated with other corners, other landings. Little by little, your home, your place of work, will people itself with angels who, everywhere you turn, will remind you that the Lord is there and that you should adore him. And doors! What a blessed means of prayer they can be! What do you ordinarily do on entering a room? You open the door, thinking meanwhile of anything and everything, and close it behind you and ... 84

you leave the Lord outside. That is not very nice of you. It is not surprising, then, that if what you do in that room has but a purely natural value. You entered it alone, whereas you should have done so with God. Why did you not have the supernatural politeness to bring him in with you or, if you prefer, why did you not think that he was waiting in the room for you and that you were being admitted into His home? That is the simple truth, is it not? Is he not in every place you enter awaiting the homage of your love? If you were imbued with this prime truth, your very first reaction, wherever you went, would be to fall down on your knees. Do so in spirit — and sometimes physically when you are alone — for your bodily posture either bestirs your soul or strengthens it. In that way, God, as it were, precedes you into your bedroom. Your behavior there will then be completely changed, for what you are about to do will be done in a supernatural spirit. And in more than one place you will be surprised as well as disappointed to note that it is the first time in your life that you are aware of the divine presence. It will also be quite humiliating. May it help you to understand what arrears you have to make up and that all the work you are asked to do is far from being useless, but on the contrary is even indispensable if you wish to lead a truly Christian life. This is all the more important because going from one place to another is frequently a transition from one type of work to another, one of those crossroads where it is so vitally important not to lose contact with God. Be faithful to the prayer of the doors. After a certain lapse of time you will not be able to see one without thinking of God. Each one will summon you to prayer as faithfully as an Angelus bell. And you will bless the genius who invented doors. Another very beneficial practice is to steal one or two minutes from your work for a short walk with our Lord in the yard, in the house, in the monastery, to some spot where you would especially like to recall his presence to mind at some future time. These two minutes will be exclusively dedicated to Him: the short stroll will be a prayer, an adoration that will associate you with the angels. Talk to God, meanwhile, not like an angel, but as a man, simply, about him, about yourself, about the things you see on the way. Stop a minute, look at the place intently, imbue yourself with the thought that he is here with you, and notice how everything becomes more beautiful, far more pregnant

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with meaning and replete with joy than when you came here alone with your poor earthly thoughts. Later on when you come upon this spot, the same inspiring thought will spontaneously return. In the course of time you can multiply these privileged spots, these places where you will have re-introduced Christ as the Master of your heart and of your life. Your home, too, will be entirely sanctified. In that way Jesus will be enthroned in your home in a very realistic way. The enthronement of the Sacred Heart in your home is an indulgenced ceremony of the Church, but the ceremony presupposes that Christ is enthroned in your heart. These minutes stolen from your work for God will give our dear Lord immense pleasure. He is so often conscious of being alone and forgotten even by souls consecrated to Him. These moments will in a singular way stimulate a liking for prayer and the spirit of devotion, and after each walk you will return to your work with renewed faith and love.

Finding God in everything God must be reinstated in the same way in the different circumstances which arise from day to day in your life. Besides your work, on which we have sufficiently elaborated, how many incidents, great and small, ought to converge toward the same goal, ought to bring you closer to God. Yet how often these very things estrange you from him! For example, you are crossed: some sorrow or failure befalls you. Instead of becoming gloomy, instead of letting it dishearten you, instead of perhaps even revolting against it, it would be well to consider the fact that God, your divine Father, had laid this trial upon you. In His infinite wisdom He has foreseen the good it holds out for you. As a true son, you ought not only to accept it from His loving hand but bless Him for it and count on His help. In that way your suffering will be alleviated and will be beneficial to you. Furthermore, the cross will have attained its providential goal. When some pleasure, financial gain, success, or good news comes your way, it is much easier to see the will of God. Yet how many times are you remiss in the simple, ordinary laws of courtesy toward God and forget to thank Him! On those days your heart is gladdened; prayer

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and love of God come easier. So profit by it to stir up the fire of your fervor. Good or evil — that is, what we call good or evil — success or failure, financial gain or loss, good or bad weather, health or sickness, praise or criticism, compliments or reprimands, should all have the same value for the true Christian and all should produce the same effect, for everything is wisely and paternally disposed by God. All is conceived uniquely for our good. "Everything that happens is adorable" and must resolve itself in adoration and prayer — the bad things as well as the good ones. A piano has white and black keys. The musician who restricts himself to the white ones will produce inferior music. Let us therefore use the entire keyboard of providential circumstances to sing before God the hymn of adoration that our life should be. Every incident is an attempt on God's part to assure himself of our love or to prompt it. There are circumstances which of their very nature lead us to God, such as the liturgy and exercises of devotion. But we must pray when we pray. This is no truism. How many times we mumble formulas and our heart is not in them, or at least very little. There are other circumstances which divert our attention from God, and which as a matter of fact are called distractions, such as games, dinners, travel. In reality they should divert our attention from our present preoccupations but not from prayer. The immediate source of the trouble in both cases lies in the fact that we forget the presence of God. As soon as we do recall it to mind, our startled soul raises its eyes, looks up at its Lord and speaks to him. It prays. From a superficial prayer it turns into a profound prayer, and the "distractions" are but variants of the interior movement that carry it in the direction of God. Whether at the stadium, on an excursion, at a concert, at the theater, listening to the radio, anywhere and everywhere you can and must remain in God's presence. Every place is sacred. Since the Lord is always there, nothing will excuse you from taking Him into account. It is your Friend, who is so solicitous for you, who sends you these relaxations and who invites you to enjoy them. So, you should take your relaxation with Him. They, as well as novena devotions and sermons, must be graces for you to love Him better. And in these "frivolities," all licit, how many things would lead you to Him if your mind were focused on Him! Music — that wing of the soul — a noble countryside, a beautiful spectacle, a perfume, a graceful gesture, all are voices whereby 87

God speaks to you and through which you can make answer to him. The world is made for prayer; it is an ever-open temple. How wonderful and sanctifying it would be for you if everywhere, as you wend your way, you knew how to reap those graces which he has sown for you! When, because of your social status, you find yourself plunged into worldly things, do not conclude that you are excused from contemplation; do not think that you are dispensed from it. Despite her duties as mistress of an aristocratic family, Saint Frances of Rome lived united to God, as did Blessed Anna Maria Taigi, in the midst of abject poverty and the distractions of a large family. Later in life, as superior of a convent, Frances divulged her secret to her subjects. "God looks at you," was all she constantly repeated to them. When the notary Giacomo Benedetti came to bury his wife — she had been killed during a banquet — he discovered a hair shirt under her brocaded dress. He had never doubted that his lovable wife was a saint and that when she looked at the games she was smiling at Christ. Yet the discovery so shocked him that he himself became Blessed Jacopone da Todi, the inspired poet of divine love. And Saint Elizabeth of Hungary! How well she knew how to blend an absorbing piety with the love for her husband and her duties as duchess! Nothing need stand in man's way of loving God; nothing need stop him from praying to God. The only thing necessary is to recall Him to mind, to see God in all things. For people in the world, this requires a little more applied effort than for religious. That is why Jacopone, a man of strong passions, thought it more prudent to become a Franciscan in order to sanctify himself. And so, if you are a religious, bless your merciful Savior every day for having called you to a life where prayer is so easy. In the religious life, prayer and life add up to one and the same thing. You are a professional man or woman of prayer. Take this motivating idea: "I live in Christ's house; I am a daily guest in His home." How this very thought could transfigure everything in you and around you! How you could focus your attention on him, be solicitous to please him and what abiding joy would fill your heart and thereby make every effort a light one! Oh! Blessed home illumined by so cherished a presence! A religious one day said: "The poetry of the cloister, what nonsense!" But Catherine of Siena's answer to that could have been used: "You are the one who makes it prosaic." The poetry of the cloister is Jesus with us and encountered and embraced everywhere. It is the monastery or convent turned into a paradise. Blessed are they who see it in that light and who 88

live this wonder, for all other poetry when compared to it becomes insipid. If you are a priest, may I remind you that by reason of your vocation you, too, are vowed to prayer, and far more than a religious is; that men look upon you as the representative of Christ, that your clinging to Christ must be so lasting, profound, and transforming that they recognize Christ, an alter Christ us, in you, and that through this fervent union you will find the fountain of graces which they rightfully expect from you. If you lose contact with God, you cease to be the conductor of grace between God and man, for there would no longer be any current in the wire and you would be failing in your mission. A priest must be a contemplative: contemplata aliis tradere. The same principle holds good for the man of action, the ardent apostle of Catholic Action. If you wish to be successful, do not forget that God alone gives the increase. Your first duty is to pray. If God must be interwoven into everything, He must have a place especially in the apostolate. Believe, then, in the apostolate of prayer, in the primacy of the supernatural, in the all-powerfulness of a Christ-bearer. Of all the forms of Catholic Action, prayer is the most important. That is why I leave the place of honor to those to whom God has forbidden all other type of action: the unfit, the unwanted, the sick, those who are riveted to their bed of pain, prisoners, all who cannot move about. If you can be counted among them, be glad. You are at the outposts of supernatural frays. You are dedicated to the contemplative life. All obstacles, anxieties, and distractions of the active life are brushed aside for you. There is but one duty left for you, the only important one: prayer — and prayer is doubly efficacious if it bears the stamp of the cross. Rather than concentrate on your pains and petty concerns, profit by this signal grace and turn this precious time to good account. May it be a retreat for you and zenith of the apostolate.

2. General means recollection Here are a few general means to make your prayer during the day more continuous. The lastingness of the union will come about in proportion to your faithfulness in using them. The first is habitual recollection. Nothing of lasting value can be accomplished without 89

silence — and particularly that "prayer of life," that state of prayer which should be the hidden foundation of your soul and should govern all you do. For that reason all monastic rules enjoin the law of silence. It is the condition and safeguard of the interior life. The duty of silence — it would be more correct to call it the right to silence — is the marvel of a religious house, for it is silence organized as a bulwark of love. What is it but the right to keep silent, to pursue one's thought and one's conversation with God in security. According to worldly standards it is impolite to talk, to intrude upon the life of your neighbor, to prevent him from thinking by obliging him to answer nonsensical questions. In religious circles, politeness demands that we be quiet and respect the silence of others. What an unappreciated blessing! Silence is the feast of religious. The religious who no longer understands this shows that his soul has become empty. When a house is left wide-open to all intruders, we may be sure that there is not very much to guard. If you are a lay person, you must follow the law of the world. You cannot be unsociable. Yet, you must shield your hidden treasure against the world. The life of the world — and your life — has been drawn up with no thought to your treasure. While observing the proprieties imposed by society, you must create silence, provide moments of solitude and, despite unavoidable necessary human communication and obligatory chit-chat, set aside for yourself periods of recollection. The hindrance to a profound life is talking. You must learn to keep silent. Silence is the domain of God, for then the Spirit speaks within us. Lip silence induces the silence of the heart, which is the recollection of the soul within itself, in that center where the voices of many anxieties have no access. There are some souls who miss all the divine encounters because they are never home. When God wishes to visit them, they are out. The saint is the man whose heart is a wellguarded sanctuary. The Lord, who was waiting for him, always finds him there. If you wish to lead a life of prayer, you will have to ward off whatever distracts you. I have said that we can pray in the midst of pleasures and social events. Yes, we can, but it surely is not the ideal. We must, especially in the beginning, try to reduce our diversions. The concern of the world is to "distract itself." The pious man strives to flee from its distractions, for his interior life is too precious.

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Take whatever recreation you need, but safeguard God's time. See that you strike out all excess in your amusements. Having suppressed a particular outing or an evening at the theater, you will find the leisure to do some spiritual reading or to attend evening devotions.

Exercises of piety Exercises of piety, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, and attendance at divine services are the second general means to promote the life of prayer. All these practices are rich in graces. They preserve and nourish the spirit of devotion. And more than once you will experience the touch of the Holy Ghost. To neglect them would eventually lead to spiritual anemia. Above all, put your confidence in the Blessed Sacrament. With this mystery we are in the realm of the purely supernatural and divinely transcendent action. Holy Mass and Ccommunion are sources of graces par excellence, and particularly graces of union. What do you find at the communion rail if not perfect union with Christ, the magnificent and gratuitous gift which you have been looking for in vain elsewhere? What efforts are required of you to reach divine union and how slowly it comes! Now, it is accomplished of itself, fully, by the grace of the sacrament. You gain more in one moment than you would through a whole day's labor. Be really hungry, then, for this manna which falls from the wounds of the Savior. Live from the Mass and from Holy Communion; continue this unspeakable meeting during the entire day; prolong the sacramental union by Spiritual Communion. If you really cannot attend Mass — and do not be too quick to excuse yourself — think of it at least, and make a Spiritual Communion. At least do not start the day oblivious of the sacrifice which is offered for you and of the banquet prepared for you. This pious thought and its accompanying desire will be some compensation for the sacrament and will contribute directly to this union. And then, when you can, go and regain contact with your Savior by visiting him in the tabernacle. There, in the quiet of a church, you will experience the action of His divine presence. Our Lord is there, in the tabernacle, really and physically present, not out of love for the ciborium to be sure, but out of love for us, for each one of us. The effect of His presence radiates from the host into our hearts: each time a heart comes

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and offers itself to His action, it goes away divinely influenced. Go then and place yourself in this Eucharistic radiance. Each visit will be a bath of devotion. You will receive graces there which you will not find elsewhere. Really believe that God's wish to dwell among us is not a vain one. Do not forget either the Mediatrix of graces. She is the mother of Jesus and your mother. Like all mothers, nothing is dearer to her heart than to see her children live on friendly terms. Her great joy is to see you fervently united to her divine Son. Her one wish is to interest herself in this with all her maternal love. Go to her then. Pray to her frequently to this end. Ask her to bring about in you what you are helpless to accomplish. As the Mystical Rose, she will teach you the ways of prayer. She will lead you to Jesus and will herself put your hand in his.

Elevations I have already spoken of the third means: short prayers, invocations, aspirations, which are sent up to God as often as possible during the course of the day. For the fervent man these prayers are as spontaneous as the flame that glows from a well-started fire; for the lukewarm soul or the beginner, they must be incited like the spark from the flint that starts the wick burning. These prayers are of two kinds. There is first the ejaculatory prayer, a brief and expressive formula which is repeated without variation throughout the day. The important thing is to choose one that is conformable to your needs. It should express the state of your soul and the present tone of your relationship to God. If, for instance, a verse of a psalm strikes you during the recitation of the Divine Office, make it the leitmotif of the day. If you are in bad humor and must fight impatience, murmur: "Jesus meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine." If you do not feel like praying, repeat over and over: "Mary, help me to pray." If your soul is fervent, it will naturally want to burst forth in the cry: "My God, I love you." When you have received some grace, say over and over again: "Thank you, my Lord." If you are overburdened with work, sanctify it by the following offering: "For you, Lord." And so on. Lastly, there is always the prayer of adoration to God ever-present. "Blessed be God; I adore you," and likewise the humble prayer of

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petition which Cassian had his monks repeat from morning until night: "Lord, help me. Hasten to support me." Perhaps the best of all these prayers and the one that has the advantage of briefness is the simple word: "Jesus!" The Holy Name can make up for all the others, for it is charged with grace. The second type of elevation is the prayers which we address to God according to the circumstances which arise. I have already suggested several on awakening, while dressing, during work, at mealtime, for good and bad weather, and so forth. They must be sprinkled all over in order to sanctify everything. Formerly, Christians had books composed of such prayers. They were the daily food of their piety. Here are a few samples: At dawn: "Rise in me, O Sun of Justice, and light up my soul with your light." On the way to church: "As the hind longs for the running waters, so my soul longs for you, O God." When the clock strikes the hour: "How little I have loved you up to now, my God! Time flies.... I resolve to begin now. Help me to sanctify this hour." In affliction: "You suffered for me, my Savior. Take this suffering and unite it to yours." In joy: "Thank you, my Jesus, for this undeserved joy. Having come from You, it is doubly precious." In temptation, look at the crucifix and say: “O my crucified Savior, dare I be so cruel as to add to Your martyrdom by one more sin? Help me. With You I am stronger than the devil." After committing a fault: "My God, forgive me. I wish to make reparation for what I have done by great love.... And I have confidence that You will forgive me." Before a beautiful scene: “O my God, if your creation is so wonderful, what must be your Supreme Beauty? I adore You." And so on and on. Even if these precious anthologies are very scarce on the market, everyone can easily compile one of his own. Over and above prayers of personal inspiration, there is much to be gleaned from the psalms and the other prayers of the Church. Having jotted them down in a notebook, you will be able to find them at the desired time. The practice of saying aspirations is an extremely useful one. These brief elevations keep the soul alert to things divine. They arouse or activate devotion; they provoke grace. Perhaps you will repeat your 93

ejaculatory prayer twenty times and very mechanically, but the next time its meaning will strike you, and it will be a light to your soul and a spark to your heart. Besides, its very repetition will in the end permeate you with its power. Irrespective of the value these prayers have of themselves, independently of any other useful effort, they are just that many salutary invocations, so many returns to God that you would not otherwise have made and for which the good Lord will bless you. Perseverance in this exercise is, then, important. Nor should you wait to begin it when you feel like it. No, this spiritual exercise should be part of your spiritual life in time of fervor and even more so in times of spiritual dryness. You will have the impression that during such days these prayers are not sincere and have no merit. Let me remind you that they are sincere as soon as you want to make them such, and that they are doubly meritorious when said under such difficulty. The apparent lack of piety and sincerity is normal and derives from the fact that you are in a state of war and of transformation. The old man in you has not yet been cast out and has not given place to the new man. We cannot expect the old man to experience the feelings of the new man. And what is asked of the new man are not feelings but acts, acts of pure will, and especially repeated acts, renewed so often that they become habits, and prayer becomes as it were a reflex action. You are struggling against your past. How many thousands of actions have you performed up to now without thinking of God! And all these acts, which have been by far too natural, have by their very repetition made you what you are. Have patience then. The task now is to perform thousands of actions in the opposite direction, actions that are permeated with prayer in order to retrieve your normal, supernatural attitude. Go about it then courageously. The stakes are worth it. There are some souls who keep track of their daily ejaculatory prayers, and we are told of some who say an unbelievable number of them. Such a procedure is not to be counselled to everyone. One's spiritual temperament should be taken into account. For most people this procedure would be harmful and distractful to prayer instead of a help. But sometimes it would be good, especially in the beginning of the spiritual life, to make moderate use of it: on certain days or at certain hours of the day when we are conscious that our returns to God are truly quite rare. It is better to count our prayers than to forget to pray. Such

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bookkeeping will occupy our attention, and will help us measure our progress and set-backs.

Written notes We now come to the fourth and last means: written notes. I am not talking of a spiritual diary — something that is to be rarely tolerated. Furthermore, the first steps in the spiritual life furnish scant material for such writings. Yet the novice experiences certain movements of sensible devotion which he quickly interprets as exalted graces. To allow him to consign such things to writing would present a special danger. What can prove useful is to keep a notebook which is a daily and brief record of your successes and failures, their causes, certain symptomatic facts, some thought which seemed beneficial; everything, in a word, which will be helpful to remember and which will be useful to you later on. Its only purpose is to help you to make progress in prayer, without exposing yourself to vain complacency. The system you use may be one of many. Everyone will have his own. It may be simply a few cursory, even schematic, notes. You might choose the form of a chart: a column for each day and a line for each point. From day to day the good will be marked with a plus sign; the bad with a minus. With a little imagination you will discover a method you like. The important thing is to understand the usefulness of such a procedure. In certain cases, it can prove to be very beneficial. For systematic notes maintain attention, arouse interest, and spur one on to spiritual work. Interest is awakened in one's notebook, in one's chart and thereby indirectly in one's supernatural life. I do not wish to imply that this means is advisable for everyone, nor in all cases, but it sometimes does accomplish marvels. A periodic glance at your notebook or chart will produce interesting conclusions and practical resolutions. Quite naturally, your notes will be strictly personal. At the very most, you will show them to your spiritual director for such a procedure can help him become better acquainted with the state of your soul.

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Usefulness of the method Heavens! you will exclaim. What a number of exercises and how complicated this all is! Is such strategy really necessary in order to discharge so simple a duty as prayer? Yes, prayer is simple. It is we who are complicated — and disorganized. We must never forget original sin. A cyclone swept the world and left the terrain topsy-turvy, strewn with obstacles, crisscrossed with ravines, so much so that the most difficult road henceforth is a straight line: the simple road that goes from will to action. All good Christians would like to sanctify themselves. But between willing and acting there is an abyss which many never jump. The exercises proposed to you have this that is good about them: they force you to act. And one act is better than a hundred idle wishes. The facility to act supernaturally is regained only at the price of a long process of re-education. Now, so as not to be misunderstood, I again repeat that I am speaking principally in this first part of the book of well-disposed Christians who have hardly begun the work of clearing the ground. My aim is to teach them how to pray as well as possible in their present state and with great expectations for the future. There is nothing surprising about the fact that their progress is slow and shielded with a thousand precautions. But they will make progress if they use these means. If someone knows a better method of resolving the problem, I would be very happy to learn of it. In brief, we are concerned with the fundamental exercise of the presence of God. All authors of the spiritual life stress its importance. But perhaps they have not insisted on it sufficiently, or not in too practical a way. Yet, this exercise is at the very basis of prayer; the first condition to speak to someone is to know that he is there. Surely, there are other means, but as a matter of fact they, too, consist in improving one's disposition, in leveling the terrain, and in building roads on it that lead to God. This will be the purpose of other chapters where we shall delve into thesubject more deeply. Prayer, then, will take on a completely different aspect. But unless this reform is inaugurated, the other methods will be useless.

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One point after the other I would again like to repeat what I have said over and over: the point is not to harness ourselves from the very beginning with all these exercises at one time. That would spell disaster. He who grasps everything will lose everything. Many act like the thoughtless runner who starts out at full speed, pants after a quarter of a mile, and gives up after a third of a mile. If you were to practice a tenth of what I have just suggested, it would be wonderful. The rest will follow little by little, at least what is applicable to you personally. To go about this in a practical way, it will be advantageous for you in the beginning to follow this procedure. Choose one very concrete point and make it your main point: for example, prayer while walking along the street, or the door prayer, saluting God in a certain place, or the sanctification not of work, but of a particular detail of your work, and so forth. And for a certain period of time, focus your attention on this point. For the rest, be content with a more general and less tense effort, being satisfied with having, again according to your abilities, two or three small secondary points to sustain and distribute your interest and efforts over the entire day. For your main point choose the one that attracts you most or which holds out the promise of easier success, and continue to work on it until you succeed. It will encourage you. Then, too, you will notice that success in one point will bring success in other points, for there is a reciprocal influence between these points. This is easy to understand: union with God has been reinforced, thinking of God has become for you somewhat easier and more spontaneous. On that account, it tends to make itself felt a little everywhere. Once an abscess is drained, our whole body feels better. After this success, you will take another point. Gradually, step by step, you will obtain an over-all success.

God's hour Here is another procedure you may combine with the preceding one. Without a special gift of the Holy Ghost it is impossible to keep

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your mind fixed on God for days on end. We could not attempt it without injury. But what is possible is to try it for a relatively short time. Choose an hour of your day and set it aside for this exercise: God's hour, during which you will give your all. Choose, to begin with, an hour that will present the least difficulties. Later, you will choose one which on the contrary will offer the greatest obstacles. Consider that during that period of time your occupation is to pray, to keep yourself united to God, the other things you have to do being subordinated to this. Of the things you have to do, try to make each one a pretext to pray, to convert them all into prayer, to apply to them as much as possible the different procedures which we have proposed as the occasion presents itself. This will demand a certain mental tension but to sustain this effort for a hour will not give you a nervous breakdown. During the rest of the day you will throttle the motor down. If a whole hour is too much for you, take only a half hour, a quarter hour, or rather, instead of a certain long consecutive length of time, take two or three periods of ten minutes each. If you object that such a thing is impossible, I shall not hesitate to tell you that your dispositions are defective. You are not giving prayer the importance it deserves. Furthermore, you will never reach the state of praying well. If you make a serious attempt at this exercise, you will not be long in obtaining surprising results. This way of prayer, utilized to its maximum during these short intervals, will give you an attitude of soul which you would otherwise not have; you will experience what your life ought to be ideally. You will receive graces which will nourish your piety for the entire day, even for consecutive days, and sometimes they will be decisive graces. It is a practice exercise for the life of union. And here again the effects obtained will overflow into the other hours of the day: first, in an immediate way, for at the end of this hour with God, you will find yourself in the state most favorable to continue in the union for the time that follows: then, in a general way, by the influence it will exert on your life, as a whole, as was said for the preceding exercise. When you have reached a satisfactory result for the hour you have chosen, you will select another in which you will have the occasion to conquer new difficulties. Thus little by little you will fill your entire day in this way. By way of a conclusion, after you have acquired a little practice in this exercise, it would be excellent to dedicate an entire day to it 98

sometime. It would be God's day when, quite naturally, in a less sustained way, you will try to live under the eye of God with greater constancy than usual and will strive to do everything better, for his sake. As a beginning, take a day in which you have less work, a Sunday, for instance; is that not the meaning of Sunday, "the Lord's Day"? For religious, the monthly recollection is already set aside for that purpose. And, finally, try to make a retreat at least once a year. Set aside a few days which you will spend not only in reflecting, but in practicing continual prayer as intensely as possible. Everyone needs to provide an opportunity for himself now and then to remake himself in order to restock himself, "to get back in the groove," and to take up his present life with renewed spirit and vigor. Some may find that I am asking a lot. I shall answer by asking the first question in the catechism: "Why did God make you?" Do you or do you not believe that prayer is your primary duty and the most important business you have? If such is the case, you must agree that it is necessary to devote considerable time and effort to it, far more time and effort than we give to any other enterprise. We must be willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Nothing is won without sacrifice. Failure in prayer is usually due to a lack of faith and courage. Remember this well: the contemplative life is offered to everyone. Only those who make it the business of their life and who know its worth attain it.

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The Prayer of Conversation Principles Importance of prayer those who complain about not being able to pray, Generally have in mind not the life of prayer (perhaps they never gave it any serious thought), but that particular exercise more properly called mental prayer, the hour or half-hour of prayer; or they may be thinking about the various devotional practices which have been imposed on them or which they have imposed on themselves. And so, as they have been reading this book, they have been surprised not to find anything on the subject of mental prayer. In fact, in the two preceding chapters where I drew up a program for a DAY WITH GOD, I deliberately omitted any mention of this point which would seem to be the main purpose of this book. I did so because, in view of its importance, mental prayer deserves special treatment. Then, too, recall what was said regarding the close interdependence between life and prayer, the state of prayer and the exercises of prayer. It, therefore, seemed more practical to begin with the state of prayer, not only because it is easier but because it makes mental prayer easier. If we acquire some practice in diffused prayer, in this "prayer of life," which impregnates life, when we are about to begin our mental prayer we will find ourselves in the best possible frame of mind to succeed. On the other hand, the systematic exercise of mental prayer, the prayer to which we dedicate a privileged hour during which all other occupations are at a standstill, is particularly useful in fostering habitual prayer and even ordinarily indispensable to maintain ourselves in a rather constant state of fervor. In the course of the day, because of the many tasks that follow one upon another without respite, it is scarcely possible to linger for any length of time over some interior impulse. Prayer cannot, therefore, penetrate the soul deeply and there take deep root. Consequently, it is necessary to stop at certain times, to break away from the flood of distractions, to moor the boat to the shore, and in the calm of recollection surrender oneself completely to prayer. There, in the solitude where the soul finds itself completely alone with God, it can ponder over holy thoughts and pious sentiments, let them sink in deeply, and be imbued with its prayer. There, the soul better hears the voice of the Holy Ghost and the voice of its conscience. It is at 100

leisure to rectify its attention, intention, and affection, and to unite itself to God as it would always like to be. Such hours are refueling points along the highway of life where the soul refreshes itself, replenishes its supplies, checks, repairs, and tunes up the motor for the next lap. But this is exactly where the difficulty lies. To use signs to remind ourselves of God, to address a short prayer to him from time to time is not, after all, very difficult; but to pray with attention for one consecutive half-hour, perhaps seems to you — and your past experience only convinces you the more — to be an undertaking beyond your ability. Let us therefore see if there is not a way of solving this difficulty. The word "impossible" is not Christian. There must be a solution.

Length of mental prayer First, let us investigate the causes of past failures. There is no question of going back to the deep-rooted causes which we treated of in Chapter II: lack of faith, attachment, a dissipated life. Our concern here will be with the more immediate factors that explain your lack of success. Most people do not object to saying short prayers, but the very thought of thirty minutes of prayer frightens them. Oh, they make it, but they go about it as if they were performing some great penance, so conscious are they of their inability to succeed, and so obsessed are they by the memory of boredom which has weighed down upon them so many times in previous half-hours. So, the first question to solve is the time element. To begin with, why do you want to attempt more than you can do? No convalescent is served a lavish meal. He would suffer from indigestion. In the beginning he is given light food and only little by little is his stomach reaccustomed to solid foods. I fear that you have suffered from indigestion — if I may be permitted the expression — in your attempts at mental prayer, and hence your disgust, boredom, helplessness, and fear to begin again. My first prescription is the following wise counsel: reduce your rations. It is the same as with visiting. When we are with close friends, the meeting lasts for hours. Everyone enjoys himself. Among strangers it would not go beyond a quarter of an hour. There are some people who do not know when to leave. After the lapse of a suitable period of time,

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when we expect to see them make a move to leave, they persist in rehashing a thread-worn conversation. They continue to annoy everyone and torture themselves. Mental prayer is a visit we pay to God. It must not be a penance, except in special cases, for that is not its purpose. The thing to do, then, is to apportion the duration of your visit according to your degree of intimacy with our divine Lord and the fluency of the conversation. In the beginning, say short prayers, say, for ten minutes or even less, depending on the difficulty you experience. There is nothing frightening about a few minutes spent in mental prayer. Except in extreme cases, everyone can control his attention for a few minutes. The obligatory period of mental prayer in religious communities is ordinarily a half-hour. In that case, if you are a religious, make your ten minutes of prayer and spend the remainder of the half-hour in pious reading, in saying other prayers or in some other pious exercise. If obedience demands otherwise (and such a thing, in principle, would be regrettable) , then be obedient. Should you feel well-disposed and are making progress in mental prayer, profit by it; prolong it beyond the fixed time. Your aim must be to increase the dose gradually until you complete the half-hour and even more without too much difficulty. St. Peter of Alcantara demanded a minimum of an hour and a half to two hours for a good mental prayer. Some saints spent the entire night, but you have not reached that point. It is to be hoped that you will see the day when you have a yearning to pray, when mental prayer becomes the sweetest and most cherished of your pursuits. With good will you will eventually live to see that day. Then, the time allotted to mental prayer will always seem too short.

Life and prayer Another reason for your lack of success is your choice of subjects for mental prayer. The market is almost flooded with "meditation books for every day of the year." Some of them are excellent and have rendered invaluable help to pious souls. But there is a right way to use them. They are not panaceas. It is fitting that they be used intelligently. We shall come to the point at once and say that, with exceptions, their use is scarcely recommendable for the type of mental prayer we have in mind at this stage of the spiritual life. Some might think just the

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opposite: "Since you do not know how to pray, help yourself by using a book. It will make mental prayer easier." It would seem the natural thing to do. The procedure is not to be condemned in itself, but there are inconveniences which we must guard against, for it runs the risk of placing mental prayer outside of life, of making it bookish, and thereby easily inducing boredom. By offering ready-made meditations, it can encourage the beginner to become lazy and hinder the initiative, the spontaneity of mental prayer, the very things we are trying to awaken. Then, too, there is no question of getting you to meditate in your present state, but rather of encouraging you to converse. We will return to the matter of meditation books in their proper place. For the present, you may profitably use them as spiritual reading, as primers rather than as outlines of mental prayer. The first principle for this "prayer of conversation" is that the subject of conversation be interesting, as interesting as possible, not in theory, but interesting to you. It must be simple, practical, personal, something that comes to your mind as it were naturally. Mental prayer must be an integral part of life; it must turn upon your life, as it now unfolds; it must revolve around your occupations — what interests you for the moment. It must be like a conversation with a close friend. It will not, therefore, consist, as a rule, in one subject of prayer, but in several which follow one another depending on the interest they hold for you. The first of such subjects will very often be the habitual state of your relationships with God, that search for union with him which is your concern during the entire day. Here you have a subject selected for you. You need not look for it in some book. It is a meditation point which currently interests you, for it is taken from the book of your life. Talk to God about it. In that way diffused mental prayer makes the approach to formal prayer easier. We stay on the same ground. All we do is carry life over into prayer and keep both on the same level. We but pursue our supernatural life more intensely and exclusively. And this complies with the real meaning of mental prayer, for it is meant to be a condensation of life. Without that subject matter, you may very well find yourself without any meditation point whatsoever. It adequately fosters your conversation with God. (When you talk to your friend, you do not have a fixed program. You talk about your everyday life.) Yet, in order to vary the conversation and sustain your interest, it will ordinarily be helpful to have a secondary and occasional subject, because you are not yet that 103

close to your divine Friend. Try and take Him into your life also by talking over the latest happenings, the day's events, the personal, external or internal, supernatural or natural incidents in your life, or the thought uppermost in your mind, your present state, your present needs, everything that is vital, active, and dynamic in your mind. Graft them all on to the basic thought, as so many variants of your main concern: union with God, with a view of relating all of them to that union and of making the two subjects one, which itself will form one unit with life. Let us say, for example, that you become aware that you have a tendency to neglect some drudging duty, that you are over-active, that you have a tendency to sadness, or that you waste your time. Make the subject of your prayer: "My God, with your help I am going to try and remain more united to You today in order to find in that union the courage to do my work, or to restrict my activity, or to find the grace to surmount my melancholy, or to check my flightiness, particularly at such and such a time." The great enemy of prayer, what paralyzes and sterilizes it, is isolating it, divorcing it from life. It then becomes nothing more than an exercise merely juxtaposed to other activities, there being no connection whatsoever nor reciprocal influence of the one on the other. Mental prayer thus cut off from life tends to be no more than a formalistic practice, doomed to remain theoretical and highly superficial. It is a branch through which the sap no longer flows. No fruit can be forthcoming. It can only wither. Unity must be maintained in your spiritual activities. Everything must work together, must be mutually helpful, and concur in the same goal. That is why mental prayer must be closely and deeply interwoven into our daily life, steeped in it, spring from it, be of the same substance, be itself a part of life — the best part of our life — and why life must be prayer. You now better understand why we insisted first on the life of prayer before treating of mental prayer. You also see that the form of mental prayer which we here propose can hardly succeed if it is not incorporated into this habitual prayer, or at least into a habitual effort toward prayer. The latter should be your constant concern.

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Prayer and life It is not only important to inject our life into prayer, but equally important that our life be shot through with prayer. The fusion is wrought by this twofold interaction. But all too frequently this is what happens. When the time comes to terminate this spiritual exercise, we close the book, recite the concluding prayer, and return to our work with no further thought of what we have just been doing. We leave our mental prayer in the choirstall, on the priedieu, or in the church pew until the next mental prayer: like the employee who puts down his pen when the bell rings, tidies up his desk, and hastens home. Under such conditions, the effects of mental prayer are so vague and diluted as to be indiscernible. It leaves an impression of uselessness. True, we have fulfilled a duty, but that is all; and our mental prayer ends on that final note. We should not say, as has sometimes been said, that mental prayer is only a means to a better life. That would be inadequate. It is more than a means; it is something excellent in itself. It is a part of life. Still it certainly is a means of better living and must tend to that effect. A well-made prayer will always have a beneficial influence on your behavior, but a good portion of it will be lost if the two are not interwoven. Normally, mental prayer will incite some practical resolutions, if only to carry over into your activities the good dispositions it aroused. These dispositions must be transferred from the period of mental prayer into the hours which follow. But this application must be immediate and without any break: an interruption of one minute can be enough to cut the mental prayer off from life and lose the greatest benefit from it. If a locomotive is warmed up and the engineer pulls the throttle full speed ahead, and meanwhile the brakeman forgot to couple the first car to the engine, the rest of the train will stay in the yard. It is extremely important at the conclusion of your mental prayer to complete the coupling, to supervise with meticulous care the transition from prayer to action — to continue your mental prayer. It is really not quite true to say that it is finished for, in one sense, we can say that it begins at that moment. We have been exerting ourselves to be united with God. The time has now come to live it.

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You must return to present-day life with God, united to God as you have just been during this holy exercise, with the sentiments of recollection, detachment, humility, kindness, and love which it elicited, to such an extent that everything that you have to do be imbued with the "spirit of prayer," that everything be done under the influence of Jesus ever-present. In that way, mental prayer will have immediate, concrete, and tangible effects on your conduct. You will feel its wonderful efficacy. You will experience that it is truly something useful and practical. Furthermore, you will develop a liking for it. In this way, the co-ordination, the connection, and finally the unity of prayer and action, the two forms of love, are brought about.

Simplicity A final and important point is the manner in which you conduct the exercise. The temptation sometimes is to regiment mental prayer too much, to make it an exercise in the literal meaning of the word, subjected to rigid and sometimes complicated rules. The best methods fail if they are not elastic. The most judicious methods of mental prayer become false and irksome when they lose their suppleness. They are no longer adaptable. Like a tight jacket, they constrict your movements. Prayer must not be stilted and, least of all, the one we call the prayer of conversation. Above all, we should not tie ourselves down too rigidly to a methodical plan, except along certain broad lines and even then not always nor doggedly. It is far better if we go about it very simply and freely, with a certain abandonment, patterning it, as I have said, after a conversation with a close friend. The Cure of Ars said: "A man has faith when he speaks to God as one does to a man," that is, in a completely natural, spontaneous, and personal manner, as we do our best friend. In this type of prayer reasoning is reduced to a minimum. Instead of reflecting, speak to God Who is present, as you did during the day, only now you can do so at leisure, with an even freer mind and in a more connected way.

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Time, place, bearing There are a few practical recommendations to suggest before we begin to describe the procedure to be followed in mental prayer. How often should you make your mental prayer? A good average, it seems, would be two or three times a day. The best time generally will be in the morning and in the evening. It is very desirable to have, in addition, a time for mental prayer around the middle of the day. For the rest, it is up to each one to find out at what time he is freer and the amount of time he can devote to it. But once the different times have been chosen, we must stick to them. Every Christian who truly wishes to sanctify himself must engage in mental prayer at least once a day. And as for the length of time, if we cannot say any long prayers, let us at least say some short ones. The best place will ordinarily be in church, especially at those times when there are fewer people there. If that is impossible, then we could make it in some secluded spot, or in any place, even a public one where we would be unnoticed. We can be more solitary in the anonymity of the street than in an oratory. We must of necessity create solitude for ourselves. Saint Frances of Rome had a hermitage built for herself at the far end of a garden. All are not so fortunate, but we can always find some suitable corner, even on a train or a subway. The posture to assume is the one which best promotes prayer. It is natural to get on our knees when speaking to God, but if fatigue hampers your thoughts, sit down. It is far better to pray sitting down than to be distracted on your knees. It is your soul that should be on its knees, for that is the real respect God demands of you. But you should not, under the sheer pretext of praying better, reach the point of humoring your laziness, for then the result will be just the opposite. The energy of the posture sustains the energy of the mind. Should you be one of those persons who think while walking, there is no objection to your making your mental prayer in that fashion; we carry on a conversation quite well while walking. But you must be on the lookout for the occasions of distractions. God is everywhere, but the devil is, too.

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2. Way of proceeding approach to prayer The first thing to do as you are about to begin your mental prayer is to place yourself in the presence of God in a clearer and more real way than you were. Do this in order to be keenly aware that He is looking at you and listening to you and that you have come to talk to Him. Then, immediately adore Him profoundly. That is the first condition and the preamble of every conversation: we get in contact with someone and then exchange greetings. This first step has a corollary to it. You must withdraw yourself from worldly concerns, shake off the temporal, and eject from your mind everything that is contrary to focusing your attention on God alone. You must empty your house, and there create an atmosphere of solitude in order to enjoy the companionship of the Lord. We have seen in a general way that the basic obstacle to prayer is attachment to temporal things. It is particularly during the time set aside for mental prayer that we must rid ourselves of this attachment. Many a mental prayer fails for lack of having placed ourselves at the very outset in this state of purity. We begin it in the company of the enemy who is the provider of all distractions. Once given entry, he is quick to take over complete command. Freedom of the mind and heart is an essential condition for prayer. When you were engaged in the "prayer of life," you could not distract yourself from the business of the moment. The problem then was to inject prayer into your activity, to unite in so far as possible the thought of God to the attention demanded by the task you were performing. Here, on the contrary, everything else must disappear to give free rein to the "one thing necessary." The present duty is to pray. Hence, the superiority of formal prayer over diffused prayer. It is equally important to free the mind of every sentiment which could be an obstacle to interior peace: bitterness, discouragement, the haunting memory of a recent fault, doubts, conscience troubles. These are so many hindrances to our association with God. If you are troubled in any of these ways, make a sincere act of contrition followed by a generous act of confidence, knowing that the Father of the prodigal son has immediately forgiven and forgotten all, that you are in his good graces, and that He welcomes with a divine joy the poor child who 108

returns to Him humbly. Your return is also an attitude of detachment and of healthy self-forgetfulness. Often it is a sinful self-love that makes us dig up the past at a time when God is saying to us: "Do not think of it any more, my child." How sad it is to think that self-love holds us back from throwing ourselves into the arms of God. The effort to detach ourselves from the world must be made with great faith and energy. It should be done while talking to God: "Yes, my God, since you are doing me the honor and the great kindness of inviting me to this conversation, I do not want to think of anything else. I leave the world behind me in order to know, see, and hear no one but you." Naturally, knowing your frailty, you will add: "Help me, Lord, to remain in this purity of heart and to hold a conversation with you that will be pleasing to you. Come, Holy Ghost, give me light and love. You yourself pray in me." Of these three initial acts — union, detachment, and petition — only the first is always necessary. The other two will also be necessary ordinarily. Comes the day when you approach your mental prayer in a state of great fervor, you can omit them. We do not chase away an absent enemy. We do not ask for what we already possess. But the first, the regaining of a closer contact with God, elevation toward God, the look which fixes itself on him more intensely in order that the heart may follow — that is indispensable. It is essential to all mental prayer. It is mental prayer. As soon as you are thus united with God, you are in the state of prayer. If someone were to ask me for a plan of prayer, I would tell him: first, unite yourself to God who is present; secondly remain united to Him; and thirdly, persevere to the very end in this union. That suffices, for to pray is to unite oneself to God. Gaining contact with God is not a simple preliminary. It must persist throughout the entire exercise as the integral and principle element. Once that contact ceases, you may meditate, read, recite formulas, but it is no longer mental prayer.

Examination on union with God Apart from this essential point and the correlative effort to detach ourselves, there is in this matter no absolute rule to be imposed as a guide to mental prayer. The more spontaneous it is, the better it will be.

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The ideal thing would be for everyone to make his own program, if there is a program. On the other hand, we must not allow our mind to wander. Controlling our thoughts is important. There is no danger as long as we remain united to God. But this union does run the risk of flagging if it is not watched, if it is not likewise fed and replenished by a variety of supplies. That is why it is good to provide a sort of plan for yourself, at least an outline, which you can dispense with, however, if God draws you to Himself in a different way. Beginners might find it helpful to have a model prayer of conversation, which could be rather frequently applied. The first subject of your mental prayer, as we have seen, will ordinarily be the habitual exercise of union with God. It goes without saying that if you really try to put into practice what we have said above, if the search for God is your preoccupation for the moment, it is only natural that, finding yourself alone with God, you will talk to Him about it. You are interested in it and so is He. There can be no doubt that it is a "subject of conversation" which comes to mind quite naturally if you have taken the matter seriously. The first point of the mental prayer, therefore, will, according to the time of the day, be one of the examinations we have spoken of. Such an examination must always be made in the form of a prayer, a speaking to God. It is already a kind of mental prayer. Obviously it must be included in the prayer of conversation. If you have already made it at some other time, it will suffice to go over it again quickly. But under ordinary circumstances we hardly have the leisure to multiply exercises to such an extent, and therefore we combine the two into one. We shall not repeat what has already been said in this regard — the examination of the preceding hours, and the examination of foresight, improving the future by means of the past. But let us see how many things there are for you to talk over with the Lord — points that will rise spontaneously from your heart during your mental prayer. You have adored God by placing yourself in his presence and you remain in this adoring frame of mind. Now, taking inventory in his presence of how much you have neglected and forgotten him, you will experience a veritable shame and great sorrow at seeing so little love, faith, and supernatural courage in your heart, and in all humility you will ask his forgiveness. The need will make itself felt to make amends for your lukewarmness. You will desire and take active measures to do better, and 110

likewise call on his divine help without which you are only too sure of falling again. Then, too, remembering the good impulses you had, your returns to God, and other more fervent upliftings, you will thank Him for His merciful help, for the graces, for the holy inspirations whereby He drew you to Himself and which are a precious proof of His love. All the classical ends of prayer are to be found in an examination thus made piously under the eye of God — all without having followed a preconceived plan. It is all so natural and as it were flows necessarily from so practical an exercise.

Exercise of union And now, what will the immediate conclusion and the first effect of your examination be? Why, it will be to bring into play the desire to do better and to apply yourself then and there to unite yourself with God more fervently, and to do it from now on, especially now, since you have nothing else to do and that is what you are here for. The second point of the mental prayer will therefore be an exercise of union. In truth, you have been doing it from the very beginning of your prayer, for you began by becoming conscious of the presence of God and by getting in touch with Him. But perhaps the contact made in view of the examination to follow was somewhat hasty. Now is the time to tarry over it, to plunge yourself into this union which is the heart of mental prayer, to make it a reality for its own sake. Make it your one and only concern. Here, the union becomes the very object of the exercise. Raise your mind, then, to God; imbue yourself with the thought of his holy and sanctifying presence to the extent that you become so keenly moved by it that it becomes the one and only reality, that for you, here and now, there is nothing else: God with you and you with God, so much so that the cry of the Apostle Thomas, "My Lord and my God," rises spontaneously from your soul. Tell him: "My God, my Master, and my Savior, it is true that You are here, so close, so inmost in me, so attentive to me that I can speak to you in whispered tones as I would to a confidential friend. It is true that you are looking at me, that You are listening to me, that You love me.... I adore You and I love You. How I wish my love were boundless! Take what little love I have to offer you. Behold my soul, my poor weak love;

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my whole being is prostrate before You. Be in truth 'my God and my All.' " Repeat that prayer or whatever one the presence of God suggests to you. Perhaps in saying it you will not feel any unction, or emotion. It makes no difference. You know that you love God — and He knows it too — and that your words are no less true and sincere than when you feel them. Perhaps the thought of God's presence will not succeed in penetrating you and will seem quite superficial. Again, that makes no difference. You believe in his presence. Let your faith, then, suffice. At other times, when grace will take hold of you, it will be sweet and easy for you to speak to your Master in such wise, and to contemplate him now and then in silence. Be glad and pursue this intimate conversation. Do not worry about anything else. Do not interrupt the union; do not interfere with the action of the Holy Ghost. You have reached the goal. Do not try to find new roads that will lead you to it. Otherwise, all you will succeed in doing is to remove yourself further from it. The seraphic St. Francis spent entire nights constantly repeating, "My God and my All," with an indescribable fervor. But for that a great love is needed. Ordinarily, you will see that the vein soon runs dry. Then quietly return to conversation. Love does not generally stay at a high pitch for a long time. When it ebbs away, the only thing to do is follow its course and simply revert to conversation. Then will be the moment to take up one of those occasional subjects we have already spoken of. It will be your subject of conversation with God. See to it, however, that the conversation remains a union, less intense but just as real as the preceding phase.

Occasional subjects These subjects are of an infinite variety. It is up to you to choose the one which, for the moment, appeals to you most. It might well be the feast-day or the current liturgical season. For instance, if you are in the Christmas season, it would be quite natural to speak to Our Lord of His Incarnation, of His birth, to approach the crib in company with the shepherds to adore, thank, and pray to the Divine Child. During Passiontide you can kneel at the foot of the cross and grieve over the sufferings of Christ. At Easter, you can congratulate Him, rejoice with Him, and ask Him to effect a spiritual resurrection within you. At

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Pentecost, you can invoke the Spirit of Love. On the feast of the Assumption, your prayer and filial love can be directed to the Blessed Mother. On the feast of All Saints, you can think of heaven and pray Our Lord that he lead you there. On the feasts of the saints you love, for example, Paul, Francis, Magdalene, and the Little Flower, you can pray God with them, and try somewhat to imitate their fervor and virtues. The liturgical cycle is an inexhaustible treasure of mental prayer. Public worship, the prayers of the Church as found in the missal or breviary, also provides nourishing food for mental prayer. In bygone days, mental prayer consisted principally in leisurely going over the psalms that had already been chanted in choir. If such subjects seem too elevated for our present state of soul, look for others that are more interesting. Now, what interests you most? Yourself, undoubtedly. Then, take yourself as the subject of mental prayer: you and your personal affairs, but in relationship to God. Take your spiritual affairs first: a fault that stands in the way of your attempts at prayer, a fault you have lapsed into again, a doubt, an anxiety, a temptation that weighs over you, a virtue you are trying to acquire and which you admire in another, a difficulty you are having with such and such a person, a grace you have received. Or, simply revert to the life of prayer just as you did in the first point, but this time in a freer way than in the examination. I mentioned above that you should not think of your sins at the beginning of your mental prayer. But it is quite one thing to be troubled by them and to have your flight toward God held back by them and another thing, once you are united to him, to speak in a filial way about them to him and to tell God again of your sorrow and, then, go on to form good resolutions. In this regard there are so many things to say to your heavenly Father that there can be no thought here of developing them. They are, moreover, so simple and flow so naturally from the subject contemplated that they will easily and quite spontaneously come to mind because they are personal things which form part of life. And why not talk to God about your temporal affairs? Do we not talk over these things with our father or our best friend? It was God himself who placed you in this world and made it a law that you were to earn your bread here. Does He demand that you leave the world in order to love Him, that you lead a double life, the greater part of which should be cut off from Him? Everything comes from Him; everything is His and 113

must render Him homage. And just as you must sanctify your life by constant prayer, so also your present life can and must find its way into your mental prayer in order that it be the gift of your entire self. You are peeved or concerned about something. What a beautiful proof of confidence it would be to tell Jesus, in all simplicity, what weighs on your heart, and to go to Him for comfort and advice! What a wonderful proof of love to smile at the cross and to offer your sorrow to Our Lord in union with his Passion! Such a prayer will do you an immense good. The sorrows and joys of every day, the incidents in your professional life, family happenings, a baptism, a wake, a loss of money, an inheritance, a praise, a criticism — all must be brought to Christ. You must tell Him everything, and confide in Him. Treat him just as you do those you love very much. He is the Spouse of souls. Everything must be held in common between Him and you. In this way you will supernaturalize the temporal; you will sanctify it. And since you live in the world, nothing could be more necessary. Use the same procedure for the news of the day. Your newspaper offers a host of subjects for mental prayer. You talk to your friend about what you have read, and most of the time you grumble about it: "Everything is going wrong; the world is in a mess." Suppose you talk these things over with your Divine Friend! You could tell Him: "Yes, Lord, current history is painting a discouraging picture. Far be it from me to become attached to this miserable earth and to this life of trials. I wish to concentrate my efforts on preparing myself for the wonderful life to which You have invited me." Or you might say to him: "It would, indeed, be discouraging to see where the world is heading, but I know, my God, that you are interested in it, that you have your plan, and I have confidence in your infallible wisdom." You will bounce back with supernatural optimism. You will, likewise, pray to Him for some particular mission, some endeavor, some poor parish mentioned in the Propagation of the Faith column, for the deceased who are listed in the newspaper, for all the unfortunate who bear the cost of these news items, even for politicians regardless of what party they belong to. If you do this, you will be performing an apostolic work. Here, too, a danger lurks. Interesting subjects can easily become too absorbing and so quickly capture your attention that you forget about God and prayer. Hence, this sort of prayer needs to be seriously disciplined. Extreme attention must be used to see that every subject of mental prayer be referred to God. The way to accomplish this is to talk to 114

God about it as you ponder it. Your conversation must never become a monologue. As you think it over with God as your witness and confidante, you cannot do otherwise than to bring everything round to the supernatural point of view. You may also take for a subject some thought that struck you in the course of your spiritual reading or in regard to some happening: the vanity and ephemeral nature of human things, hell, the greatness or the mercy of God, some scene or teaching in the Gospel, the immense goodness of Christ, confidence in his love, his presence in the Eucharist, a particular virtue of some saint, or some prayer which you know from experience will stimulate your piety. In short, it is up to you to find what befits your present disposition. You must choose, try, and change subjects deliberately. To open a door we try different keys until we find the right one. When, in the course of a conversation, we exhaust a theme, we go on to another. There must be no prejudice. The correct criterion is utility, and your mental prayer will be beneficial if the subject you choose is adapted to the state of your soul.

Difficulties There are days when none of these suggestions will answer your problem. We all have bad days, days when the mind is sluggish or restless, and we find ourselves in a regrettable state of mind: sad, angry, worried, impatient. Try first of all to discover the cause and examine whether the exercise of detachment at the beginning of your mental prayer was not made too superficially. If that is the case, make it over and try to neutralize, to digest the troublesome element. Even if you restrict yourself to that one point, you will have made a very good mental prayer, and a very useful one. Sometimes, you will find no apparent cause. It could very well be purely physical. What should you do then? Try your best to pray just the same. If your efforts are fruitless, humbly offer yourself before God just as you are with your inability to pray and your bad humor. He loves you that way because it is not your fault. Your good will suffices for him. It should suffice for you, too. In your struggle against distractions, that scourge of mental prayer, you might try this: when you become aware that you are distracted, make the distraction the subject of your mental prayer.

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Examine its contents. You will find that it is a question of money, of vanity, of spitefulness perhaps, or simply of amusement. You will catch yourself red-handed in the act of self-love. For that is always, or nearly always, the case. You will be able to put your finger on the self-love, the attachment, the excessive interest you give to temporal things. "The old man" has again made his presence felt. This information is precious. Humble yourself before God; then, under His eye, see what your attitude ought to be on this occasion; reason with yourself supernaturally, and force your will to adopt the frame of mind which refers all things to God only. You will conclude with an act of virtue exactly where you need to make one. Thus will you play a good trick on the devil. Your sharp counter-attack will turn his weapons against him. It may happen, however, that the distraction obstinately reappears, either that one or another, despite all your efforts. After two or three attempts, be satisfied with chasing it away each time you are conscious of it, and affirm your good will before God by begging Him to help you. Do this calmly without mental strain, without getting impatient or sad. This recommendation of self to God is all that you can do and therefore all that you ought to try to do. Realize, also, that you are not the only one who has distractions. The Little Flower had them. They are normal. If you lose your footing in this harassing stream of distractions, use a book to anchor yourself and try to read attentively, that is, think and pray as you read. Or say your rosary slowly or, if you prefer, indefinitely repeat some short invocation. The main thing is to hold on and to make your mental prayer just the same, in one way or another, remembering to make it short enough so that it does not become too heavy a burden. It is no great marvel to be faithful to mental prayer when it is easy and pleasant; but to persevere when it is difficult, that is what is beautiful, useful, and meritorious. The soldier proves his worth in battle. Here you are before the enemy, pressed and reduced to a purely defensive position. Its purpose is to prepare you for future offensives. Meanwhile, orders are to hold. Those who abandoned mental prayer have done so during such periods and not in the good periods. Hence, the extreme importance of the following advice: persevere despite distractions and ill humor. Let that be a golden rule with you.

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Final part We have now come to the final points of mental prayer. All that has preceded will normally end in inciting some resolutions having to do with the object of your mental prayer. Other resolutions will concern a more or less distant future. The former should be very practical, and it will be wise to prepare guide-marks in order not to forget them at the desired moment. The latter apply to life in general and, therefore, to the immediate future: notably that of living more united to God. It is not, moreover, necessary that every mental prayer comprise an explicit resolution on a definite point: it can suffice that it create a more upright and pious disposition in the soul, that is, have an over-all effect on your life. This is even often more important than specific resolutions because it goes deeper into the soul: it is the motor itself which has thus been adjusted. The dispositions and resolutions of immediate application are to be carried over into the next hour. The question of coupling comes up again. To insure this, it will be good — unless you are strongly under the divine influence — to have foreseen in a concrete way the first moments which will follow mental prayer; going from the chapel, the first journey, and the first people you will meet, going back to your work: all opportunities to lose your mental prayer on the way. (How many times has this not happened?) Picture these different things to yourself and the way in which you would like to do them in union with God, that is, in the pious disposition in which mental prayer placed you. Then, when the time comes, be very careful to couple, to insure the continuity. When a boy is learning to ride a bicycle, he has someone help him until he gets his balance. Then with a push from his friend, he takes off and tries to better his initial speed. If, on the contrary, when his friend lets go he hesitates for a moment, the boy falls and has to begin learning all over. Mental prayer is a coaching in the business of leading a holy life. There must be no gap between the two. This would be the time to practice the "prayer of the doors" with great care. There is the door of the church you are about to leave, the door of the room where you are going to take up your work — as well as the other artifices previously mentioned. These are the moments when

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great vigilance is needed to preserve the spirit of recollection. Recollection is the seal on the flagon which prevents the perfume from evaporating. In this way you will prolong your mental prayer; you will live it, and if it has been a fervent one, you will remain the entire day under its beneficial influence.

Remarks This program offers you ample material for ten minutes or a half hour of mental prayer, depending on how you develop it. Its explanation takes longer than its execution, for you will take only one of the subjects proposed, and you can treat it in few words. You must be penetrated with it rather than develop it. These different phases of mental prayer, moreover, form a cycle which, once determined, can be taken up again under the same form or under another. Finally, let us examine the case where, having made a short mental prayer, you must fill in the half-hour imposed on you. You can do this by reading a spiritual book. The reading will serve as a preparation, a primer for mental prayer. In general, it would be better to do your reading before mental prayer, but you may take it up again if there is time left. Your reading, however, should not be done in a haphazard way, but should be chosen in so far as possible in accord with the subject of your mental prayer. And if your mental prayer does not take hold, then pick up your book again as a check on your distractions. You can also fill in the time with prayers which, it seems, it would be better to say after your mental prayer, where they will be a sort of sequel and crowning. Whether it be a formula, a psalm, the Our Father or the Hail Mary or a repeated ejaculatory prayer, try to choose one in conformity with the preceding mental prayer and one that will tie in with it. In these two cases, if the reading or the prayers follow mental prayer, it would be fitting, before the conclusion of the exercise, to take up the subject of the mental prayer again briefly, especially the resolutions and the coupling in order to insure its practical prolongation. We should agree that all of this is really not difficult. A mental prayer of this kind is always possible for everyone. It has, furthermore, the advantage of being practical and of being an integral part of life. So

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much so that it will efficaciously help you to act more supernaturally; and by a fortunate law of the spiritual life the higher the spiritual level of your life is raised, the easier will mental prayer become for you.

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Private Vocal Prayer Kinds of vocal prayer Although the special purpose of this book is to treat of mental prayer, it will not be out of place to offer a few remarks about vocal prayer. Vocal prayer, too, is an authentic form of prayer which is used and recommended by Holy Mother Church, and it is certainly the most universally widespread form of prayer. Since the faithful encounter difficulties with vocal prayer as well as with mental prayer, it behooves us to try to help them remove these stumbling blocks to their perfection. The close relationship between these two forms of prayer is an additional reason for this treatment of vocal prayer. We shall begin by defining our terms. If we take the expression literally, vocal prayer is that in which the words are actually pronounced. Yet two different cases can arise. Even when a person prays mentally, his prayer will almost always express itself interiorily by words and phrases, for such is our psychological make-up. We think while discoursing. Mental prayer without interior words is hardly met with, except in certain forms of mental prayer which are rather rare or of fleeting duration. If the person is alone, the thought or the sentiment of the soul will sometimes tend to express itself have seen, is to awaken or express interior devotion. The first quality of vocal prayer will therefore be attention. A voluntarily unattentive prayer is no longer a prayer. It is no longer homage to God; it is a breach of good manners. It is a sin. So, first of all, attention to God. Just as in mental prayer, so here, too, we begin our prayer by placing ourselves in the presence of God and by becoming conscious of the fact that we are talking to him. Next comes attention to the words, not only with our mind, but with our will and heart too, in such a way that piety will be the fruit of our prayer and that our whole soul soar toward God. To do that we must above all avoid haste. We must bring to each prayer a deliberate slowness so that this interior operation may take place. A moderate pace will ordinarily suffice to accomplish this. But we would find it very beneficial to linger over a sentence, to go back over it in order to reflect on it, in order the better to make it our own, to extract the marrow, to ponder it at some length depending on the wealth of 120

connotation it has for us and its pertinence to our state of soul, and make it a real personal prayer. Sometimes a vocal prayer may even be the starting point and the mainstay of an entire mental prayer. Try the Our Father that way. This divine prayer is so profound, so pregnant with meaning that when we meditate on it we always find new treasures. Instead of hastening through its several petitions and scarcely giving them any thought, you might devote more or less time to each point depending on the possibilities it has and say, for example: "Our Father who art in heaven ... Father infinitely good, kind, and merciful; and you, Christ my Savior, who came on this earth to reveal the Father to us and to teach us how to pray — I adore you. My Father, you are in heaven and you are here too, for by your holy presence, you have really brought heaven down to us in order to be with your poor children. My Father most tender, my God most paternal, grant me the grace to love you with a filial heart. "Jesus, do me the kindness of praying with me to your Father and mine. "Hallowed be thy name ... by the holiness of our life, by our thought which is in harmony with yours, and by our will which is absorbed in yours. Alas! I have so often profaned your sweet name of Father by having said it without respect, by praying to you without attention or fervor. Help me to sanctify it henceforth by being faithful and by adoring you in spirit and in truth. "Thy kingdom come ... the kingdom which is none other than you in our hearts and you governing in us. May this kingdom of purity, this kingdom of love, this kingdom of divine joy which we have been seeking so eagerly for so many years, may it come at last. May your kingdom include the many unfortunate souls who do not know you, those who reject you, those who for lack of hope are sad, and those who, like myself, would like to love you but are weak and unfaithful. My Father who art my King, until now I have not made you reign over me. I have left you at the door of my heart. Do come in now and be the sole Master. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.... How we wish that our will were dead and that your will would become ours, for then only would we be living for you, by you, with you, and in you. In heaven the angels and saints spend their eternity in lovingly accomplishing your divine will, which is the norm of all wills. The few years of trial on this earth have been given us for that purpose: to please you by making our 121

wills correspond with your supreme and loving will. My God, make me a little like the angels and the saints, spending my days adoring you by my prayer and by my life. Beginning today, I am going to start by doing.... (here think of some concrete point) . Help me, my Father; help all those who want to serve you. Be their support and comfort ever. "Give us this day our daily bread ... our material bread which we have to earn at the cost of so much sorrow and fatigue. Help us to seek it with less eagerness and with more filial confidence in your Divine Providence. Give us especially the bread of your grace without which our best desires come to nought. We are hungry for you, Jesus, our supersubstantial Bread. We were hungry yesterday and we are hungry today. Come in us; nourish us not only through holy communion but in spiritual communion. However intense our desire is to receive you, your yearning to be united to us is far greater. Father, do not allow our souls to die of starvation. Satisfy them with your holy manna. "Heal our souls likewise by forgiving our sins. Our sins, our laxity, our egotism, and our meanness, while wounding your love, infect us and hide you from our vision. Wipe away our stains, we beg of you. Make our hearts pure and remove the scales from our eyes so that we may see you. To merit your forgiveness, we wish to forgive all, to be without bitterness or resentment. My Father, I have in a most infamous way offended you. I have been most ungrateful to your most beloved Son, but I am deeply sorry. That I may obtain forgiveness, I willingly forget all the evils that have been done to me." (Here reflect a moment to be sure that there is no trace of rancor in your heart for anyone and that you have, indeed, forgiven all.) "And deliver us from evil ... that is, from what pained your Sacred Heart, from the one and only evil — to offend you and to forget you. We wish to be ungrateful no longer. Our profound hope is that you may never have reason to weep over us again. Today, we shall praise, bless, and sanctify your Name, lovingly accomplish your will, and in our turn give you the bread of love which you longingly await from us. "And now, dear Lord, who deigns to be our Friend, stay with us, and since you wish for my poor love and for my unworthy companionship, let us remain united as you wish us to be united forever under the gaze of the Father, you and me and all my brethren consummated in the unity of your love.

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"In the name of the Father who is most good, in your blessed Name, Jesus, and in the name of the Holy Ghost. Amen." Do the same with the Hail Mary. Try to paraphrase it yourself. If you find nothing of your own to add, then at least try to say it piously. Repeat the words slowly, pausing briefly after each phrase. For want of doing better, you will have become conscious of the meaning of the words you are saying. If no inspiration is forthcoming today, it will come at some other time, for these prayers are full of graces, provided you form the habit of saying them that way, provided you make them real prayers, that is, prayers that go in search for grace and prayers that attract grace.

Prayer and prayers You will perhaps say, "Praying that way is, indeed, very beautiful, but too time consuming. After all, I am not a Trappist. My Rosary alone would take three-quarters of an hour. And the rest of my prayers.... Take tonight as an example. I still have my night-prayers to say. Ordinarily I follow the formulas in my prayer book. And I still have three decades of my rosary, the litany of the Blessed Virgin, my prayer to Saint Joseph, to Saint Anthony, and to the Little Flower, the Paters of my Third Order Office, my three Hail Mary's, the prayer for a happy death, and the one ... " Wait a minute. For a person who does not know how to pray — and who doesn't have much time — I am of the opinion that you spend quite a bit of time praying. I wonder, not without some misgivings, what will become of you in that forest of prayers. May I venture to say that you will begin your rosary in a hurry. After a decade you will already be thinking of the end. And you will mumble the Our Father's and the Hail Mary's one after the other as fast as possible, and meanwhile the Lord alone knows what you will be thinking about. You will run through your Third Order Office and the other prayers the same way. As for the three Hail Mary's, you will hardly have enough breath to finish them. The conclusion: you will have ruined beautiful prayers, and you will not have prayed. Is that not the way you often pray? Perhaps you will say, "Why, more or less. Yes." To this I answer that you are saying too many prayers and that there is no real praying, that to overburden yourself with more devotional

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practices than you can reasonably carry is often the surest way of praying poorly and likewise of making prayer irksome. Could that not be one of the reasons for your difficulties? Why not follow my advice and, beginning tonight, abandon all these excellent prayers, or at least a good part of them. "What about the Third Order Office?" 8 "Well, first of all, it would be far more prudent if you satisfied that obligation earlier in the day. These few Our Father's and Hail Mary's take the place of the Divine Office. The least you can do is to accord them the necessary time. The best way is to distribute them over the day and in that way say them piously. You are, moreover, aware that this obligation is such that for a reasonable cause you are dispensed from it. Now, today you have a serious reason to omit your Office. "And what," you ask, "might that reason be?" It is, simply this. You have to relearn how to pray. To do that, you must unlearn how to pray poorly. The sick person must be put on a diet. Do you know what? Instead of reciting your twelve Our Father's, say one in the manner we have just seen. The purpose of the Office is to make you pray, not to render lip-service to God. A fortiori, do the same thing with your rosary, which is in no way obligatory. You say that you have already said two decades. Let that suffice for today. "What! Don't say my rosary? This would be the first time I ever missed it. Is it not an excellent devotional practice?" Certainly it is. But do not forget this: devotional practices are made for piety and not piety for devotional practices. If you say your rosary, you must say it well. "What do you mean by saying it well? To dwell on each Our Father and Hail Mary as you pointed out would take hours." But I did not say that. All I said was that it would be well sometimes to afford yourself the luxury of meditating on some prayer that way. You could pray the first Our Father and the first Hail Mary of your rosary in that way and then say the rest of your rosary slowly enough to remain under the influence of these two, and from them find the most profitable elements for your piety. "What about the mysteries?" 8

The Third of Saint Francis members recite 12 Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Glory Bes each day. This book was published by Franciscan Herald Press, whose first audience is the Third Order of Saint Francis

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If you have meditated on the corresponding mystery before beginning the decade, you will weave your Ave's into that background by relating the text of the prayer to it. Such a procedure will break the monotony of repetition. For example, how many nuances can the thought "the Lord is with thee" take on, depending on whether you consider our Blessed Mother hearing them from the mouth of the angel, as she carried Our Lord within her, as she pressed him to her heart at Bethlehem, in the Temple, as she followed him in his Passion, found him again after his Resurrection, or as she reigns with him in heaven. And so on with the other phrases. In this way your prayer will always have something new about it. "But saying the rosary in this fashion will still require a great deal of time." You are always harping on the question of time. Let's settle it once and for all. Let us suppose that you set aside fifteen minutes or a half-hour for your evening devotions. Whatever the amount of time, the thing to do is to use it to pray correctly. This consideration alone must determine and limit the number of your prayers. The trouble is that you want to cram more into that space than is possible. You give the impression that you are being paid by the piece. And the result is poor workmanship. What counts is quality, not quantity. Were this not true, all we would have to do is imitate lamas with their prayer wheels. Everything in excess of what you can "do well" is harmful and conducive to praying poorly. With that, we have put our finger on a frequent abuse and one that is an obstacle to any and all progress in prayer for many a soul. Apply this principle to your rosary. Suppose you still have three decades to say. How long would that take you ordinarily? Six minutes? Good. (I presume that you cannot spare more time.) In that case, begin the first decade and say it slowly and piously, as previously suggested, as if you had two hours in which to say it. Now, when the six minutes are over, stop. You will perhaps have said one Our Father and a few Hail Mary's, but you will have prayed and prayed well. And what you have said will be much more pleasing to God and far more beneficial to you than three decades muttered without attention. "But the indulgences?" Indulgences, too, were made for piety and not piety for indulgences. If the Church has attached indulgences to certain prayers, she has done so to encourage the faithful to pray — to pray well, of 125

course, and not to massacre prayers. Now then, do you know what happens? You fail to gain your indulgences, because they are won only to the extent that your prayer is well said. Hence, in rushing through your rosaries you lose everything, both the indulgences and the merit of the prayer. You may be quite sure of this: one act of real love of God is worth more for you and for your sins than many indulgences which you do not gain. "If that is the case, I'll stop saying my rosary. It seems to me that you are teaching me the art of ceasing to pray." Say rather that I am trying to teach you the art of ceasing to pray poorly, or to put it in a different way, the art of praying better. To do that you must make certain curtailments; you must reduce quantity for quality. You must lessen the number of pieces by the hour in order to turn out better workmanship and relearn how, in your prayers, to do things well, and all the more so because over and above your oral prayers you will have to attend later on to mental prayer, to your examination of conscience, and to the exercise of the presence of God. For the rest, have no worries about the devotional practices you cherish. You will return to them later on if they are useful to you — either to the same ones or to others, once you have learned how to discharge them according to the desire of God. Even if you never return to them, so what? as long as you pray better, as long as your prayer becomes more intimate, more spiritual, and more fervent. So much the better if your soul reaches the point where it prays so well and so easily that you no longer need formulas.

Vocal and interior prayer For, despite all that has been said about vocal prayer, we must not forget what has been said in the preceding chapters and what remains to be said in succeeding ones about the other kind of prayer — that of the heart. It is very recommendable to repeat the beautiful texts in prayer books piously, but there is something else, too. To limit ourselves to this method of piety would be to get ourselves into a rut. Vocal prayer must be given its rightful place in the general economy of prayer. And never forget this: vocal prayer is only secondary, a means rather than an end. The goal is interior devotion. Vocal prayer will have to give way to

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interior devotion each time piety demands it. (We are speaking naturally of private and not public prayer.) Such is the most excellent thinking of St. Thomas. "Vocal prayer is a means of exciting internal devotion and it is by means of internal devotion that the mind is raised to God.... Vocal prayer should be used to the extent that it is useful in stimulating devotion, but as soon as it distracts the mind or hinders its soaring it should be abandoned — a point which happens especially with those whose mind is so sufficiently prepared for mental prayer as to have no need for vocal prayer." 9 This enlightening remark defines the limitations of vocal prayer independently of all question of time. In our relationships with God the mind takes precedence. Has not the Master said: "But in praying, do not multiply words, as the Gentiles do; for they think that by saying a great deal, they will be heard" (Mt. 6,7) . We must ever be aware of this primacy, never lose sight of the goal, and exercise great freedom in regard to the means. Never become a slave to external practices. When you read your prayers from a book or use some prayer formula, you do well if they help your devotion. Should they become dull, cumbersome, or distracting, leave them. It may well happen that formulas, even extremely beautiful ones, through repeated use lose their savor and their stimulating action. In that case, discard them and replace them with new ones. It may also happen that at a given time vocal prayer act so well that it excites a great interior devotion. Interrupt it at once without hesitation and follow the impulse of the Holy Ghost. It has accomplished its purpose. If you were to cling to it, you would lose its fruit. The usher has led you to the King. Let him return alone. Repeat to yourself, if necessary, the sentence or the word that inspired you. Follow that inspiration very freely, and do not take up the remainder of the text until you have milked it dry. And if, even before opening your book, you feel like speaking to God simply and spontaneously, if you have something to say to him, leave the book closed. What wells up in your heart will almost always be more living, more truly your prayer, and the soaring of your own soul toward God. These various remarks naturally concern what we call devotional prayers, that is, those which are left to our own initiative. We cannot use 9

Summa theo, IIa IIae, q. 83, a. 12.

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such liberty in regard to prayers of strict obligation: for example, our penance after Confession, practices we have imposed upon ourselves under vow (which should not be undertaken without prudence and spiritual counsel), or the recitation of the breviary for those bound to it. There can be no question of shortening these prayers at will or of replacing them with others for reasons of personal devotion. A serious reason is needed in order to be dispensed from them.

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Public Prayer Liturgical prayer The liturgy is the norm of the official cult and of the official prayer of the Church. As defined in the preceding chapter, the liturgy by its very nature is a public prayer. It is an ecclesiastical function. Even if performed privately, as for example, in the non-choral recitation of the breviary, liturgical prayer is public in the sense that the one saying it is delegated by the Church to do so and because it is said in communion with the universal ecclesiastical prayer. On the other hand, it is a private prayer in the second meaning of the term, because it is said privately. Likewise, a lay person assisting at holy Mass takes part in a public act of worship but he may spend the time saying strictly personal prayers or engage even in purely mental prayer. Of the various kinds of vocal prayer, liturgical prayer holds an unrivaled place both by the homage it renders to God and by the blessings it calls down upon men. Being of divine inspiration, liturgical prayer is the perfect worship. It is the universal and truly catholic praise, that of holy mother Church and, therefore, the prayer of every Catholic. The soul who participates in it leaves his own small personal sphere to unite himself with all his brothers in Christ. It is a prayer of communion, a prayer of charity, in which each one forgets himself and uses the plural pronoun "we" instead of "I" to invoke the common Father of all mankind. As the prayer of the entire Mystical Body, it has an intercessory power greater than any private prayer. Inspired by the Holy Ghost, it instills us with piety better than any other prayer. It enlightens our minds and warms our hearts. It is a gushing fountain of devotion. The inexhaustible grace which overflows from it comes from unfathomable depths. Such efficacy naturally demands that the sacred functions be performed with a bearing, purity, and piety in keeping with their meaning, beauty, and eminent grandeur. Sometimes divine services are dispatched with so distressing a lack of deference as to suggest a charade rather than an act of worship. Then they are an injury inflicted on our Lord, an obstacle to piety, and a scandal to the laity.

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The generations which preceded us lived in an age of true liturgical decadence and witnessed the day when prayers and hymns of questionable inspiration and good taste were introduced into the official worship of the Church. That the faithful grew to dislike the holy liturgical services of the Church and became more and more estranged from them is not difficult to explain. The liturgy was the business of monks and priests, and sometimes even they discharged it rather poorly. Hence the spiritual schism between lay Catholics and those who stood as mediators between them and God. Devotion became unduly individualistic. Instead of religion clustering man around Christ and his Church, a narrow moralism centered religion around man. The truly Catholic sense of worship became obscured; and piety, now cut off from the great source of traditional Catholic worship, took on secondary devotions and innovations, some of which were questionable. And so, there is great reason to rejoice in the liturgical movement. Since the time of Pius X, the Benedictines especially have been trying to restore and purify the liturgy, to recapture its beauty and dignity, and to place it within the reach of the laity by encouraging them to become interested in it and take an active part in it. It is one of the most magnificent undertakings of our century and one of inestimable value. We should, however, avoid the excesses to which some have been led by reason of a somewhat one-sided zeal. There are those who confuse the liturgy with archeology. They would have us return to antiquity and thereby deprive divine worship of any possibility of progress or of adaptation. Others, on the contrary, are overanxious to set up a modernized liturgy. The liturgy is undoubtedly a living thing: the expression of the religious sentiment of Christian society. It evolves with it, develops, and enriches itself with the passage of time. Yet, nothing is more dangerous than to want to force a process of life artificially. We must, likewise, beware of all exclusivism. Let us not use the liturgy as a pretext and reject everything that does not conform to it according to the laws of strict logic and, parading disdain for all other forms of devotion, see in them but devotionism, mawkishness, sentimentality, or blameworthy, individualism. We should be broadminded enough to excuse the non-liturgical ecstacies of Saint Teresa. We can pardon certain excesses which result from a reaction, but it would be regrettable to hinder a good cause by pushing it to the absurd. 130

From the fact that the liturgy is excellent we must not infer that it is everything nor that it is equally adapted to everyone's needs or means. The language, the style, the complexity of the rubrics are baffling to some. Nevertheless, they should try to conform to them and learn them. There is, moreover, a minimum of participation obligatory on all. But there is also a limit which varies with each individual. We would be mistaken not to keep in mind the variety of temperaments in this matter. Some people are naturally social-minded; others are asocial. The former live on the spoken word, the latter on silence. The "hermits" are less attracted to public exercises and garner less profit from them than from a private mental prayer. For all of that, they are not less Catholics. The Church has canonized Paul the Hermit. 10 A man may be patriotic and yet show little interest in official demonstrations, celebrations, and ceremonies whereas for others these things are a source of enthusiasm. If, in one sense, man is made for the liturgy, it being the public worship due to the Lord of all, it remains true, on the other hand, that the liturgy is made for man and must nourish his devotion. And that, in the final analysis, is what everything must lead to. Religion is a meeting of souls with God. What God wants is men. Each and every one of his children must save his own soul and sanctify himself. Each and every man must love and adore God personally. God does not want a society as such which has only a moral personality, even if the society of the Church is of a unique and eminent type. The society is as good as the individual members that compose it, and their devotion is the very soul of public worship. The social spirit must not end in a sort of spiritual totalitarianism which would exclude concern for the person and belittle all private devotion. No one loves and understands the liturgical exercises better than the mystics; but because they also love solitude, let us beware of despising their precious interior life and of accusing them of individualism and of sentimentality. The two forms of piety are no contradictory. They are mutually complementary.

10

Saint Paul, the First Hermit went into the desert to pray and was unable to assist at Mass for decades. This was before the Church made it obligatory to assist at Mass on Holydays.

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Holy mass Although we can assist at holy Mass without saying any vocal prayers, we shall treat the subject here because the Mass is a public function and of all public functions the most exalted and the most sacred. It is more than a prayer and more than a liturgy. It is the perpetuated sacrifice of Christ our Savior. It is the center and the summit of the Christian economy, just as the redemptive Passion of Christ on Calvary is the center and the summit of the history of mankind. Volumes would be needed to treat of the Mass properly. In order to remain within the framework of this book, we shall limit ourselves to a few succinct remarks on how to pray during the holy sacrifice. First, let us begin with a general principle. While no particular prayer is of obligation during Mass, to spend the time in devotional practices which have nothing in common with the holy sacrifice would, indeed, be a rather indifferent way of assisting at Mass. The main thing about a good method of assisting at Mass is to be well aware of what is transpiring at the altar and to unite oneself in heart and mind with the sacrifice which is being offered. The Mass is not a simple ceremony, a spectacle, or a worshipful formality. It is a dramatic and august action: the drama of Calvary, the work of redemption continued, the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. And of this we should be fully convinced when we assist at Mass. And to think that each day the same sacrifice that was consummated on the Cross is perpetuated on our altars! Had we stood at that tragic hour next to our Lord's Mother with her pierced heart and in the company of John and Magdalene weeping, had we seen the blood of the innocent Victim flow and had we heard his last words, we surely would not have been able to think of anything else. The sorrowful spectacle would have remained before our eyes and in our hearts until our dying breath. Well, the very same drama is mystically re-enacted at Mass. With what holy trembling should the priest ascend the altar! With what love and compassion ought he, as the minister of such a sacrifice, discharge so sublime and so awesome a duty! And with what piety, respect, and love ought the faithful assist and participate in so divine a mystery! Let us pray before Mass to our Blessed Mother and to John and Magdalene; let us ask them to give us a little of that immense love which tore their hearts that day so

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that we may not be too unworthy of standing with them at the foot of the cross of Christ. If we approach the holy sacrifice of the Mass with their thoughts and sentiments, we will assist as Mass with excellent dispositions, whatever method we follow, and even if we follow no method at all. Yet, it may be helpful to add a few words concerning some of the various methods that have been proposed. The most normal and the most natural method, it seems, is to use a missal and follow the Mass with the priest. Since the priest prays in the name of the faithful, it is proper that the faithful know what is being said for them and that they unite themselves in the one and same prayer with him who represents them at the altar before the Lord. These prayers were either composed or chosen especially for the Mass. They are very beautiful, very profound, and in great part inspired by the Holy Ghost. Then, too, they are the prayers of holy mother Church. He who prays them is no longer alone, for his voice is integrated with the great voice of the universal Church and he participates in their absolute power of intercession and praise. Some, however, do not like to use a missal. They find the rubrics quite complicated and the antiquity of the style of the prayers discourages them. To spend the time at Mass thumbing pages and rushing through prayers that mean nothing would be a rather distracting way of assisting at Mass. The liturgical method requires preparation, an elementary acquaintance with the rubrics, and some initiation into its sacred literature. Laudable efforts are being made in our day to train the laity in this matter, but there are still many people who do not use a missal. They might, however, use a missal adapted to their mentality, one that is written in a more modern style and one which, at least in the essential texts, approximates as best as possible the liturgical text. Most prayer books include "A Method of Assisting at Mass." Here again, a choice must be made. Some are good; others smack of an exaggerated modernism or are composed with regrettable bad taste or in a tedious style. Such formularies become monotonous much more quickly than do the liturgical texts themselves. To avoid this unpleasantness, it would be well sometimes to change to another method. We could, for example, meditate during Mass on the sufferings of Our Lord, either by covering the entire Passion from Gethsemani to the 133

burial, or by dwelling on some particular scene more apt to arrest our attention and move our hearts, and by recalling to mind that the very same Passion and sacrifice once enacted on Calvary is now being reenacted and offered to God on the altar. This method is less socialminded and farther removed from the liturgy than the preceding one. On the other hand, it has the advantage of keeping the mind riveted on the central idea of the holy sacrifice and of giving one's piety a greater freedom. It may be helpful to souls who are more inclined to a more interior devotion or to those who are blessed with an active imagination. We may also keep our mind occupied with some other thought or sentiment related to the holy sacrifice. Saint Leonard of Port Maurice proposes as food for thought the four great ends of the sacrifice and apportions them as follows: up to the Gospel, adoration; up to the Elevation, expiation; up to the Communion, thanksgiving; from the Communion of the Mass to the end, petition. Other similar ways have been suggested: for example, up to the Gloria, humility, sorrow, and confidence; up to the Credo, sentiments of faith; up to the Preface, the offering of oneself with Christ; up to the Pater Noster, the immolation of oneself with Christ; up to the end of the Mass, the giving of oneself to Christ. This latter plan seems more conformable to the action of the Mass as it unfolds at the altar. But, generally speaking, the difficulty with these methods is that the parallelism between the sequence of the ideas chosen and that of the liturgical action will always be more or less forced, especially when we want to make the different phases of the Passion coincide with the ceremonies of the Mass. We must not, therefore, tie ourselves down to any one method too rigidly. Every one in this matter must decide for himself what bolsters his devotion and his attention during Mass and what weighs them down. The best thing to do would be to adopt a mixed solution, one which would be sufficiently liturgical and yet leave enough latitude for personal devotion. Such a method is particularly suitable to souls who are more given to contemplation, souls who are accustomed to praying without a book, souls for whom formularies are an inconvenience and who yet desire to follow the Mass in union with the celebrant. It consists in remaining attentive to the unfolding of the sacred function, but in a rather free way, concentrating on the meaning rather than on the words, and especially on the general and profound meaning of the Mass, uniting 134

themselves to the acts of the priest by a spontaneous prayer and at the same time relying on the liturgical text whenever it fosters their piety. Here, briefly, is how one may proceed: At the beginning of the Mass, we can unite ourselves with the priest, with the faithful who are present, and with the praying Church. 11 Having reminded ourselves of our solidarity, it will be quite natural to blend our voice with theirs in the beautiful opening psalm: "I will go in to the altar of God, the God of my gladness and joy" (Ps. 42,4) , and then to take part in the common confession of sins and purify ourself by sorrow as a fitting preparation for so exalted a mystery and so that no obstacle may stand in the way of divine grace. What follows from then until the Offertory is still not the Mass, but the reunion of the faithful in whose midst the holy sacrifice will be celebrated. To avoid too rapid and too complex a succession of ideas, you might say the Kyrie Eleison and the Gloria with the priest. As for the variable parts of the Mass, tarry over a particular text which is better adapted to your devotion and which puts you in the atmosphere of the feast day. On great feasts where the proper is particularly beautiful and rich, it would be well to follow it entirely from the missal in union with the spirit of the Church. From the Offertory on, prepare yourself for the sacrifice which is about to be consummated by meditating, if you wish, on the Passion of our Savior and by already offering the Divine Victim to the Father for yourself and for others. Then, unite yourself with the Church on earth and with the heavenly court to praise and thank him in the beautiful prayer of the Preface and the acclamation of the Sanctus. Next comes the most sacred moment of all, the moment that constitutes the center and the very essence of the Mass, the Consecration. Jesus is there as by a new Incarnation. His Sacred Heart beats in the host. If the priest had enough faith, it seems that he ought to feel the sacred 11

The corporate union of the faithful present at Mass is brought about at the altar, and not necessarily by the prayers they say or the hymns they sing together. The latter may prove a distraction to devotion, especially if the music director unconsciously diverts their attention from the altar. What makes for their oneness at Mass is their participation in the same Eucharistic sacrifice, for there they are united in Christ; Christ is the unifying force. The direct union of the faithful with one another is to manifest itself outside of church, in their daily life by mutual understanding, charily, and collaboration in good — all of which will be a logical outcome of their common love of Christ and which has its source at the altar.

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pulse under his fingers. Jesus is there as victim in a new representation of his Passion, which is constantly being perpetuated and offered for our salvation and sanctification. How important it is at that moment not merely to assist at the sacrifice of the Mass but to participate in it through an effective compassion and to make it our very own sacrifice, to see to it that the solidarity of the faithful with Christ which the Apostle speaks of and which has already been symbolized by the drop of water added to the wine becomes a reality, and to be a Simon of Cyrene on the road of the cross and not a mere spectator. Let us come to the aid of our divine Savior in his great and exhausting undertaking. We are, as it were, bound by a debt of honor to pay off the debt which the afflictions of Christ leave still to be paid. Let us say to him: "O Jesus, it is we who have sinned and you who expiate, and that is not just. Give me my share in your too generous sacrifice. You plead for souls who consent to be victims with you. Here I am. Grant me a share in your redemptive cross and strengthen me that I may carry mine resolutely." Thus, in union with the priest, you can offer Christ the host to the Eternal Father and offer yourself as a host together with Christ in the most sacred action of holy mother Church, his mystical Spouse. Of the various ways of assisting at the holy sacrifice, this is the best. And when, in the course of the day, a trial is laid on you, you will recognize that it is in answer to your prayer. Your cross, then, will be changed into a great joy. Having made yourself a victim with Christ, you may then present your petitions with confidence, with boundless confidence, in fact. The Mass is the hour of superabundant graces, the great hour of salvation and sanctification, the great apostolic hour. Just as on Calvary the seven sacraments and all the graces of Redemption gushed from the heart of Christ in an outpouring of blood and water, so the graces of Redemption still continue to be poured out at holy Mass as from an inexhaustible source. The one condition is that we know how to tap these saving waters. The graces of just one Mass would in themselves suffice to save the entire world, but not, however, without the free consent of men. Men do put an obstacle in their way and they are thus deprived of the full effects of the Mass. A pious soul had a symbolic vision one day of the Mass: the precious Blood overflowed from the chalice. The faithful 136

present came to catch it in cups; but they were too few and the vessels were too small, so much so that some of the precious Blood spilled on the ground and was lost. Would that we could come to the altar with a heart so wide open that it would be capable of receiving both for us and for all others all the graces which Christ pours out for us at Mass. In union with the priest, pray for the living and the dead, for sinners, for yourself, and for the Church. Say Christ's prayer, the Our Father, with the priest. It was not inserted in the Mass for nothing. Pray that through Christ all glory may be given to the Father in the unity of the Holy Ghost. I repeat, pray for yourself; above all, ask for a greater love of God. Any other petition you make God may modify, but the prayer for an increase of love is always answered. If the Holy Ghost suggests other sentiments to you, follow his inspiration without feeling obligated to restrict yourself to the preceding suggested method. This phase of the Mass is its contemplative part. It is fitting to leave the door open to the influx of grace which descends from the altar. Let your eyes, your mind, and your heart be riveted on Jesus present in the host. Adore him; tell him over and over again of your love, your compassion, your gratitude, your promises, of your desire to belong entirely to him, to share everything with him, and to work to the end that his immolation may fructify and bring joy to his Sacred Heart. If any one of these sentiments persists, it will provide you with ample food for prayer. But do not forget that before the Last Supper, our Lord gave us the commandment of charity. Pray, then, that the Lamb of God establish peace among men, and see that peace is in your own heart by the pardon, the kiss of peace, given to all for love of him. This will be a fitting way to prepare yourself for the last of the great actions of the Mass: after the bitterness of sacrifice, the sweetness of communion, its most exquisite fruit. Holy communion is the morning kiss of Jesus. Yes, it is that and more too. Watch a mother press her child to her heart. She "would like to eat it up." By an unheard of miracle, the loving Savior brings about what humans find impossible to do. The sweet and admirable union of communion, free of material barriers, gives him to us better than if he were visibly present. Jesus in us, heaven, the wish of the Last Supper, in us, the "I in them" (Jn. 17, 23) is accomplished. What a prodigious life bursts forth in us. Ordinary food produces its effects by being changed into our substance, but in holy communion 137

this divine food changes us into Itself. The life of Christ flows in our veins. This life, this eucharistic grace acts of itself, sanctifies us without any effort on our part, and in a glorious way compensates for our insufficiencies; for the Lord in an unspeakable effusion of his love passes on to us his own merits and gratuitously dispenses to us the blessings which he bought so dearly for all mankind on Calvary. Would that we appreciated the gift of God! If we did, then we would hunger and thirst for this banquet of love of which the angels are so envious. Before approaching the communion table, strike your breast once more and beg the Lamb of God to heal your soul which is unworthy of so august a visit. Then, receive him with all the love possible. If communion leaves you emotionless, let him act in you; communion is then not our flight toward God but God's descent into us. All that is asked of you is to do your best to receive Christ with all the good will possible. Then, too, concentrate your thoughts solely on this marvelous gift, and nothing else. Nourish yourself with Christ, become drunk, as it were, with the blood of Christ and entertain this heavenly drunkenness. Daily holy communion will be for you a renewed Pentecost. You will draw from it a love stronger than death. You will leave these holy banquets filled with a revitalized spiritual energy. Enlightened, fired, uplifted by the love of Christ, embalmed with the fragrance of Christ, and comforted again by the life of Christ, you will be invincible in good. After Mass, be extremely solicitous not to forget your divine host. Carry him around in your heart. Although his sacramental presence has ceased, do you think that his love is satisfied with a quarter of an hour and that after those fifteen minutes he is going to withdraw himself? Oh, no. He remains in you in a mystical way and although his presence is no longer physical, it is none the less real. Continue your communion and let your entire day be a spiritual communion. Entertain him by a few visits to the blessed sacrament. This form of union, centered around the Eucharist, is one of the best and one of the most pleasant ways of practicing the interior life. Continue your Mass. A saintly priest once said: "We must always be at Mass." At every hour of the day, on some spot of the globe, the Redeemer is offering himself on the altar. Be there in spirit and unite yourself in mind with the continuous sacrifice of the universal Church. How wonderful to think that we can assist and participate in this great work of salvation at every minute of the day, that we can harvest graces 138

from it, help missionaries, and that we can constantly be a powerful, active, and efficient element in the Church of Christ. How many riches we lose daily by being unmindful of this! Be present, then, at this perpetual Mass which ever continues to save and sanctify the world. If it is of help to you, use the "eucharistic clock." It will remind you at each hour of the day at what places the holy sacrifice is being consummated. In brief, lead an eucharistic life. This devotional practice can in a very pleasant and efficacious way suffice for all your needs of piety, and for a life of union with God and with the Church. You must never grow accustomed to the Mass, whether in assisting at it or in celebrating it. It must never become a burden nor a routine. Rather, each day it should renew the youth of your soul. Your day should be divided into two parts: the first part is more important than the entire second part. Let holy Mass be the center of your life and the place of your supernatural refueling. Assist at it with a love ever new. Be conscious of what you add to the sacrifice by your fervor. Each and every one of us is responsible for the blood and for the Passion of Christ. For love of Christ, let us see to it that we never default at this sublime mission.

The divine office Next to the Mass, the canonical office is the principal act of worship rendered to God by the Church. Those who have assumed this sacred duty ought to be convinced that next to the holy sacrifice and in connection with it the recitation of the breviary constitutes the best, the highest, the holiest, the most important, and the most useful occupation of their life both for their apostolic and for their own spiritual good. It is the opus Dei. 12 In truth, it is a way of life. In general, the canonical Hours are apportioned throughout the day so that those obligated to recite them may never remain long without returning to God to praise him and pray to him. Between times, they ought, according to ancient practice, to continue to live them, going over in their mind the sacred text which they have recited and thus draw nourishment from it. Our elders felt that the divine office meditated and lived in this way took the place of spiritual 12

Work of God. Saint Benedict told his monks to pray and to work, calling the Divine Office the Work of God.

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reading and mental prayer. One's entire interior life concentrated itself around the Sacred Word and it adequately sufficed to sustain that life. Where, for practical reasons of necessity, this procedure had to be more or less relaxed, the divine office still had to preserve its exalted signification of perpetual adoration and systematic refueling of piety. The divine office recited in choir enjoys the added blessing of corporate prayer, for Christ said: "Where two or three are gathered together for my sake, there am I in the midst of them" (Mt. 18, 20) . A fraternal community, delegated by the Church to adore the Lord in the name of the universal Church, assembles in choir for the recitation of the divine office. At the same hour and in all the countries of the world, other communities are doing the same thing and come together to unite their voices with them in the same prayer. The entire Church Militant, together with the Church Suffering and the Church Triumphant, the blessed in heaven and the choirs of the angels gather around the throne of God: a magnificent realization of the communion of saints in an ecumenical prayer. What a powerful voice it is, being composed of all the fervor, all the love, and all the merits of the purest souls, ascending to the Lord to adore, sing, and pray to him for all the needs, the sins, and the sorrows of men. The Virgin Mediatrix unites her all-powerful prayer to ours. And among all these beautiful voices and above them all, the voice of Christ joins with that of his spouse in glorifying the heavenly Father and continues in heaven to intercede for redeemed souls: duo in voce una. 13 With what delight must the Father listen to such a prayer and hear so pure a praise! How these petitions expressed by voices surrounding his throne, and therefore so dear to him, must do violence to him! See how our weak prayer is buttressed by the surest intercessors, how our supplication and our love becomes theirs. This is so because we approach God as members of His mystical body and thereby share fully in the divinely intense life which He in his love has quickened his body with. With what joy, enthusiasm, respect, and love should we go to this office so rightly called divine! There, we are led into the court of our King for sacred and truly angelic functions. Under the Old Law, the High Priest trembled as he entered the Holy of Holies alone and stood before the fearful throne of Yahweh. 13

Two in one voice

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We, however, come near to the throne of the Lamb with confidence. Grouped about the tabernacle, we form a court about him that is most intimate and fragrant with love and sweetness. Furthermore, he encourages us with his gracious smile and helps us to pray. He even prays with us by giving us his Spirit. The first sound of the bell summoning you to choir should remind you of what was said to Mary of Bethany: "The Master is here and calls thee" (Jn. 11, 28) . Hurry then with all joy to so precious a meeting. There, adore Christ and ask his grace: "Aperi, Domine." "Lord, open my lips that I may bless your holy Name with the dignity, attention, and piety due to you." 14 Then, tell yourself that you are in heaven, that you are associated with the angelic choirs and the legions of the elect. Yes, heaven at that moment has lowered itself to the earth and you have but to enter into it. Join with them and exclaim: "Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord. Let us acclaim the rock of our salvation." Listen to the call of his love: "Oh, that today you would hear his voice: `Harden not your hearts' " (Ps. 94:1,8) . Respond to the plea of your Savior. Open your heart wide in order that it may be ready to receive the divine words which are about to fall from heaven. And then, give yourself over to the Holy Ghost and relish the splendors of the sacred liturgy. May the divine office be for you a daily feast and a spiritual banquet. Its splendor is not so much the chant or the literary form as it is the inner splendor which sparkles from the sacred words. In truth, they are divine words and in the strict meaning of the word, for the majority of them are drawn from sacred Scripture and are therefore divinely inspired. "That he might receive fitting praise, God has praised himself," says Saint Augustine. Ut bene laudetur, laudavit seipsum Deus. What a joy thus to be able to render to the Lord homage worthy of him and which is most certainly pleasing to him! For that reason the divine office has graces which are quite special to it. Even the most contemplative souls, who are so eager for the solitude of mental prayer, receive light during it and promptings of love which they receive nowhere else. Such is their daily experience. These 14

The new rubrics have suppressed the Aperi Domine. There is profit in saying this beautiful prayer privately, for it so well expresses the sentiments which should animate us as we begin our divine office.

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texts, inspired from on high, have a singular depth and efficacy, and this latent faculty of theirs is everyone's daily experience. Religious, priests, deacons, and laity who are imbued with these sacred words are amazed with what plasticity, with what exactitude, and with what surprising appropriateness they adapt themselves to their own devotion, to their state of soul, to their needs of the moment. It is as if the inspired words had been written especially for them and for the very hour in which they are saying them. By means of his own words the Spirit is acting in them and is praying in them with unspeakable utterances. Such is the action of the divine words. Their fullness infinitely surpasses the letter. They are living and active words laden with graces. And in truth they have been given to each one of us and for each hour of our life. In inspiring them, God knew the needs of the least of his children, and has spoken to each one beforehand in order to help him through some particular day of his pilgrimage. The Church, as we know and believe, is the sole authorized interpreter of sacred Scripture; but over and above the canonical and universal meaning which it has imposed on every Christian, the Holy Ghost continues through his words to act on each soul, enlightening him and inspiring him with holy sentiments. If the Holy Ghost can and does act so easily through human words, why should he not do so in an eminent way when there is question of His own word, which is our daily manna? As long as these spontaneous interpretations of the sacred text are strictly between God and the soul, as long as they do not deny doctrine, and as long as we cling faithfully to the Catholic and official meaning of Scripture, which remains the basis of all the other meanings which we can discover in it, there is no tinge of Protestantism. The most orthodox spiritual writers abound in discoveries of this kind. For the rest, as we have already said, the most faithful and the holiest of souls are the ones who receive such illuminations from the reading of the sacred words, and they are well aware that these graces come to them from on high. The stirrings of the Holy Ghost awaken generous acts of love in them and nourish their piety in an admirable way. "What tears your hymns and canticles brought to my eyes," Saint Augustine said, "for I was touched to the quick by the sweet voice of your Church! Wafting to my ears, they distilled the truth in my heart. The affections of my heart overflowed. Tears flowed from my eyes, and how beneficial those tears were for me" (Confessions I, IX, Ch. vi) .

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May such sentiments be ours when we discharge this sacred function. But we must merit it. And in this matter it is everything or nothing. If you go to choir distracted and lukewarm, if the office for you is but an irksome formality and a hindrance to your work, it will not have its divine quickening power. You will be deprived of the graces which were waiting for you, and in the end the office will become an unbearable routine for you. Therefore, give it all your care and fervor. Let God do with you what he wills. If you let him speak in you, the office will be a bottomless source of graces. Each day it will have a new charm for you. You will come to look upon it as more than a prayer. In fact, it will become a completely divine prayer, the ever-renewed song of your love, the poem of your life sanctified in the life of the Church and of Christ. There can be no question here of giving even a succinct exposition of all the splendors, the sweetnesses, the exalted and salutary lessons of the sacred liturgy, of the admirable prayers it places on our lips, of the beauty of the cycle of the feasts that recur annually and the harmony of its sumptuous sequence, of all that it tells us in penetrating words of the grandeur of God, of his wisdom, of his touching mercy, of all the sentiments of love, sorrow, confidence, and of adoration with which it inspires us. This profound subject must be studied if we would be well instructed as to its content, if we would understand its many meanings, and if we would wish to be better able to mine its inexhaustible riches. We cannot urge you too strongly to read and re-read a work such as the Liturgical Year by Dom Gueranger. Modern studies on the subject, despite their new findings, have not succeeded in replacing it. Even if you do not grasp everything — and this is especially true of choir religious who do not know Latin — rest assured that God understands. You are uniting your voice with the great voice of the Church and the Church says wonderful things to Him. Be satisfied with being a member of that great choir and of fulfilling your part. Simply sing before God. Sing with fervent love. God is satisfied and you should be filled with joy. It is, of course, to be hoped that everyone will do his best to deepen his knowledge of the meaning of the texts. Since there is the danger that repetition begets routine, a good practice would be to renew your attention from a special point of view before beginning your office; for example, to praise the Lord in union with all creatures, or to praise Him with Mary, or to console the Heart of 143

Jesus; or you might have some special intention, for example, for the Church, for the missions, for some grace that you are asking of the Lord. I have already referred to the immense power of entreaty of the divine office, and that is one of the reasons we hold it in such high regard. We would like to mention, however, that it is not necessary while saying the office to keep in mind the favors we are praying for. That could be distracting, especially where there is question of temporal favors. Furthermore, God knows our desires without our having to tell them to him. I read the following pleasant anecdote in the life of a saint. She went to office with many intentions that people had recommended to her and she obtained everything she prayed for — without, however, giving them any explicit thought in choir. One day, a good lady came and begged her to intercede for, of all things, her chickens. They had stopped laying. The saint, moved by compassion, promised her that she would, and then went to choir for Vespers. Once there, she gave no further thought to the chickens, but she did think a great deal about God. The next day the farm-woman, all smiles, brought a large basket of fresh eggs to the convent. Finally, because of the homage due to God, our own devotion, and the edification of the faithful, it is highly important that the divine office, whether sung or recited recto tono, 15 be executed with the dignity, respect, and recollection suitable to such a function, with moderate slowness, and in the strict observance of all the rubrics. It must be made a thing of beauty. Let each one, therefore, begin the divine office with a maximum of good will, submerging self rather than standing out in choir, as in a well-directed orchestra where every musician loses himself in the harmony of the ensemble. And give special attention to the external beauty. If, in trying to observe the rubrics, if keeping the tone or the rhythm, demands sometimes that we relax our attention from the text, then interior devotion must be sacrificed for the exterior perfection because we are discharging a public worship. Ordinarily, the two will dovetail harmoniously. Being associated with the choirs of the angels, our solicitude and piety ought to rival theirs. Thus, the Lord will be glorified; we will be sanctified —and the laity present will be edified. We are not sufficiently aware of the deep 15

The Divine Office is either sung or recited recto tono, which means on one tone. This is not like the manner in which we say the Rosary or other prayers, but a form of singing on one note.

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impression, either elevating or degrading, which the divine office leaves on those who hear it. It is a true form of the apostolate.

Private recitation of the breviary Except for the last remark, all that has been said holds true when the office is said privately. It is still the prayer of the Church, and he who says his breviary in his room is no less a member of the universal choir, is no less delegated by the Church than are those who recite it in choir. It remains the sacred function of priests, deacons, and of religious — a duty imposed upon them by reason of their role as intercessors and adorers — to assure a sufficient amount of prayer in their life and a continuity in prayer that befits men consecrated to God. The important thing is that it be a true prayer. Otherwise, the breviary falls short of its purpose and no longer complies with the intentions of the Church. If we say it perfunctorily, we satisfy the letter, but not the spirit of the precept. That is Christian Pharisaism. The basic principle which regulates all vocal prayer holds here: the breviary must not be recited but prayed. Si cor non orat, incassum lingua laborat. We must never lose the stimulating and keen awareness of the greatness and the exalted supernatural utility of the divine office. Even when said in private, it must be celebrated with as much respect as in choir. We must approach it with an attitude befitting one who is speaking to God in the name of the Church, maintain the attention and piety which so noble a prayer requires, and assume a pace which allows the text to act upon our soul, stopping at times to savor it and to be penetrated with it. If the breviary is not a mental prayer for us, the reason is that we are discharging it poorly. It should be given its proper place within our day — the place of honor. The ideal would be to recite the various hours at their proper time, but this is rarely possible. The next best thing would be to divide the breviary into two or three parts of the day and in that way assure ourselves of relays in order to revive our devotion and so that the hymns of the hours, for example, will not lose their meaning. We can reserve Compline for our evening prayer. Foresight should be used so as not to leave too much of the breviary for the end of the day lest we find ourselves running a close race with the second hand of our watch.

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It is highly improper to recite the breviary hurriedly and to consider it the least important of our obligations under the pretext that the time consumed in saying it could be spent in much more profitable work. That is the heresy of Americanism. The divine office is the principal occupation which must sanctify our other priestly duties. To be careless about it is to dry up the source of this sanctifying grace, and in the last analysis it is our work and our apostolate which are sterilized. Likewise, in hurrying through the office, we are (perhaps) fulfilling the positive precept of the breviary, but we are not fulfilling that most important law which obliges all of us to pray well. We should never be in a hurry when we are talking with God, and no precept can oblige us to pray poorly. If, for some serious reason, we are dispensed from the office, we suggest that some part of it be said so as not to deprive ourselves of so precious an aid. The breviary together with the Mass and mental prayer must be our daily food. But in order to enjoy its marvelous effects, we must put ourselves in a state of receptivity for the divine action. To mumble it as quickly as possible, without attention or piety, would be a profanation of the sacred word. Not only would we be doing injury to the Lord instead of praising him, not only would we be grieving the Holy Ghost, but we would be closing the door of our soul to him. The result, therefore, is the very opposite of what it should be. When we eat hurriedly and do not chew our food, the food poisons us instead of nourishing us. So too, when said poorly, the breviary turns into poison: instead of nourishing devotion, it taints it, dries it up, makes us lose our liking for prayer, and even draws us away from it. We have "fulfilled our obligation," yes; but we have acted like a bad boy who reluctantly recites his lesson in order to escape punishment. Is that really what God expects of us? His wish is that the repeated audiences which he grants us bring us closer to him; that they activate our love, and be for us a constant source of piety and of apostolic zeal. They do this in an excellent way if, with a filial heart, each time we say our office we make it a real prayer. The laity who are in a position to do so are highly encouraged to say at least a part of the breviary. 16 They should look upon the opportunity of taking part in the grand prayer of the Church as a joy and an honor. Furthermore, they will reap great spiritual profit from it. In 16

In Acerbo Nimis, Pope Saint Pius X encouraged the pastors to give Catechism classes on Sunday afternoons before the office of Vespers.

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saying the divine office, they should put themselves in the same state of mind as those who celebrate the office in choir. They, too, will receive the same graces. Since, however, there is no obligation for them to recite the breviary, they may take a certain liberty with the rubrics, should these prove distracting. Their predominant concern should be with quality rather than with quantity. It will be much more to their advantage to limit themselves to what they can say in the time at their disposal than to hurry through it in order to complete what they had decided on saying. Someone has said: "Never be sure of finishing," and that is an excellent rule for devotion.

Other prayers said in common We are not concerned here with the various exercises of worship, such as benediction, the stations of the cross, the sacraments or the sacramentals. An adequate treatment of these would call for a textbook about the prayers, whatever they be, which the faithful say out loud and in common, either in church, at home, during a procession, a pilgrimage, or at any other such gatherings. A few remarks will suffice. These prayers must have the same essential qualities as the great liturgical prayer: respect, attention, and piety. But perhaps because of greater liberty, of less solemnity, or because of the monotony of the formulas, there is greater danger of their not fulfilling these conditions. Lulled by the monotonous murmur of the congregation, one's attention is soon distracted, piety vanishes, and one's attitude and tone are naturally affected, especially if it is a question of the better known prayers which are worn thin from repetition. I remember a preacher reading the well-known prayer to Saint Anthony from the pulpit. It was followed by a Pater and an Ave. The invocation to the "great Saint Anthony" was read with much conviction and even with grandiloquence. When he came to the Pater — Christ's own prayer — his manner changed quickly to a confused and hasty mumbling. It was as if he had taken a prayer wheel from his pocket. And the congregation answered in the same way. Who has not heard litanies and rosaries reeled off in record time and in a most bored way, prayers that so sorrily recalled to mind the words of Isaias: "This people honor me with the lips, but their heart is far from me" (Is. 29,13) . Sometimes the prayers are recited in a sing-song tune that is almost insufferable.

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There is certainly no question of any bad intention. It is an acquired habit and a vile one. A few thoughtful moments of reflection will convince us that such an attitude is not indicative of a very vital piety. In fact, there is something repulsive about it, not to say scandalous. One day an unbeliever was waiting for his friend in the vestibule of the church while the congregation was praying in its usual way. After the services were over, he could not but remark: "You don't claim that those people believe they are talking to God. If they did, they would speak to him in a different tone of voice." We would not permit such a lack of deference toward a statesman, especially if we were asking him for a favor. When we are speaking to the King of Heaven, and especially when we are doing so in public, let us try our best to remember to talk to him in a way worthy of so exalted an honor. Lack of respect is an offense to God, and we cannot treat his worship lightly. It is important that we be aware of this. The surest way to avoid such a fault is by interior devotion. We recognize saints by the way in which they pray. A truly pious soul would not speak to God in a disrespectful way. The mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart. We must not allow our piety to become lethargic as can easily happen when we say our vocal prayers. Rather let us keep ourselves on the alert by paying attention either to the words we are pronouncing or simply to God's presence. Next, we must watch the externals, for the interior and the exterior in this matter react on each other. Being conscious of the fact that we are speaking to God, we should assume a manner that will make attention possible. The tone and the inflections should express the meaning of the words and be indicative of the devotion which animates them. There is no question of declaiming. In this matter the nuances are discreet and entirely spiritual. Even if the prayer is said recto tono, a certain restrained expression will indicate that we are thinking and sensing the words. In that way, public prayer will be a real prayer for you. You will edify those around you and you will stimulate their piety. Finally, your prayer will be pleasing to the Lord and he will answer it by his blessings.

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Reflection Halt Let us return now to interior prayer. I presume that you have followed the advice given you thus far: you have resolutely set about practicing the presence of God; you have conscientiously used the method of relays and signs; and you have applied yourself to the prayer of conversation. I have been waiting for you to reach this point. So now, let us pause and examine what ordinarily happens. I say ordinarily, because there are many variants, all of them specific cases, each with its own history. After the difficulties of launching, we became aware of very encouraging results within a few days. Our returns to God were more and more frequent. New habits tended to form. To our great joy we compared all these good impulses with what we did or did not do in the past. Our progress in mental prayer, however, was less spectacular, but we nevertheless engaged in it and not without some success. There were times when we felt closely united to God; perhaps there were even periods of real fervor. One noticeable point was that our interest in mental prayer had been aroused; we were happy, and full of gratitude for the assistance God had given us. We felt like we were living a new life full of interior joys. Then, little by little, after such a beautiful beginning, the impulse slackened, prayers were said less frequently; we became aware that we were laying the signals aside unintentionally. They were less evocative. Any attempt to revive them was all in vain; their power had been dulled. Habit had taken its toll here as it does in everything. When we came to think of God or to speak to him, we did so in a rather routine and superficial fashion. The outbursts of fervor became rare and were shortlived. The process yielded little or nothing. In brief, after a certain length of time, it seemed that we found ourselves where we were at the very beginning, except that now we are concerned about it, whereas before we were not. And so finding ourselves faced with a monotonous exercise that seemed fruitless, we began to doubt its efficacy; we grew to dislike it; we became discouraged, and finally we abandoned it. I can picture you coming back to me with a long face and saying: "Things are not going well at all. The little aids you taught me to use are 149

no longer effective. I am as distracted as before, and when I begin to pray my heart is far from God. I see no change in my life whatsoever. What's the use of continuing? Do you really believe that we learn to love God through these humble, artificial means?" And I welcome you with a smile of encouragement. Do not be so upset. You think that things are not going well at all. Well, they are. First of all, there are the benefits of the period that has elapsed: you tried; you prayed more than usual. All of this is to your credit. Then, there is your present concern, your preoccupation with God which is surely something very precious. You have become "a man of desires," a man who is looking for God. And that is the primary requisite of any attempt at perfection. The only mental attitude that should disturb you is indifference toward God and spiritual inactivity. What is happening to you happens to everyone who begins the spiritual life. Beware, for here some go off on a tangent. Nine-tenths of your fellow-beginners, disconcerted by the uncertainty of the road, give up at this point. The rest, advancing as best they can, live to see the fruit of their perseverance. Above all, beware of becoming discouraged at such difficult times. Such periods do not mean that you have come to an impasse, but only to a bend in the road. Discouragement is the child of ambition. You must not expect to accomplish everything at once nor pretend to be at the end of the road when you have only started. We most assuredly do not attain to a love of God by using those artificial means but, thanks to them, we set out on the road to love. Many souls must make several attempts in the course of their spiritual life before they are finally launched. But every attempt leaves a lasting experience and makes subsequent efforts more successful. This halt in your spiritual progress, this apparent failure should not alarm you. It is in the cards, as they say; it is normal, foreseen, and easy to explain. Recall to mind the procedure we have thus far followed: after having searched for the causes of failure in prayer, we saw in a general way that intensifying our faith, practicing renunciation and cultivating love were indispensable if we wished to obviate such a failure. In other words, we drew up a complete, although elementary, program of asceticism. Then, before going any further in that direction, we suggested that you begin to pray without any further ado, with whatever

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virtue you had, and that you compensate for your deficiency by using material means. It was able to work for a while and produced good results in the beginning, thanks to the attraction of the novelty and ease of the practices suggested. But the impulse which was started on a weak foundation and with artificial means could not long last. It was excellent work unquestionably, and one that was beneficial to you and which you had no reason to hinder — we must always do what we are capable of at the time — but it was superficial work. The depths of the soul have not been affected, and that explains the basic ineffectiveness of the method; for profound prayer and constancy in devotion emanate from the center of the soul. Your soul is still very earth-bound. Its supernatural poverty explains why, when you begin to pray, the subject matter is soon exhausted and why conversing with God quickly becomes monotonous or empty. Your heart lacks that keen and ardent love which gives savor to divine commerce and makes prayer a persistent necessity. On the other hand, lack of detachment, too many temporal needs, desires, and irrelative anxieties occupy your mind to the point of absorbing all your interest. All these things constantly distract you from loftier preoccupations. If, then, you wish to pursue this exercise with profit and find pleasure and facility in prayer, supernaturalize your soul. Improve the bad soil by eradicating self-love and attachment to this life. Nourish and enrich your interior life by penetrating it more with the knowledge of God and consequently in the love of God. Thus far, we have limited ourselves to the psychological aspect of the question. There is another — the constant remembering of God. This we shall never attain by our own efforts. A grace is needed, a powerful grace from the Holy Ghost. And our main endeavor will be to place ourselves in a state which will favor such a divine action — to purify our heart that it may be able to see God. And there the trouble lies. Your heart is not pure enough. The means thus far recommended have produced all they could, considering the present state of your soul. The stone wall facing you is by no means an indication that you cannot advance further. It means simply that you have reached the term of one phase of your spiritual life and that the moment has come to enter into a new one. So much the better.

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A new departure The question now is to tackle the basic work, to work not from the exterior but from the interior, to begin the program all over from the very beginning, but this time on a large scale, systematically and methodically. You are facing the enemy lines. The small, easy forays are a thing of the past. Now you must assume the offensive. The time has come to remind yourself that life is a warfare and that the kingdom of God is not conquered except by violence — and by patience also, which is a form of courage. The undertaking is a serious one. First, it will demand, as we have already seen, a strenuous effort of reflection. When a general finds himself in contact with the enemy, he begins by noting carefully the enemy position. Then, he ponders over his plan of attack. So you, too, must enter within yourself, examine the situation, the obstacles, the resistances to be expected, and look for the means to surmount them. Whether you like it or not, you must engage in one phase of meditation. Not meditation for meditation's sake, as so often happens, done solely to satisfy a duty, haphazardly following the topics suggested in a meditation book or, as in the preceding type of prayer, according to the attraction of the moment; but an organized, realistic meditation, one with a definite goal in mind. And that goal is to open up the road of prayer by attacking the successive defenses which block its progress. Your aim is a voluntary meditation, one that tends to action, that resolves itself in ascetical work culminating in interior reform. Meditation then should be accompanied by practical exercises that will be its natural prolongation. It must be an integral part of life, even more so than the prayer of conversation. A meditation without practical resolutions is a dead meditation. You must want to do something, and reflect on how you can accomplish it. That is one of the reasons why I had you try your hand at the life of prayer before you were thoroughly prepared to do so. You have tasted somewhat of its sweetness, noted its utility, and divined what a continuous and fervent life of prayer would be like. The desire for prayer has been awakened in you; the goal has become clear in your mind. And finally knowing what conquests you are striving for will give you more courage in the struggle.

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And that is also why I let you continue to the point of failure: the raids, the reconnaissances led you to the enemy positions and made you discover them. You have reached the point where you have run into an obstacle. Was there a better way of becoming aware of the enemy's presence and of his nature and likewise of convincing you of the necessity of routing the enemy? This is particularly true of renunciation which, by its very nature, is repulsive and which, at first sight, presents itself only in a negative light. Having learned from experience that attachment is the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of your desire, that to destroy it will prove extremely practical and useful, in fact, necessary, you will attack it with greater conviction. No one would think of tearing down a wall unless there were something behind it he wanted; but the prisoner who knows that the wall deprives him of liberty and life will work passionately and relentlessly until he breaks though it. I am going on the presupposition that the exercises leading to union with God have almost completely failed. Of course, such will not always be the case. It may happen that for a long time they continue to succeed to a satisfying degree and to show progress. Even in this eventuality it will be good to set aside periods of reflection or at least to devote oneself to reflection at times without suspending the preceding practices. Such a procedure can only favor union with God. Reflection is necessary to make our union with God more earnest, thanks to the new light and the deeper betterment of the soul that will result from it. Furthermore, there is always work to do in this domain. Those days or periods when the practices conducive to union with God yield less might be chosen for this. But in any case, ultimately you will have to begin to meditate. If you are going through a period of great fervor, you must not hamper the action of the Holy Ghost. The time will come when his action will not be so strong. That will be the time to have recourse to meditation. In any eventuality, there is spiritual reading which to a certain degree takes the place of the prayer of reflection. We cannot afford to neglect spiritual reading. Our supernatural life needs nourishment.

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Three fundamental meditations In the prayer of conversation it was suggested that you talk to God about anything, provided the subject interested you. In the present case, the subjects are imposed on you and follow a certain order, like the movement of a company of soldiers in a regular attack. As a rule they are divided among three principal points: faith, detachment, and love. (Note that these subjects refer to the three theological virtues, for detachment is to put all one's hope in God and in the things of the future life and to expect nothing from this earth. It has, then, a close relationship with the virtue of hope, of which it is, so to speak, the opposite). All other subjects, especially the different moral virtues, will be grafted on to these basic ones. We will treat of them later under the subject of "moral prayer." I. Faith — These three topics of meditation follow each other and are linked with one another. Faith is, evidently, the point of departure. It would be useless to prove this. Here, however, we are concerned with a certain quality of faith. Every Catholic believes the dogmas which holy mother Church teaches. No point is more common among the faithful. But a faith that is profound, vital, active, one that permeates and impregnates one's whole being, that commands one's complete will, that governs all one's actions is rather rare. Now, that is the faith that must be solidly anchored in your soul if you would create an atmosphere favorable to prayer: a dynamic not a static faith, one that is a motivating idea and not a dead one, one that is at the center of your preoccupations and fosters a keen and constant interest in things supernatural. For example, suppose a man is to take up his residence in a foreign land within a month. How seriously he prepares for his departure! During that last month, his thoughts and his entire day's activities are concentrated on that one idea and everything related to it: his passport, the ship he will take, all the preparations for the trip. He sells everything he no longer needs, and makes whatever purchases are necessary for his new life. He already lives in his new home in imagination. The thought obsesses him. The town he is about to leave no longer interests him. So too, with just as keen and active a faith, should we believe in the primary of the supernatural enterprise of our earthly life, in the imminence of our departure, in the urgency and absolute

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necessity of preparing for that other life that awaits us — namely, to love and serve God at the expense of everything else. Now, ponder over your way of life. What place does faith hold in your habitual thoughts? What influence does it exercise over your daily behavior? You agree that there is much to be done. It is ever the same: the preoccupation with things earthly clouds and chokes the supernatural and robs it of all practical interest. Despite the faith you profess, in real life the scale of values is reversed. The first order of business, then, is to re-establish the fundamental order of the spirit: a real reversal of values. You understand that success requires much deep thought. This subject and the one following have been touched upon in Chapter III where I invited you to make your first attempt at meditation; but here we are concerned with a complete and methodical examination in view of a definite result. As a guide in this matter, here are the main points you must give some thought to. They can be proposed here only in a cursory way. In the beginning you will find it indispensable to use some book which develops them, such as the meditation books which can be found in Catholic libraries. 17 1. Reality — Real things are not those which we see, but those of the supernatural world. In truth, reality is God. He is being; He is the all of everything. The rest have but borrowed being and exist only because of Him and for Him. God created us out of love, that we might love Him and He love us and, in that way, make us happy like the angels. Our one true and sure good is the friendship of God — grace here below and glory in eternity. 2. The Meaning of Life — Our destiny is to reach heaven by serving God. Our earthly life has no meaning in itself, but only in its end, the future, definite, and eternal life. This life is a preparation, a pilgrimage, a combat in quest of our happiness. Everything must be referred to that. All things pass away; one thing alone remains: the sum total of the merits we have amassed. How well it would be if we were convinced of the relative and ephemeral character of our present life: a passing trial of infinite significance. 3. Aberration — We believe that, but how do we act? In exactly the opposite way from what the most ordinary common sense demands. With a sort of unconsciousness, we settle down in the ephemeral, as if 17

In general, it would be better to use classical works. While their style may be dated, their contents are more meaty than certain more recent ones.

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there were nothing else. We believe one way and act another: like a man who, instead of tending to his business, enjoys himself and squanders his fortune. The result is deception and sadness, because our present life cannot give us happiness; and when the day of reckoning dawns, instead of being rich in merits, we find ourselves empty-handed. 4. The Last Things — The finale is what counts. What will it be? Death is one truth we do not question. A few years from now our life will have terminated; we will have stepped across the threshold. Where will we be? There is but one alternative: heaven or hell, eternal happiness or everlasting misery. We talk of making a place for ourselves. But there it is, fixed and irrevocable. What food for thought! What will we think then? How will we judge our conduct? If we could return to earth and begin our life over, how different it would be from the one we are now living! 5. Wisdom — Let us think now as we will think then, since our thinking then will be logical. Let us live now as we would have wished to live. Act in all things in view of the end, of life eternal, referring everything to it, the one thing which must be of consequence to us, considering everything else as accessory, or rather as so many means to attain our glorious end better and more surely. That is what the saints did. They cared little for the things of this earth and fought valiantly for the kingdom of heaven. And today they stand before the great white throne of God; they enjoy unlimited happiness; they rejoice over the sacrifices they made in order to receive so glorious a crown. In other words, they acted reasonably. 6. Applications — If we wish to live rightly, we must recall these primary truths to mind every day, at least once a day and more often if possible, until they become the very basis of our thought (for, indeed, it is the basis of our life). It would be well if this basic meditation served as a prelude to each one of our mental prayers. In that way we would place ourselves once again in a supernatural climate. And in order to preserve ourselves in that climate, we will have to do some spiritual reading. Spiritual books are an antidote to the naturalistic environment we live in. The spiritual food these books offer will permeate us with these primary truths and keep the light of faith clear before our eyes. Oh, that our faith would become living and alert — in fact, more than a faith — a spirit of faith. Next, these convictions must be translated into our conduct, otherwise known as the resolutions of our mental prayer. They must be 156

practical and definite. They must correct, point by point, each of our actions in such a way as to reorganize our whole life in the supernatural order. This is the first part of your program. It is indispensable that you comply with it. In proportion as you accomplish this adjustment from within, your interest in things divine will revive, and you will become capable not only serving God well, but also of praying well. II. Detachment — Once you are penetrated with this spirit of faith, you will be capable of detaching yourself from things earthly, for this second point flows logically from the first. This virtue, which is so difficult and so contrary to our tendencies, is the consequence and the fruit of faith. It can proceed from it alone, for faith gives it its motive and meaning. Without faith renunciation is absurd. No one would renounce temporal things if he did not believe in the eternal. Faith purifies the intellect; detachment purifies the heart. And with that we have put our finger on the crucial point. In spiritual combat, the key position must be seized and if that is conquered the enemy line will crumble. Here the enemy concentrates his resistance. When a soul comes to a halt in his spiritual progress, and especially in his progress in prayer, look for the answer in his detachment. With rare exceptions, you will always discover a lack of renunciation in him. His soul is not free. There you have the basic reason for failure in spite of excellent means. Any and every technique of prayer will soon show itself inoperative if it is applied to poorly prepared soil. The most perfect machine will produce nothing good if it works on defective matter. On the other hand, when the depths of the soul are purified, these means succeed wonderfully and soon become superfluous. All good soil asks is to be allowed to produce. Give me a detached man and I will make a man of prayer out of him. I will make him a saint, and with ease. No obstacle stands in the way of his forward march. Detachment is the condition of all the virtues. All of them are in one way or another but modalities of this parent virtue, just as they are modalities of love. Hence, in our program, we shall not treat systematically of each virtue in particular. For the greater part, detachment will take care of that. It remains for each one to set about reducing the hold a particular tenacious fault has on him, and notably those which are more directly obstacles to prayer. Later, we shall see that there is another method of

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eradicating all of them. Love, in fact, will accomplish this miracle. But first, we must reach love through detachment. Here are a few points of meditation to this effect: 1. Logic and illogicality — Detachment is the immediate result of faith, for it but one thing is necessary, all the rest is accessory and of little importance. It is, therefore, unreasonable to be attached to temporal things. Not only is it unreasonable, but it is fatal; for apart from the fact that these things are contemptible in themselves, they are harmful to us because they stand in the way of our progress toward the essential goal and make us lose valuable time and precious efforts. We are reluctant to draw so clear a conclusion because it affects our life and entails sacrifices. Lack of courage induces a lack of logic. We would like to win both the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of this world. Although that is the aspiration of a misled humanism, it became impossible with the advent of original sin. "No man can serve two masters" (Mt. 6, 24) , says the Lord. 2. The Obstacle — Our sickness is love of the world, attraction for things visible. Hence arise concupiscences, vices, and sins. Our desire for immediate and sensible pleasure creates an egocentricity in us which draws everything to it, shackles us to everything and immobilizes us in an inextricable net. Progress in love becomes impossible, of which it is the exact opposite; it puts an obstacle in the way of all the virtues; it is the chief enemy of prayer; it induces spiritual dryness and all sorts of distractions. Should you have any doubts, two minutes of selfexamination will convince you of the dire effects of love of the world. 3. Purpose and Necessity of Renunciation — If we would march forward, love of the world must be overcome. Love needs a free heart. The resolve is a necessity; it is inescapable. If it seems irksome to us, then we have but to think of the reward promised us: divine love, virtues made easy, prayer in all its sweetness and, in the end, celestial glory and the possession of all good. On the contrary, think for a moment of what earthly things can give: they can never satisfy us and one day they will be taken away from us. Christian renunciation has nothing negative about it. It tends toward a magnificent term, the only one after all to which we aspire: happiness. 4. Remedy: Reflection and Action — The only conclusion we can faun is that it is a difficult virtue. Hence, we must meditate on these things frequently and profoundly if we wish to reach a point of conviction that will lead us to action. I have asked you to think on the 158

last things every day. Let your daily conclusion be such that your faith resolves itself in detachment. Your meditation must be made in a practical way. It must take your life into consideration, to the extent that your reflection be followed up by concrete exercises that make your reflection fruitful. The work to be done is threefold. a) Interior Detachment. Discover where the obstacle holds you back most, and remove it by reflection. If it is pride or vanity, convince yourself that there is no vice more stupid, and that it sins against truth. Recall to mind how you scoff derisively at the conceited people you meet. If it is ambition, then what connection does it have with eternity? The ambitious man works exclusive of and in opposition to his eternal goal. If it is esteem and honors, what do they profit you? Rest assured that other people are thinking of themselves far more than they are thinking of you and that they laugh at your merits. You are chasing wind. Is it money, riches? Recall to mind the Gospel story of the farmer who died while dreaming of his ambitious projects. Pleasures? Except for necessary relaxation, they are a waste of time; they sap your energy; often they are degrading and leave you with but regrets. Having given careful attention to all this, bend your will never to desire these things, to will but eternal goods, to take a supernatural attitude, an attitude of disinterestedness toward the world, an attitude of truth. Then, apply this disposition to the various occasions in which you will have to exercise it. b) Active Renunciation. If interior detachment is sincere, then it will translate itself, in so far as possible, in effective renunciation of what it makes us despise. It is at this point that the concrete resolutions of your meditations will fit in: to do nothing that flatters your vanity, to know how to accept humiliations, to be satisfied with a modest share of temporal goods, to be ready to part with something to give pleasure to another, to curb your ambitions, and moderate your pleasures. These resolutions must be practical and applied to specific points of your life. The same thing will apply to the third domain: c) Penance. Now comes the counter-attack: penance goes directly against our desire for pleasure and suppresses our evil tendencies. Were it not for that, it would be absurd, but because of it, it is indispensable. "Unless you repent, you will all perish" (Lk. 13,3); you will be victims of your passions. The modern man wants no mention of this virtue. But if you wish to remain a Catholic, you will see to it that there is always a certain amount of it in your life: some small corporal mortifications, nothing 159

excessive. In themselves these small penances are negligible, but they create in you an aptitude to resist the spirit of pleasure. They keep you in combat condition. Perform penances of a spiritual nature, too: combat your curiosity, dissipation, gossiping, laxness, insubordination, and caprice. Accept the misfortunes of life: sickness, failures, worries, humiliations, and all the sorrows that burden your mind and heart. These are penances which God in His mercy sends us, for He knows that we have need of suffering if we would be purified. And they are the best penances. So why complain about them? Since we must suffer, why not make a virtue of necessity? It is so simple. All we have to do is say "yes" to our heavenly Father who wishes to cure us. Our suffering would be alleviated and we would learn to reconcile ourselves to its daily companionship. 5. Prayer — Left to ourselves, we would never reach the point of practicing the austere virtue of prayer properly. We must ask for help from on high. Therefore, let every one of your meditations conclude with an urgent and confident prayer. "God has commanded us to do what we can and to ask him for what we cannot do," and the result will be that with the help of his grace we can do all things. 6. The New Soul — Finally, think of the result of this struggle, of the wonderful effects of detachment. It is a release; our chains will have been removed and we will become free to be what we want to be, to do what we wish to do. Detachment is a source of energy and makes us strong and constant in doing good. It gives us a peace which nothing can disturb because none of the things which we formerly feared so much can now harm us. And finally, it makes prayer pleasant and easy because the causes of distraction have disappeared and because, freed of our worldly cares, we feel at home with God. All of this takes place because the soul has become responsive to divine love, and all that remains is for divine love to come to full bloom in that soul. III. Love — Detachment opens the way. The man who is freed of self-love finds himself in a position to love God. Loving God then becomes something natural. No one can live without love. He must either love himself or love God. Only when the heart is empty of self can God enter it. But we need help. The break in the wall has been made, but we must keep hammering away. Success is not automatic. We must use the forces liberated by renunciation and direct them in a positive way toward 160

the conquest of divine love. Detachment is but an essential condition, the negative side of the problem. It would be foolish and deplorable to stop there. Some souls make laudable efforts of renunciation and then restrict themselves to a narrow asceticism with no horizon or warmth. They were able to conquer but they did not know how to exploit their success in order to end in what would be its crowning: the flowering of the heart in love. Such is the third point of the program and the third subject of reflection: the training of the heart and the direct search of love, the climate of perfect mental prayer. In this first phase, God himself is the object of our meditation, and particularly the God-Man. We should try to penetrate more and more profoundly into the knowledge of His beauty, His grandeur, His goodness, of everything that can awaken in us admiration and affection for Him, of what can touch our hearts and will make God the object of love in all the force of the word. Next, we should dwell on that immense love with which Our Savior, has loved us both as God and as Savior, on His merciful Incarnation, on everything that Christ willed to endure for our salvation. Our hearts will then feel urged to return the love of Him who gives us such proofs of His love and with the Holy Ghost, seconding his effort, our love and fervor will gush forth naturally. Now this last meditation has to do directly with affective prayer. Of this, more later. For the present, what we might keep in mind here is its corollary, love of neighbor. Although it derives from the love of God, it is not, like the love of God, immediately ordered to affective prayer. It will be well, in view of its outstanding importance, to make love of neighbor the frequent subject of our meditation, and reflect, for example, on the following points: 1. Motives and Importance of Fraternal Charity— Its close connection with divine love: the two commandments are but one, and refer to the same virtue which is love, the queen virtue. Our Lord made it so in his testament. Speaking of the general judgment, He makes love the passport of admission into heaven. The reason is that it comprises the entire Law and the prophets. 2. Charity and Detachment — The exercise of charity calls into play a host of other virtues, particularly detachment. We sacrifice our own good for that of another, thus killing one bird with two stones. Fraternal charity is the daughter of renunciation as it is of the love of God. 161

3. Applications — There are many forms of charity which we must foresee in meditation. The following is an incomplete list. In the material order: assistance to the poor, the sick, to all outcasts, concern for the misfortunes of others and active compassion, and an eagerness to render service. In the moral order: kind judgments, charity in word and conduct, treating others as we would like to be treated, patience, gracious condescension, affability: to be bearers of joy. In the supernatural order: to be preoccupied with the good of souls, to practice an active apostolate suitable to our condition in life, at least to support apostolic endeavors when we cannot devote ourself to them, to pray for the conversion of sinners and the sanctification of souls. "And so you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Gal. 6,2) . A Catholic without charity is not a Catholic. "By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another" (Jn. 13,25) To enlighten the mind, purify the will, warm the heart, such is the triple road you now have to travel. Begin it with confidence. When you reach the end, you will enter into the ways of prayer without any difficulty, no longer artificial means, but with a spontaneous movement of your profound being.

The course to follow Serious and repeated thought must be given to what has just been said. We do not discover our deficiencies at once. Often they are unconscious or, what is worse, unadmitted. Nor do we create in ourselves new convictions that are strong enough to transform our lives. Our good tendencies, submerged by the tide of small passions and contrary habits, are so inert that it is quite an undertaking to get them to function. Here a retreat would be very beneficial to you. In so far as possible, make it a closed retreat: a few days during which, removed from your habitual duties, you will be alone with truth. There is nothing comparable to it for a spiritual bath and as a preparation for the period of reflection which you are about to begin. Contrary to the prayer of conversation, you must, during this period, adhere to the same subject or to one point of the subject for a

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definite time. The important thing here is to do some thorough and deep thinking and this requires that you have to return to the same thought many times, to look at it from different aspects until you have assimilated it and until it has produced its desired effect. What is important is not the meditation itself, but the result, the effect it produces on your life and consequently on your prayer. You must not, however, tie yourself down to this rule in an absolute way and consider yourself bound to divide the time of meditation into three successive, watertight periods, one devoted to faith, the second to detachment, and the third to love. What I have suggested is the general and theoretical sequence, but psychological factors must be taken into consideration also. You must avoid boredom and exertion. Everyone must decide what profits him best. For some souls it would be well to run through the entire cycle in a few days, then go through it again but this time searching more deeply into the subjects and returning to them again and again until the desired result is achieved. Use a certain freedom of choice according to the circumstances and the needs of the moment. If, in the course of these meditations, some particular thought strikes you forcefully and seems to be more fruitful, dwell on it as long as it has something to offer. There is nothing to stop you on any given day from taking a subject other than the three fundamental points: for example, an important liturgical feast you are celebrating or some circumstance which awakens a salutary thought in you, or the necessity of reviving one of the special virtues which flows from the three mother virtues. But try to refer these casual meditations to the subject at hand and include them in the general pattern of your reflections. You will do this naturally if you have seriously plunged yourself into your reflections. In the spiritual life everything meshes. Finally, I must return to an important point. It would be vain to limit yourself to reflection. There is the matter of applying your reflection to your conduct, of carrying it over into your life. And this involves a whole aggregate of practical exercises and a series of actions and reactions between meditation and life. Only in this wise will meditation be efficacious.

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How to Meditate First, a very important point must be made. Because you are about to begin to meditate, you must not brush aside the preceding exercises: namely, the practice of the presence of God and the quest for union with him. Because these two practices are essential, because they are the goal of the other exercises, they can never be abandoned. Whatever else you do, you must discharge them to the best of your present ability. If your leisure hours are limited, you will have less time to devote to the preparation of your meditation and to the different examinations of conscience. Better still, as we shall see, you might integrate them into your new form of mental prayer. Moreover, they will have become easier for you because by this time they have become somewhat of a habit. The only thing in need of modification is the manner of making your mental prayer. Then, too, constant concern for the presence of God and intimate union with Him must find a place in your meditation. Having said that, we may now proceed to a few general principles on the manner of meditating.

First principle Meditation must be pious. By this I mean that it must never be a simple reflection, an isolated and cold exercise from which God is absent. Let us recall to mind the difference between meditation and mental prayer. Meditation is reflection. In itself it is a work of the mind alone and requires no one to converse with. Mental prayer is conversation with God, union with God. It is an activity of the whole soul and one in which God necessarily has a part. Now, meditation in the Catholic sense must always be mixed with mental prayer; it must be mental prayer and at the same time reflection. It is but a special form of mental prayer. Consequently, I prefer the expression "mental prayer of reflection" to that of "meditation." Mental prayer of reflection consists, therefore, of thinking in the presence of God, of speaking to Him, and of listening to Him. It will always be made in the manner of an affectionate conversation in which the heart is as active as the mind, just as in the mental prayer of conversation. But whereas the latter was a free conversation on any 164

subject, the mental prayer of reflection is a serious conversation on a very specific point. When two friends meet casually, their conversation may ramble from one subject to another; but they may come together to discuss some important question. In that case, the conversation takes on an entirely different form. It is more restricted, more rigid, and more methodical. But it ever remains a conversation. Even though the affection is implicit, it is in no way excluded.

Second principle Meditation must be practical, have a concrete goal, and help us to live. To a certain degree, it will accomplish this, thanks to the three fundamental subjects that have been chosen and arranged methodically for a well-defined purpose, which is to reach the point where we live better in order to pray better. We cannot overstress the point that it must be made in a detailed way in terms of life — your own life — in terms of your present state and needs. You must now begin by becoming conscious of your manner of living and by discovering your personal needs. Do this in order to determine the particular themes you will select for your meditations. During your meditations, keep them before your mind's eye and, finally, apply what your mental prayer suggests to your conduct. The mental prayer of reflection must be active, dynamic, and voluntary, aimed toward its particular goal and part and parcel of a definite program. Beware of mental passivity and indolence. Meditation must not be considered as some sort of exercise of piety on the fringe of life, nor must it be made in a haphazard manner, without too clear an idea of what we want to get out of it. Such a meditation is headed for distractions; it lacks interest and yields scant fruit.

Third principle Meditation must be ordered. A thought that is not watched and controlled comes to nought. An undisciplined meditation leads to reverie and confusion. We must, however, be on our guard against certain errors in the use of meditation methods.

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The fact that these methods offer ready-made points encourages laziness, and this is especially true if we use a book. The book, naturally, follows a particular method. We therefore run through the different points conscientiously, but without deep thought, with no concern to assimilate them or apply them to ourselves. The effort we expend is superficial and the work artificial. Surely, it is an easy method. We have but to follow and the subject matter is there. But we neither think nor do we pray. We have the illusion of doing so. We have been occupied and, when the period is over, we think we have engaged in mental prayer. Our effort has been no greater than the lazy student who idiotically repeats what his neighbor whispers to him. Used in this wise, meditation methods, whatever they are, deceive the soul because the soul dispenses itself of any effort and yet fancies that the goal has been attained. Another fault, which we have already touched on, is to be a slave to some method. Some souls believe that they are obliged to dwell on all the points of a preconceived plan. Whether they succeed or not, they think they have not made a good meditation if they omit a single point. This is downright absurd. A method is not meant to be an obstacle but must help you to think and to pray. Now, how do such souls expect to be able to think effectively in such an assembly-line production, and how can they catch the inspirations of grace? Finally, some spiritual directors are stubbornly guilty of the gross error of attempting to bend all souls to the same method. This is tantamount to ignoring the infinite variety of temperaments, graces, and needs. Such insistence can provoke regrettable trouble for some souls and definitely arrest their progress. The best method for each one will be one of his own making, one comformable to his own spiritual constitution. Naturally, you may try one or the other method suggested in different books and adopt the one most beneficial for you. Or you may combine from several of them the points that suit you best. Or having tried them, you may prefer to work out a personal method of your own. A method must be tailor-made. There are discursive souls who like to treat a subject in a strictly logical way, and there are intuitive souls who would be cramped by such a system. They can think only by direct impression of the truth. Let everyone reflect during meditation in his own way, the way he usually does in any other circumstance.

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Now, what do you do when you examine any problem? You do not sit down and figure out in advance how one thought will logically lead to another; you do not, except rarely, set down the points you intend to treat successively. No, your thought follows its natural course. It creates a certain logical order for itself, one that is spontaneous because the thoughts are naturally logical. So why act differently when you meditate on the articles of our faith? Why do you cease being yourself and subject yourself to a way of thinking that is foreign to you? You may object and say that it is easier to reflect on things earthly than on things supernatural. That is true. But do you not increase the difficulty by adding to it the cumbersomeness of an artificial method which seems to relegate such matters outside of reality? That, I believe, is one of the reasons for the repulsion many experience when faced with methodical meditation. After all, what is methodical meditation but examining a question to reach a definite result? Any and all processes of thought that lead to that end are good. Does that require so very much previous organization? The ideal would be to do without any preconceived method whatsoever; and for a man little accustomed to thinking that indeed is not very difficult. Ready-made methods are only last resorts. The truth is, however, that many find it necessary to have recourse to some such temporary expedient, and they need a great deal of courage to adhere to it. Furthermore, they must avoid boredom. Likewise, the simplest and most natural of methods will be the best: those which give the impression that that is exactly how we would have gone about it had we not been taught how. The method must be flexible. We must even go so far as to say that each one must use several methods according to the subject one is contemplating. Saint Ignatius proposes an entirely different method for meditating on a subject of one's choice than he does for meditation on a fact related in the Gospel. Even in regard to the same subject, we may one day be inclined to reason upon it and the next day ponder it over with greater freedom and more affection. The method must leave you with a degree of independence. It is only an instrument. There is great wisdom in knowing how to omit what proves to be less useful and on occasion to dispense with it completely. The method is made for the man, and not the man for the method. Of course, if you cannot make profitable meditations without using the method you have chosen, then hold on to it. Using it is far better than wasting your time. But do so with the hope of throwing off its 167

yoke whenever possible, and of gradually making your meditation more and more personal.

Fourth principle Just as in the preceding type of mental prayer, so here, too, you must not attempt to exceed your ability. Meditation, for some people, is a difficult exercise. To overdo it would quickly end in disgust. If you experience difficulty, begin with short simple meditations. One single thought, if it is well chosen and dwelt on, can suffice. And the one that comes to mind at once will often be the one best adapted to you. You might also precede or follow your meditation with some spiritual reading on the same subject.

Fifth principle For mental prayer of reflection — much more so than for the mental prayer of conversation — it will often be recommendable to avail yourself of a book, especially in the beginning. Do so only when it is necessary or useful. You will, however, find this to be the case frequently. The point here is to think. Now, as long as we have not meditated at length nor lived things divine, our ideas along these lines are rare and poor. For the most part, it is an unknown domain. A book will help us explore it. There we find things that we would never have thought of by ourselves. We will find ideas unexpected, rays of light completely new to us which will make a deep impression on us and will open up veins rich in graces. The old monks always preceded meditation with spiritual reading. "Seek by reading," said Guigues the Carthusian, "and you will find by meditating." The meditation books you use will naturally be those which treat of the subject you are concerned with at the moment. It might be a collection of meditations (the book will offer you a plan which you may profitably use without, of course, making yourself a slave to it) or some other work of spirituality. Whichever it is, begin by opening the table of contents and finding the meditation or the chapter which fits you at the moment. Even in these passages you will have to make a selection. You must read them with meditation — your meditation — in mind. 168

Everything on the printed page will not be equally useful to you. You must glean from it and choose the most profitable points, just as bees choose their flowers, just as the carpenter standing before a pile of wood takes only the pieces he needs for his creation and rejects the others. You will pause when you come upon something that is capable of being integrated into your mental synthesis, to what can become for you motivating ideas or motivating sentiments. Ponder these thoughts for your own benefit, and in your own way. Dig away at them and thus you will make the transition from spiritual reading to personal reflection.

The general progress of mental prayer From what has just been said, it is understood that the plan here proposed is only a suggestion, a simple guide which each one will follow or modify to his liking. It is one of twenty approaches. I have chosen this particular one because it seems to me to be the most simple, the most logical and natural one, and at the same time the best adapted to the kind of meditation subjects called for at this period of your spiritual life. It is no more than a schematic plan.

Preliminaries The preliminaries are the same as for the mental prayer of conversation. Begin, therefore, by placing yourself in the presence of God, by putting yourself in communication with him as intimately as possible. That is the proper way to think supernaturally. Then, cast aside your worldly cares. Make a serious effort to raise yourself to the plane of divine realities. If you fear being distracted, stop for a minute and think of the meaning, the brevity, the vanity of this earthly life, and of the necessity of taking Christ's warning seriously: "Seek first the kingdom of God" (Mt. 6, 33). It is always well, as we have seen, to put this fundamental question squarely before ourselves before beginning to meditate and come face to face with reality again. I urge you to do it each time you meditate in order to create a supernatural climate in you, except when you feel the action of God from the very outset of your meditation.

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And lastly, humbly implore God's help by a prayer such as: "Come in me, Holy Ghost. Fill my mind with your light and my heart with Your love."

The mind You are now ready to begin the body of the mental prayer. In general, it will be useful to have anticipated the subject and to have already given it some thought before you begin your mental prayer. In that way the ground will be ready and you will not risk wandering from the subject. But if for some reason you find occasionally that another subject would fit you better, then use it as the subject of your mental prayer. For instance, some passage from your spiritual reading or from your breviary may strike you, and you feel that it would benefit you to exploit this grace. Do not hesitate to do so, and for as long as its light burns. Or you may have intended to meditate on the goodness of God, but meanwhile you have had words with someone and you are still disturbed with feelings of resentment. "Go first to be reconciled to thy brother" (Mt. 5, 24) , says the Lord. Make charity and forgiveness the subject of your mental prayer, and all the more so because with this poison in your soul the subject of God's goodness will succeed very poorly. You could, moreover, link the two together. Or, to take another example, suppose you had prepared a meditation on death and, as you are about to begin, the Lord gives you a grace of union which awakens a fervent love in you. Brush aside the subject and all reflection in order to live in this precious union. Should you talk to him of death, it will be in an entirely different way than you had foreseen. Aside from these exceptions, the point we are concerned with here is to give some thought to the theme you have chosen for mental prayer, to develop it somewhat. That is the difficult part, and that is where a book can be of service to you, provided, as we saw, that it is used like the phosphorous on the tip of a match, to start you thinking by yourself. It is impossible to give a system of thinking, a recipe, or fixed and infallible rules for correct thinking. Books on the Art of Writing never made a writer. They may be helpful, but nothing will replace inspiration or spontaneous effort. A book on the Art of Thinking would

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be even more useless. Thought is something too subtle, too personal, too essentially variable to allow itself to be hemmed in by such laws. What can be said and what would be far more useful, I think, is that you must bestir yourself. Obtuseness comes more often from a lack of energy than from any real intellectual inability. If your mind refuses to work, it is because of laziness and inertia. You must then shake off its lethargy and bend your will if you would overcome your apathy. This is all the more necessary when one has but little skill in reflecting on supernatural truths. That is why it would be well in the beginning to draw up a sort of general plan for yourself and follow its broad outlines as you develop different subjects (with all the variations necessary at times)+. Try to find such a plan. Let us suppose that you have chosen charity as the subject of your meditation. You have prepared nothing in advance. I can picture you thinking along the following lines: "Charity is an exquisite and excellent virtue. There is nothing nicer than a charitable, a good, and a generous man. Nothing stirs up sympathy and affection more. People easily forgive the mistake of a good man. There is nothing surprising about that, Lord. You are Charity, and the goodness we have is but a reflection of your sovereign Being. We defile your image when we sin against charity. "That is why you made of this noble virtue a law that transcends all other laws, a corollary of the fundamental law of love that we owe you: the second commandment is like unto the first. The Gospel scene of the Last Judgment portrays you forgiving all to those who observed this law while on earth. "And what an admirable example of charity you yourself gave us during the whole of your life!" (Here you recall to mind some of the Gospel episodes which exemplify the great love of Christ.) "And before giving us the supreme proof of your love, you left us your commandment: 'Love one another' (Jn. 15, 12) . "Jesus, I am the heir of this testament of your love. You are asking me to love my brothers as you have loved me, me whom you have created to your image so that I might reflect your divine charity. "How, then, could I have been harsh and angry with my brother just a short while ago? Why does resentment loiter in my heart? "I am not your disciple if I do not forgive. I am not wearing the sign whereby you recognize your own. I am not worthy of your love. Matters cannot stay as they are. In the same way as I would like to be 171

treated by others, so in the same way must I and do I want to treat my brother. Forgive me my offenses just as I forgive, as of now, the offenses others have done to me." There you have a succession of ideas which seems logical enough and which would be easy to develop. Now, let us pause for a moment, analyze the path your mind took, and attempt to reconstruct the plan it spontaneously followed. First, you examined the notion of charity itself both from the doctrinal and the moral point of view. The doctrinal point of view was further subdivided into the human consideration of the beauty of the virtue of charity and the supernatural fact that the virtue of charity is a reflection of God. Your thoughts on the moral aspects of charity were naturally concerned with the obligation to practice it. All in all, you engaged in good theology without knowing it. Next, you made these reflections more living by recalling to mind the example and the teaching of Christ. After having made these considerations of a general nature, you applied them to yourself; you came face to face with your life — in fact, a concrete detail of your life; and since your life did not square with this law and doctrine, you came to a practical conclusion. And with that you had enough material to make a good meditation. Notice, too, that everything took place in an atmosphere of talking with God. Your meditation was a prayer. There is no reason, then, why you cannot, with few evident modifications, treat the majority of subjects in a similar way. For instance, let us take a meditation on death (one of the most useful you can make) . "What a strange thing death is! How terrifying, how certain! "Thanks to you, my God, death has a meaning which throws light on our life and sweetens it. It is, of course, a punishment for sin and we accept it as such. But in punishing man, you softened the chastisement with the balm of hope, for death is the blessed termination of the miseries of this life and the gateway to life eternal. "By consenting to your own death, Jesus, you held out Life to us once more. " ... Provided, of course, that I die well. It is entirely up to me whether I accept or reject your Redemption. I shall die, surely, and, on that day my lot shall be irrevocably fixed. My entire life, my every action must converge toward that one reckoning. 172

"Is that the way I live? Alas! I seem to forget death. I live contrary to the faith you have given me. What did I do this morning? What did I think this morning? A great change has to be made in my outlook and in my behavior." A great number of subjects will lend themselves to a similar development. Whatever other reasoning your mind might have followed, the result would have been the same. You might, for example, have started with Christ and the Gospel and grouped everything around him and his teaching. There are a hundred ways. All plans are good provided they are neither artificial nor too complicated. In order to avoid such faults, a good procedure would be to begin by letting your mind work freely over a subject, and then arrange the few ideas which come to mind. Often they will be most practical for you, because they arose spontaneously. If you are an intuitive soul, meditation will be even more simplified. The thought will occur to you: "I am running toward death. My God, you are waiting there for me.... What am I doing, then? I am wasting my time." And you let this simple thought sink in deeply and you apply it to the details of your life. Or it might be sufficient to imagine how you will judge your present conduct once you have crossed the threshold of death and can see clearly. If you are meditating on charity, two glances, one on Jesus uttering his commandment of love at the Last Supper, the other on the condition of your soul, will jolt your conscience. Or more simply still, you might simply say: "Jesus, what do you think of me at this moment?" The rest will follow automatically. If, on the contrary, you adopt a more detailed plan, you must not develop each point equally, but rather pause over the ideas that take hold of you, dwell on one idea that helps you better than all the others, and center your reflections on this or that point. At the time of an attack, we sound out the enemy position in different places. If one section begins to yield, the attacking army concentrates its strength on that flank in order to assure success.

The will What has preceded is but the first part of the body of mental prayer, the part of the intellect, the part which is more properly meditation, reflection. We cannot be satisfied with that. Every soul must

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be interested in mental prayer, and mental prayer must take into consideration the heart and the will. This is quite natural. Truth tends to action; the good or evil we perceive moves our will. Even without being told, you would proceed spontaneously to this second part, so human is it. Go back to the preceding meditations for a moment. The final considerations naturally led you to make acts of love and resolutions. They called for them. They were already partly so, for by their very nature they overlapped into the affective domain. If I have lingered over this point, I have done so uniquely for didactic purposes, to point out the logical division of the parts. The temptation was to continue, and all the more so because these meditations give the impression of begin truncated. We feel that they lack something. Let us go back over the one we made on charity. You will already discover contrition and a firm resolve in the last lines: affection and resolutions. You surely would have gone one step further and said: "Forgive me, Jesus, for having sinned against charity, and for so paltry a reason. How egotistical and earthly I still am! I still love you very little, since I am forgetful of your strongest desire. Yet, you do know that I love you. Oh, how I want to love you. To prove this to you, I will shortly go and make amends for my faults, even if I have to humiliate myself in doing so. As for the future, I shall take steps not to fall again, to be ever kind and patient." (Among the specific resolves you form, do not to forget his holy presence.) Many other sentiments will come to mind: admiration for the charity of Our Lord, a desire to become like him ("Make my heart like unto yours") , sadness for having wounded his Sacred Heart ("You did it to me") , fear of being reproached by him on Judgment Day, the desire to console him, and so on. The same thing applies to the meditation on death: contrition, shame at the thought of your flightiness and inconsistency, regret over time lost and graces wasted, an acute awareness of the brevity of life, of the urgent need of reforming your life, the fear of unavoidable chastisements. Then, the clean-cut decision: "Things must change — and right away." So you resolve to live by faith. In order to give concrete expression to this, you apply it to some particular detail of your life and, to make sure not to forget it,-you decide on some practical measures to take (notably, to do everything under the gaze of God) . Every meditation resolves itself in sentiments and resolutions. 174

Do not say: "None of this means anything to me. My heart is dry." You are not asked to feel your sentiments, but solely to see that they are sincere. Sentiment here must be understood in the basic sense of a simple disposition of the soul, regardless of whether it reaches the level of an emotion or not. If it does, so much the better for you. If not, the sentiment is none the less good, neither less true nor less acceptable to God. As for the resolutions, they are of various kinds. There could be a general resolution (to be kind and patient, to live by faith) . In the beginning, one ordinarily starts with a resolve of this kind. However, to be satisfied with that would be running the risk of remaining indefinite and of accomplishing little unless, by a grace of God and consequent upon a keen light, this decision were deeply rooted in your soul somewhat after the manner of a compelling idea and you feel that it is capable of sustaining itself. If this is not the case, you will have to foresee that it is brought into play in certain details of your life. You will have to break down the general resolution into a few specific resolves so as not to encumber yourself with too much at one time. The best resolutions are those which are of immediate application and those which concern very practical matters: "In a short while, I shall listen calmly to the observations of my foreman or to the recriminations of my mother-in-law.... As I walk down the street, I shall think that I am walking toward heaven.... As I add up my expenses, I shall recall to mind that this money will be of no use to me at judgment time and I will allot a certain amount for some specific parochial cause," and so forth. Do not multiply your resolutions. Sometimes one alone will suffice, provided it hits a nerve center or applies to a frequently recurring circumstance. As in the mental prayer of conversation, although less rarely, the resolution may, in certain cases, be replaced by an idea, and even by a simple impression which struck you during mental prayer and which by its nature will influence your conduct: a thought that has a bearing on your life. But whether it is a thought or a sentiment matters little as long as it is dynamic and beneficial. The one thing is not to lose sight of its leading idea, and when necessary to use a memory aid to this effect, as you do to recall to mind the presence of God. For the rest, whatever procedure you use, you must persistently practice the exercise of the presence of God. The two practices go hand in hand and naturally complement each other. The same exercise will serve two purposes: union with God and faithfulness to your resolutions, 175

the latter being but the concrete manifestation of your love. The two are one. When you use a reminder to help you remember God in some particular circumstance, it stands to reason that it will also remind you then and there to do what you have promised him.

The heart Is that the conclusion of mental prayer? No, it is not. After the previous meditation in the form of mental prayer, it is desirable that you reserve a time for pure prayer. This will be especially the part of the heart. The heart has already intervened in the preceding affections, but it did so rather in view of preparing the resolutions. (We must not, however, dissociate the actions of the different faculties too much.) First comes the prayer of petition, which is completely logical and natural: after having made some good resolutions, the remembrance of your past infidelities will fill you with anxiety. Fear that these resolutions will fare no better than so many others you have made and a consciousness of your avowed helplessness will bring the following prayer to your lips: "My God, help me! Distrust me, otherwise I shall fall again. I have good will, as you know, but you likewise know how fickle I am. Sustain me by your powerful grace. I will do what I can, I promise, but I count on you for the rest." What you are asking for here, under one form or another, is the grace to love and serve God better. Follow that with a prayer of union, because everything must be conducive to that: "And now, dear Lord, let me rest on your Sacred Heart ... " Unite yourself to Him. Forget all the rest and whisper words of adoration and of love to Him. Or, if you prefer, remain in the silence of simple contemplation. It will be the golden moment of your mental prayer, and the sweetest, too, should he give you the grace of experiencing his love. That will convince you in a wonderful way of all that you have thought and resolved, and will help you to "keep these things in your heart." Then, too, it will connect and unite the two practices of your devotion: pious reflection and holy union with God.

Remarks Such are the three essential elements which constitute the body of mental prayer: the mind reflects, the will forms sentiments and 176

resolutions, and from the deepest recesses of the soul arises the prayer of petition, particularly, the prayer of union. Someone may ask how much time should be devoted to each of these phases. Do not try to regulate such matters. The length of time to be given to this or that point will be determined by its utility, which will vary for each individual depending on the subject, one's temperament, and inspiration of the moment. On a certain day, you will devote more time to reflection in order to reach a needed conviction. On another, the emphasis will be placed on a necessary resolution. At another time, if the Holy Ghost so moves you, love and the prayer of petition will have free run. But above all you must be on your guard against two diametrically opposed excesses: affective souls have too great a dislike for reflection. Consequently, they will have to force themselves to reflect, otherwise their soul will remain fallow and their devotion will be restricted to remain pure sentiment, and a rather superficial sentiment at that. For others, on the contrary, meditation is hardly more than the study of a question, and they care little for the rest. Such souls will not improve their life either and will always be ignorant of the ways of prayer. Everything has its proper place. Reflection is a means; resolutions are the goal; sentiments are both means and goal, and prayer crowns everything. As a rule, all three are needed, for there is a reciprocal action among them and one affects the other. There is no reason why we should feel obliged to observe a rigid and uniform order in all of this, to line up these different parts one after the other in a column like battalions on maneuvers. There is no need to forbid ourselves from experiencing a sentiment during the time of reflection or from inverting the sequence of the parts when to do so seems opportune. Mental prayer is the most human act there is. Our reaction toward it must be human and we must not rob it of the suppleness of a living thing. A single thought can immediately call forth a resolution; a sentiment or a prayer can well up at any point of mental prayer or the outpouring of our affections may wait until the end, in conjunction with the prayer of petition. just as there is no one plan for composing a book or a discourse, so neither is there for thinking in the presence of God.

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Conclusion of mental prayer We have now reached the epilogue of mental prayer. It consists of two important points. The first is coupling. It will always include, first, a return to everyday life while at the same time remaining united to God, just as in the mental prayer of conversation. There is no exception here. The concluding prayer of your mental prayer will help you do this. This union, on the other hand, will take on the nuance of the meditation you have just made. Special attention must be given that you do not forget to carry out your resolutions, that those which are immediately or constantly applicable are put into practice under the gaze of God, and that you are careful to remain in the happy disposition in which your conversation with God put you. We have talked at sufficient length of the means of accomplishing this. But this first linking is not enough. It is useless to skip a point only to come to a halt at the next one. You must continue your mental prayer. You have restocked your provisions. And you did so in order to enable you to travel the next lap of the journey until the next relay. Your entire day must be a mental prayer and a continual meditation (even if slower and proportionate to your strength) impelled by a persistent idea: a union with God tinged with the "thought of the day." This thought, this resolution, must remain in you, in your subconscience, as a driving thought, ready to emerge on every occasion. In that way, you will react to all things in a supernatural way. It is also the way to evoke those flashes of light, like the inventor who suddenly and accidently discovers the solution of his problem by dint of having carried it within himself. To do that, you must from time to time briefly return to your meditation, frequently repeat the main idea in the form of a slogan (spiritual bouquet), apply it to concrete things, couple the remembering of it to your returns to God, and be attentive to the resolutions it comprises. Persistent repeating of this one thought will make it gradually sink into the profound depths of your being. In the end it will become an integral part of you, and will transform your life and your soul.

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A few observations 1. The reader who is somewhat familiar with spiritual literature has been aware that I have tried to find a simple and natural plan for mental prayer. The result has been that I simply fell back on all the points of the traditional methods, and especially on those of Saint Ignatius: preludes, considerations, affections, resolutions, and a conclusion. I have not even omitted the majority of the subdivisions. Some may perhaps consider that so much searching to rediscover America was not worthwhile. Yet, it is interesting to discover things you already know. Old questions take on current interest that way. Then, too, we become well aware of how natural and human these procedures were. We grasp the technique better and avoid the unfortunate impression we sometimes get, when they are handed to us on a platter, of how mechanized mental prayer is. These procedures are so natural that every inquiry must come to the same conclusion. The internal logic of things makes it so. A problem of geometry has but one solution. Mental prayer, being a complete human act, demands the cooperation of the various human faculties according to the order of their normal activity. So, too, all the classical methods of mental prayer are basically the same. The differences are only nuances. The focal point of the first Ignatian method is the exercise of the powers, "these being, according to the psychology of the time, the memory, the understanding, and the will." Saint Francis de Sales, with a few variants and despite an even more modern classification of the faculties, did not do otherwise. Neither did Saint Alphonsus. The Sulpician method centers all mental prayer on Christ, but in this setting we again find the same psychological system. My sole intention has been to recall and explain the normal workings of the mind, and yet leave it sufficient freedom. In the plan proposed you will have noticed, for instance, that there is a regular return to Christ. The procedure is not a systematic one, although that would be the natural and excellent thing to do. This plan insists especially on two points: first, the concrete application of our reflections and resolutions to the details of our everyday life and to the carry-over of mental prayer into life; secondly, the necessity that our meditation be also a mental prayer, that it ever

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preserve the character of a conversation, and the utility of tying it in closely with the exercise of the presence of God and of concluding it with a prayer of union. 2. In those parts where there is question of your exterior life, you must be careful not to let your thoughts meander into the temporal domain. That danger ever lurks as long as the heart is attached to things earthly, which is to say, always. Awareness of this peril should help us keep a firm grip on the wheel as we come to these "dangerous intersections" and use the preventive we have already suggested, namely, to remind ourselves that we are talking to God. 3. If some idea strikes you forcefully during your meditation, interrupt the sequence of your reflections to dwell upon it. Mine it; milk it dry. Lay your plan aside if this one thought suffices and for as long as it suffices. One idea, well assimilated, is more efficacious than thirty-six others skipped over superficially. If you experience a movement of fervor, do the same thing. Put aside all reflection and enjoy this grace at leisure. The Lord is giving you "the better part." Do not refuse it for that of Martha's. You can return to Martha's role later. The only exception is the case where a meditation was undertaken to reach a resolution that can brook no delay. Even then, this outburst of fervor will be able to induce you to make that resolve better than any amount of reflection. 4. It may happen, on the contrary, that nothing appeals to you. No idea has any bite to it, no sentiment moves you; distractions harass you like flies. What should you do in that case? Assure yourself, first of all, that the reason is not mental laziness. If it is, then bestir your will. Try to discover the cause of the distraction, and fight it with the suggestions given you in the chapter on the mental prayer of conversation. Having done that, continue your mental prayer, continue your search. Only in that way will you make a discovery. If you strike the flint long enough, perhaps the spark will burst into flame. If the flame is not forthcoming during your mental prayer, perhaps it will come later. There is such a thing as ideas that evolve. They need time to incubate before they develop and then, all of a sudden, when we least expect it, they will come forth in all their clarity. Thus it is that "night brings counsel." Intellectual men are well aware of this long period of incubation which ends in a find. But until then, you must force yourself to search a long time without finding.

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Another method would be to change subjects to see whether some more attractive matter would not give better results, even if you have to abandon the general outline of your meditation. Moreover, you need not unduly persist on meditating and wear yourself out trying to pray out of sheer obstinacy. There are days when, for various and unknown reasons, whether moral or psychological, it is absolutely impossible to make a good meditation. This happens to everyone. It is no small thing to know this. You must resign yourself to the inevitable and humbly admit your helplessness. All that is asked of you in this case is to do your best, however little it is. The important thing is not to give up mental prayer. At such times, you may shorten it, and by way of compensation add some other pious practice. Fall back on some simple measure. Be content, for example, with repeating some idea from time to time and doing your best to make it sink in. The result may seem nil, but it is not. Such an exercise has a hidden action. Only when the mist has lifted will you see proof of this. Or pick up a book and read something that interests you. Read the Gospels, or your Imitation of Christ. Read slowly, stopping at certain sentences. Repeat them if that helps you. At times, interrupt your reading to say a word to Our Lord or to invoke the Holy Ghost. Or on such days go back to an easier form of mental prayer: the mental prayer of conversation, and make it as simple as possible. Simpler still, repeat an ejaculatory prayer, or a vocal prayer. 5. What is far worse is when this inferior condition prolongs itself and the mind is sterile and the heart inert for days, weeks, even for months on end. This is, indeed, a trying ordeal. During such periods we are tempted to say: "What's the use!" and give up. But don't. Persevere, persevere despite everything. Remain faithful to mental prayer even if all you think about is politics or your kitchen and do not succeed in ridding yourself of distractions. Remember, the devil is waiting to trap you. His weapon is discouragement. It is up to you to make his efforts come to naught. He cannot harm you so long as you persevere. And in this matter, too, it is well to know that such trials are normal, that such periods of dryness happen to the most pious of souls, that even saints go through such times. The ecstatic Saint Teresa lived twelve years with inextricable distractions. Such a trial was needed to prepare her for the prodigious ecstasies of love that followed.

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Yes, I mean what I said: to "prepare" her. No farmer expects wheat to grow in his field during winter, but he knows that the seed is germinating under the snow and that the ground is already fashioning the new sap. The spiritual life, too, has its seasons. Winter is the prelude to spring and the harvests of summer. But you will never see these harvests if you neglect the field. Be patient. Under the apparent aridity of the bad season, one stores up precious elements in the subconscious regions of the mind. It is the sap which tomorrow will seek but to rise. To engage in mental prayer requires a grace from God and this grace you must know how to merit. Your merit will be to remain steadfast under the gust of distractions and to continue to do your best despite lack of success and distaste. Such fidelity is no small merit. It is greater than when mental prayer is easy — another point that is important to know and which we are all too tempted to forget during these difficult periods. One day Saint Magdalene of Pazzi spent a whole hour in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, and her mental prayer was woven with distractions. (You see, the same thing happens to the saints.) Seeing her grief, Our Lord deigned to appear to her and said: "My daughter, for whom were you kneeling here before the Blessed Sacrament?" And she answered: "For you, Lord." "Well," Our Lord reassured her, "you have prayed to me during that entire hour and your prayer has pleased me despite your involuntary distractions." You might perhaps retort and say that your distractions are not always involuntary, that in the end you consent to them. How are you so sure? There is nothing more difficult than trying to disentangle the extent to which your free will consented to these distractions. Do not try it. Be content with making an act of contrition for whatever culpability there was. As for the rest, remember that only one thing is essential before God: your basic good will. Now, you knelt down to pray, and as long as your good will endures you must believe that as a rule your distractions are never completely voluntary. But if they are, you are free to rid yourself of them. Sometimes God delays in receiving us. He does so to measure the intensity of our desire. If he does not open the door to you, it is because he wants you to knock again. Such searching for God is the profound preparation for the spirit of mental prayer. It maintains the soul in a state of waiting with regard to grace. The sails are unfurled despite the dead calm. If the wind comes up, the sails are ready to receive it. In order not to miss the hour of the Holy Ghost, we must never furl the sails. 182

Meanwhile, we can always repeat one thought, say a prayer, make a resolution, in a word, show God our good will. 6. Finally, there are people who suffer, it seems, from a sort of congenital or invincible repugnance with regard to meditation. Do not be too hasty to believe this to be your case: the so-called inability to meditate may be nothing more than laziness. It may be an unconscious prejudice against meditation. Then again there may be a substratum of secret vanity. "I am a mystic." A mystic? You ought to know that you will begin to be a mystic when your soul is purged of self-love. But, after all, there are souls for whom meditation is a chore. We must bear in mind the natural disposition of such souls — the affectives and the intuitives — and not force them inopportunely to engage in an exercise that will only shackle them. Yet, they are not by that token dispensed from reflecting. They must train themselves to it by means appropriate to their nature: replace methodical meditation with a more free, more intuitive reflection, one more mixed with sentiment and of rather short duration. Instead of a half hour at a stretch, let them stake out over the day a series of more brief returns to a chosen thought. Finally, they can frequently repeat this thought which they have reduced to a concise formula, much in the nature of an ejaculatory prayer. In a word, they can multiply instead of stretching out. It is just another way of deepening the furrow. For that matter, everyone can profitably use this method at certain times. In a general way, the less one is capable of reflection, the more fitting it is for him to compensate for that deficiency by spiritual reading.

Spiritual reading Although we have already spoken about spiritual reading, we feel that more should be said about it at this point. It is closely allied to meditation. It is its natural support. It may, as we have seen, be made an integral part of meditation and sometimes even replace it. But it cannot always take its place. Spiritual reading is an exercise that differs from meditative mental prayer in that it is less active, less directly adapted to our personal needs and in that it leaves more to chance. It is, nevertheless, an indispensable support for our meditations; it nourishes us with supernatural thoughts, rejuvenates our

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prayer, and renews our interest in meditation. Every soul concerned with its own spiritual progress must, therefore, be faithful to daily and fixed periods of spiritual reading and read as much as possible as a precautionary measure against his negligences. Spiritual reading has something special about it in that it must not lose the nature of a spiritual exercise. Its immediate purpose is the supernatural welfare of the soul, the perfecting of one's inner life. We must, then, if we are reading a doctrinal book, not make a study of the reading, not let ourselves be absorbed by the thought to the detriment of devotion, nor deviate toward the anxieties of our ministry or apostolate. If we are reading the life of a saint, we must not linger too much over the narrative or the story but rather search for the soul of the saint beneath the facts and draw useful lessons from them. We must be choosy. The best spiritual books are those that accord best with our present stage of spiritual development and which can be integrated into our future meditations. Nothing need prevent us, however, by way of relaxation, from picking up a more attractive work or one that treats of an entirely different subject if we think that it can be useful to us. There are, on the other hand, some basic books which are at the basis of all Christian meditation: the Sacred Scriptures and theology. In Holy Scripture and especially in the New Testament we find the very word of God which reveals frequently to this unique and original source of light. It has been abandoned too much. This eternal truth is further developed in theological works: dogmatic, moral, and especially in what concerns us, ascetical and mystical theological writings. Every soul must, according to its abilities, penetrate into this sacred domain and become familiar with it so that he may better know God, Christ, his blessed Mother, the Church, and all the wonderful mysteries of religion. Every Catholic needs to nourish and develop his supernatural thinking and open his mind to the rich discoveries which such an exploration has in store for him. Depending on our needs and personal taste, we should choose either more or less popularized treatments of pure doctrine, or works of a more general appeal, such as the Introduction to a Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales, An Easy Method of Mental Prayer by Fr. Witherforce, O. P., One with Jesus by Fr. de Jaegher, S. J., or any one of the more recent and numerous books which treat of theological or spiritual matters.

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We will bring the thought gleaned from our reading to our meditation, but in a less theoretical way. We should preferably muse over those thoughts which favor devotion and try to draw pious sentiments and holy resolutions from them for improving our life. Only after gathering nectar can we transform it into honey. See to it that the mental prayer based on such readings does not become a pure intellectual occupation. You should not read too many books on speculative theology, but preferably choose works of pure piety or of asceticism which are more directly to your need. Spiritual reading is not a relaxation but an exercise, even though it can be both. It must be done seriously. It is far better to read slowly than to read much. Pause now and then to let the text penetrate your soul, and develop it yourself. Read intelligently, choosing what you need, pausing at what is the most profitable for you, and skipping over what does not concern you. Finally, read with piety, under the gaze of God, and without abandoning in so far as possible constant communion with him. To accomplish this you might use the book-marker or some other means. Attention to the presence to God and his action will make spiritual reading much more supernaturally efficacious. One type of spiritual reading more akin to meditation is what is known as "meditated reading." It differs from meditation only by its less methodical character and in the sense that in "meditated reading" reflection relies solely upon the text whose ideas it absorbs. It is done more slowly than ordinary reading. We pause, not after each phrase, but after each thought and especially after the more moving passages to ponder them, to let them sink in, to assimilate them, in a word, to make a more or less brief meditation on each one of them. After each part, we make a synthesis; and if the reading has set our mind to work, we put aside the reading to engage in a pure and simple meditation. This is an excellent exercise for those who find it difficult to meditate.

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Moral Mental Prayer The problem the entire problem of the spiritual life can be reduced to one point: change egoism into love. This is likewise the basic problem in the life of mental prayer, since mental prayer is nourished by love, since mental prayer is the expression of love and must in its turn nourish love. It is a practical problem, too, that must be resolved in a concrete way. Now egoism is at the heart of the entire gamut of vices and takes recognizable shape in the sins which follow. Love, on the contrary, incarnates itself in all the different virtues. The problem, therefore, reduces itself to suppressing our vices and making room for the opposite virtues to reign in us. That is where the battle must be fought. For if it is true that love of its very nature tends to make man virtuous, it is no less certain that vices shackle love and arrest its growth; whereas virtues cause love to blossom and wax strong. Imbued with the fundamental truths which must direct our entire life, we must now apply them to our conduct in a more detailed and diversified way, taking each virtue in particular. Here especially, mental prayer and the practical exercises must be closely united, constituting one and the same action or, if you prefer, two exercises combined for the same combat.

The overall tactic In spiritual combat, the first thing to do is to determine the definite point of attack. It would be exceptionally bad tactics to open fire on all points simultaneously. Dispersed effort can only end in no victory whatsoever. Incompetent generals begin a battle that way — and lose it. To want to combat all our faults at one time is far too vast an undertaking. We scatter our efforts and accomplish nothing. "Grasp all, lose all," says the proverb. Some people are constantly changing their objective and never stick to any particular one. Today they attack impatience, tomorrow gluttony, the next day, dissipation, and so on. Success is never theirs because they abandon each assault before they have finished it. Work on each point must be pursued until success is reached. 186

In the tenth chapter of my book Holiness Is For Everyone, 18 I propose an ascetical method which consists simply in re-enforcing love and abnegation, the two queen virtues. It is their function to arouse and promote all the other virtues. A good general sees to it that his troops go to battle well-armed, well-trained, and in good physical and moral condition. This is half the victory and will contribute success all along the line; but these ordinary measures do not dispense him from marshalling his troops. The correct thing then is to use both procedures simultaneously and to bolster the one with the other. On the one hand, never drop the basic work. Comply with all that has been said in the preceding meditations and with what will be said in subsequent ones. See to it that all you do is motivated by faith and love. On the other hand, do not leave your good resolutions in the abstract, but apply them to precise objects. You must then begin with one point and stick to it. But be sure you make a wise choice. Of course, there are some who, whether out of laziness or blindness, attack every point except where the enemy is. They follow their taste and agree to strike only where it pleases them. They have, for example, a praiseworthy tendency to recollection, so all their selfdiscipline, their examinations of conscience, and their spiritual exercises will be concentrated on strengthening this good disposition. Meanwhile, they allow pride, egoism, and laziness to persist, even to sink deeper roots. It is equivalent to putting a bandage where there is no open wound. These vices will prevent them from ever attaining perfect recollection. Each one must examine himself, find out where the shoe pinches, and cure the sore spot. Everyone has a dominant fault which determines his behavior and provokes the majority of his failings. Generally speaking, that is the fault to begin with, on which all our efforts must be concentrated. One might likewise begin with the fault — very often it is the same one —which hinders mental prayer most and causes trouble and distractions during prayer. Sometimes it is advisable to postpone such a basic and necessary attack in order to attack some particular failing, less serious perhaps, but which nevertheless wounds charity, provokes scandal, or interferes with discipline. In such a case, the soul is faced with an immediate duty. 18

*Martial Lekeux, O.F.M., Holiness Is For Everyone, trans. Paul J. Oligny, O.F.M. (Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1953)

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Once the dominant vice is conquered, or at least sufficiently repressed, we may then undertake the others successively. Curtailing the principal enemy will weaken resistance all along the line, for everything is of a piece in our chain of faults. Thus far we have seen but one side of the combat. Triumph over one's vices is to be followed by conquest of the opposing virtues. The two go hand in hand. Every conquest of vice is a victory for the opposing virtue. But some confine themselves too much to this negative side of the problem and concentrate exclusively on the faults they have to master. It is important to look at things from a positive point of view and to keep in mind the virtues to be practiced. The above statement works the opposite way too: what is won in one virtue shackles the contrary fault to the same degree. Moreover, progress is more rapid. The virtue goes further than the simple suppression of the vices. Virtue is not content with avoiding illicit things. It even renounces things permitted, and pushes ever forward to the attainment of perfection. This perfection of life is what we must tend to in order to make progress in the way of mental prayer. And we will accomplish this through mental prayer itself and through the exercises which it suggests. Here is another important point. Do not defer the combat. Many souls are forever procrastinating. Today they are not feeling well; they will be feeling better tomorrow.... But tomorrow will have its own difficulty. Or they persuade themselves that to begin well they must first conclude some annoying business. Alas! It is only followed by another, and one obstacle replacing another, they postpone the battle indefinitely. We must begin the battle in the state and in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, not tomorrow, but today. We have no right to put off the service of the Lord until tomorrow. To undertake the study of all the rules of this spiritual combat and of the different procedures to use in acquiring each virtue would lead us so far that this chapter would become a volume. The development of these points can be found in a number of ascetical works, for example, The Spiritual Combat, by Scupoli, The Spiritual Directory of Scaramelli, The Primer of Perfection by Meyer, or The Practice of Christian Perfection by Rodriguez. 19 We shall limit ourselves here to some general indications, paying particular attention to the relationship of these exercises to mental prayer. 19

'Despite its somewhat outmoded style, the last mentioned work is still an excellent one, except for its exaggerated suspicion of mystical prayers.

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Before the combat considerations In this, as in other matters, the first step will be an effort at reflection. Having chosen the point of attack, a certain fault or a certain virtue, make it the subject of your meditation for as long a time as necessary. This is "moral meditation," which has been downgraded a good deal. Yet, it is excellent, provided we do not restrict ourselves to it exclusively. Furthermore, everyone needs it at certain times. To place your moral meditation from the very first in a practical climate, begin it with an examination of conscience. See how you are at the mercy of some particular fault, how often you fall into it, all that needs to be done to free you of it and to practice the opposite virtue habitually, and the little you have done thus far. Next, consider — and here a book will be of great help to you — how hateful this vice is, how vile, how offensive to God, your neighbor, and to yourself, and how beautiful and advantageous the virtue you lack would be. By way of an example, let us take impatience. This fault is directly opposed to the spirit of kindness which the Gospel breathes. It causes you to become irritable and angry; it wounds charity, makes you unjust, and provokes misunderstandings. And what does it do to you? It stirs up frequent trouble which estrange you from God; it monopolizes your mind and reaches the proportions of making mental prayer impossible. The patient man keeps the law of Christ; he wards off disputes or resolves them peacefully; he keeps his mind free and his heart serene; he is ever ready to receive the Lord's visit. If your weak point is vanity, recall what has already been said about pride. Vanity is the grotesque face of pride. Not only is it ridiculous but it makes us ridiculous. It is an error, a fault against truth, and often an hypocrisy. It is a sin against love too, since it is one of the most subtle forms of egoism. Ever attentive to what concerns him, of the opinion of judgments of others, the vain man is deplorably sensitive to praise and criticism. He is easily offended and changes moods according to what he has heard. Such self-preoccupation and vulnerability encumbers prayer with distractions. It predisposes to vain glory, to illusions, and to all the aberrations of a warped devotion. Humility lives 189

in truth; it is wise, open, and reasonable. It opens the way to love because it is the deep-seated form of detachment. It keeps an even keel, evaluating criticisms and praise as of equal worth. If the humble man has any preference, it is for humiliations, so much so that they delight him instead of disturbing him. Such a soul has no misplaced ambitions and thinks only of serving. He is occupied with the Lord instead of worrying about himself, and this disposition makes mental prayer easy and forearms the soul against illusions. If you are waging war against sensuality, recall that it reduces man to the level of animals and sometimes lower. It makes him a slave to matter, leaves him unarmed and cowardly in the face of temptation, and exposes him to serious sins. It dulls his mind and cools his enthusiasms. What is given to the flesh is lost to the soul. Those who live according to the flesh become incapable of understanding spiritual things. Their mental prayer, too, is lukewarm, painful, and easily turns into sleep. An austere life makes us participate in the angelic nature. It dominates the flesh and makes it a docile instrument. It steels us for battle. It keeps the heart pure and mind alert. Living in the realm of spiritual things, the chaste and mortified man finds God there. Purity is the wing of fervor. And so on with every other fault which you choose to attack. Whatever it is, you will continue to consider that each time you fall you offend your heavenly Father and increase your responsibility for the sufferings of Christ, your Savior, that God wants you to fight valiantly against this enemy, and that you should consider no effort too demanding to accomplish his holy will. By way of encouragement, remind yourself that God does not ask the impossible. This is true both for the simple reason that He asks it, and because He makes it possible through His grace. Look at the example of the saints — people like yourself. Look at their confidence, their generosity, their triumphs. Look at the example of Christ Who, in order to give us a model, came among us to practice to the highest degree all the virtues which He demands of us. And finally, think that it is your bad dispositions and your laxness in correcting your faults that prevent him from acting in you and from speaking in you as he would like; that vice repels him and stems the action of his grace, that virtue attracts him and prepares a fitting place for the holy intimacies which he desires to have with you.

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Once you have deeply convinced yourself of all this, you will cry out: "My God, I am a poor servant and an unworthy child. I have not done what you expect of me. I now resolve to do better. I have offended you enough. I have left you waiting at the door of my soul long enough. I wish to amend my life, and I resolve, as of now and with the aid which you promise me, to begin this combat which will open my heart to you." These convictions will be the natural conclusion of your reflections.

Applications Having done that, return to the concrete details of your life. Try to determine the reason why some particular vice persists and on what occasions you continually fall into it. The basic causes, as we know, are your lack of faith, of detachment, of love, or piety, and the habitual dissipation of your thought and life. Your examination of conscience, especially, should ferret out the occasions. Reconsider some of your faults. Ask yourself how and why you fall into them, how they habitually happen? What are the occasions of sin? They could have been occasions of virtue, you know. These incidents were so many questions which God asked you to see how you would answer them. It was as easy to answer them correctly as it was to bungle them, the simple reason being that you knew the solution. And since you must conclude your meditation in a practical way, otherwise your good resolutions will remain vague and bear no tangible fruit, here is a highly recommended procedure. Take one or the other of those occasions which regularly prove to be a stumbling-block to you. Look at it, and paint a very clear picture of it with all its concrete details. Pretend that you are really there. Think of how you ought to react to it, and mentally act that way. Do this, as I say, in a very detailed and realistic way, like a novelist who puts himself in the place of his characters and himself intensely lives all that he makes them do in the novel. It is a rehearsal in view of action, the same as was suggested for the presence of God. It is the exercise, the preliminary maneuver, the fictitious combat which soldiers execute before they go out to face the enemy. Thus, if we may go back to the preceding examples, what frequently unleashes your impatience is, perhaps, the visit of some bothersome person who interrupts your work. You storm interiorly; you

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kick a poor innocent chair, and you greet him with the air of a bear — an attitude hardly Christian. Now when you make your mental prayer, place yourself in such a situation, and in thought compel yourself to react to it in the spirit of Christ. Remind yourself that Christ sends this gentleman as an opportunity for you to be "meek and humble of heart" like Him. Say: "Yes, Jesus, I am going to receive your friend kindly, for you, however annoying he is." Place this thought in your heart and put a smile on your face. Bear with this man's visit as if it filled you with joy and as if you had nothing else to do. Abbe Poppe told his confreres that "a saintly priest is one who can listen to an imbecile for an hour without becoming impatient." Whatever the occasion of sin may be — contradictions, oppositions, or contact with some person "who gets on your nerves" — use the policy of the smile. Act as Christ would and for love of Christ. You have a foreman who is not easy to get along with. His cutting observations wound your pride, irritate you, and embitter you. You have to do something about it. Paint the scene for yourself. "That disagreeable man is coming toward me." Remind yourself that God gave you this foreman to exercise your humility. Think of Christ's attitude before his judges, and prepare yourself to take the verbal shelling stoically, for him. While your foreman reproves you, think calmly of Christ, and if possible with joy. And if you have any excuses to offer, present them in such a way that your foreman will be induced to accept them. Showing temper will only worsen matters. In company you have the annoying propensity to talk about yourself. This is a sign of vanity, of an excessive preoccupation with yourself. Remind yourself that in doing so you are only engraining the fault all the more and that, furthermore, you are perhaps antagonizing others. Imagine some conversation in which this temptation presents itself. Immediately switch the conversation to some other subject. Talk about others; interest yourself in what they are saying. The orders are: the "I" is forbidden. You must overshoot the mark in order to hit the bull's eye. At table you instinctively take the best cut of meat or the nicest piece of fruit. During mental prayer let the tempting dishes file past your imagination. Tell yourself that this succulent portion would bring pleasure to someone else as well as yourself, and in the spirit of charity and penance, offer it to Our Lord or what amounts to the same thing, to your neighbor. 192

And so on. Repeat this exercise for each object as often as necessary. In the end you will be so well acquainted with the maneuver that it will become automatic. When the occasion does present itself in real life, you will do it correctly.

Security measures Besides this exercise of reflection, you must take certain security measures in order to be ready to ward off possible attacks. Our divine Master has given us the program to follow: "Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation" (Mt. 26,41). Distrust yourself, but have confidence in God. Prepare the following measures during mental prayer so that you may apply them later on. First, keep before your mind's eye your resolution for the day. See that it is ever-present and ready to go to work at the desired moment. Be on the alert and very attentive. A good resolve is quickly forgotten. Use signs, if necessary, just as you do to remind yourself of the presence of God. Keep a close watch over your senses. They are the door through which the enemy gains entrance. Without putting on the airs of an hypocrite, learn how to discipline them. Foresee the occasions when you will fall so that you may avoid them. Do not consider yourself stronger than you are. If certain occasions cannot be avoided, try to neutralize them by raising your mind to God and to your duty. And, finally, pray. The degree of distrust in yourself should be the degree of your dependence on God. Count on Him. Many souls forget Him completely. Keep up your confidence in Him. Let your constant concern be to assure yourself of His grace in the fight. Each time you say: "And lead us not into temptation" think of your temptation and believe that the good Lord will make victory possible. Besides this prayer of petition, practice the prayer of union. Be solicitious to keep the thought, the sentiment of God's divine presence in you. It is a talisman against all temptations. Make frequent use of the sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion. Whether you sense it or not, these two sacraments will give you abundant grace and strength.

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Finally, make as many acts as possible of the virtue contrary to the fault you are struggling against. This is the counterattack. Strategists say that we only defend ourselves well when we attack. We must never limit ourselves to the defensive alone. Do not wait for temptation. Anticipate it. If you are irritable, find occasion to show your patience, first on a small scale, then in more difficult things. Armed with a hearty smile both within and without, go out and deliberately find the person who gives you goose pimples; do so for the express purpose of exercising your patience. Interrupt your work just as if that annoying person were there. If you are vain, go in search of humiliation. Perform some little thing that lowers you a little in the eyes of others. If you are sensual, look for some penitential practices which vex you and which mortify this tendency.

The combat and its wake grace and will These repeated exercises will train you and harden you for warfare. You will become accustomed to victory. When the temptation comes, you will be ready to meet the emergency. But do not forget that, before the attack, the first measure to take — and the one most forgotten — is prayer, whatever it is and whatever your dispositions are. It is the call for help; and this help you need. It will be given you if you ask for it. Praying at the very first onset of temptation is an act of resistance directly opposed to the temptation to evil. Now, in temptation, the decision ordinarily is made at the first moment, according to the attitude we took at the very beginning. It is a rebounding in the supernatural spheres. Simply say: "Jesus! Mary!" even if you say these words with your lips only. (Sometimes that is the best we can do.) Immediately you will feel a current of pure air clearing away the foul fumes of evil. Often, that is enough to dispel the temptation, and with it calm, humility, and strength will return to you. The majority of our falls are due to the fact that we did not pray at the moment of temptation. Thus armed with grace and persisting in prayer, force your will to act. It is always able to consent or not. We can always say "yes" or "no." As long as you say no, the enemy gains no victory over you. Recall some good thought of your preceding meditations, then bow your will, bend it, force it to will the contrary of that fault toward which it feels drawn. And 194

if the attraction persists, create a diversion for yourself. Detach your attention from the temptation by occupying your mind with something that interests you, if possible, by an act of the virtue opposed to the temptation. The important thing is to be convinced that victory is always possible. Napoleon's soldiers returned victorious from the most critical situations because they never imagined that they could be beaten. All this must be foreseen, examined, and prepared during meditation.

After a defeat If despite everything, if through weakness, surprise, or failure to have observed the above recommendations, you do succumb, do something about it. When anyone falls down, his first thought is to pick himself up. Do the same. Let your first thoughts be to repairing the evil, for nothing is irreparable here below. First, make an act of contrition without delay. Already the fault is erased. And if your sorrow is sincere, profound, and dictated by love, you will perhaps be more pleasing to God than you were before your fall because your good will survives the accident and has grown stronger because of your sorrow. And then, when you have regained your equilibrium, take up again the exercise previously suggested to you: relive in spirit what you so poorly did in reality. Applied to a real and very recent event, the exercise will be easier, more efficacious. Let us suppose that you gave way to wrath, to wranglings, insults, slamming doors, and so forth? And now you are deeply ashamed of this commotion and of the resulting consequences. So, reconstruct the scene mentally for yourself in the presence of God. Imagine how you should have conducted yourself, especially how you should have reacted the moment your anger opened fire. Raise your thoughts for a few moments to God; then answer the person you were talking to with moderation and charity. Try to harmonize his point of view with yours. If he is obstinate, give in or, for want of something better, be quiet if you are not master enough of yourself. Place yourself in an atmosphere of peace, and strongly resolve to act that way the next time. The result? First, you will have concluded a good spiritual transaction. Add it up. The outburst of temper which escaped you was

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certainly largely involuntary: the passion, the temperament, the suddenness of the temptation are excuses which God is the first one to take into account. Your will is better than your act: you have just proven that by the return which followed the fall. The return, on the contrary, is fully voluntary. This time you are really yourself. This exercise was entirely meritorious and its merit will be attributed to you as if you had really acted that way. The whole thing therefore came out on the black side of the ledger. This is surely a good way to utilize your faults. Then, too, you have learned an excellent lesson in supernatural savoir-faire. It will not be lost on the next occasion. Moreover, if you have performed the exercise well, you will be inclined to harvest its immediate fruits and to repair the harm at once. You will go out and find the person you jostled. You will excuse yourself politely for your outburst of temper — very likely he will do the same — and you will calmly and meekly explain the reason for your behavior. You will reestablish peace with your neighbor and with yourself.

The aftermath of success If you score a success in the combat, see to it that you do not lose its benefit for the future. Do not rest on one laurel. If you fool yourself into thinking that all is won, you will dispense yourself from a sane vigilance. Since you must expect an offensive return of the enemy, persevere humbly in mental prayer and utilize the security measures which helped you to victory this time. See to it, likewise, that you exploit the success, that you extend it by numerous acts of virtue. You must avoid the occasions, we said; but we also noted that an occasion of sin was likewise an occasion of virtue. When you feel strong enough — and past successes make you stronger — you can attack the already weakened vice directly. You can anticipate the occasions, provoke them, create them according to your means, continue to strike the enemy, and accustom yourself to victory. That is the method I suggested to you previously as a preventive measure. But here it is not simply a counterattack, but a pursuit. Note that this tactic can never be applied to our carnal passions. In this domain, the only strategy is flight. In all other matters, however, you must not overestimate your strength. These practices call for a great

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deal of ardor and wisdom. Talking about tactics, here is another military aphorism: the more audacious one is, the more prudent one must be.

Some warnings In all this spiritual combat, some general principles should never be forgotten. Several have already been pointed out in the course of this chapter. Here are a few others. Amidst the ups and downs of battle, take great care that you always preserve your peace of heart. Do not be surprised that difficulties are forever showing their heads. Such a thing is normal. Do not be disturbed by your failures. You do not beat yourself without giving yourself some blows. After a fall, simply ask yourself: "What is the best advantage I can gain from this fall?" Then begin the combat once again. Effort, not success, is what interests God. Victory is His business. Avoid ambition, excessive haste. Impatience has no place in your ascetical life, as if you wanted to be a saint in a week. Holiness is a long and exacting undertaking that has its ups and downs. Only tenacious perseverance will lead to complete victory. "Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14,21) . If it is true that you should not become discouraged in failure, it is equally true that you should beware of becoming proud over success. Each success, on the contrary, is the time to make a good act of humility, to attribute all the good to God, and think of all the evil that still remains in you. Be on your guard, for if you take pride in your virtuous acts, you run the risk of losing more than you gain. As for the senses, these great purveyors of temptations, refuse them everything you can reasonably do without. Then, since it is not entirely possible to silence them, try to make them tractable, to orient them toward God, to spiritualize, to supernaturalize the object they present to you: a beautiful landscape, a work of art, a song, a perfume, even a pleasant meal can serve as a point of departure for exalted ascensions of the soul. See with what mastery and simplicity the Seraphic Saint Francis sang the hymn of divine praise on the lyre of creation. All creation should cause us to raise our thoughts to God, its Creator. Finally, one important point. Throughout the combat, see that you do not lose contact with your Master from whom you must receive

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instructions and ammunition and who directs the operation. You are fighting for Jesus, not for yourself. In practice many forget this and think only of themselves, of their perfection, of the pursuit of their excellence, and so they fall into a very human moralism which flatters their vanity and fosters their self-love. There are "saints" of that type who spend their life adoring their sanctity. It is nothing but sheer egoism, often unconscious, however. Christ must ever remain the center of everything. In your service to Him, see that you do not forget to love Him, that the motive of love quickens your efforts and maintains them in a straight line, that you humbly and generously accept failure in some point if such is God's good pleasure, for He is always satisfied with your good will. As you struggle against your faults, keep the flame of love burning. Feed it. Love will guarantee the purity of your efforts and be its most powerful mainstay. Complete failure is inconceivable if you struggle as you should. By dint of patient repetition of acts of virtue, habits will take root in you, and these habits will render the acts easy. What formerly seemed impossible to you, as contrary to your deepest tendencies, will become natural. In truth, a new nature will be formed in you, a renaissance — the new man taking the place of the old conquered man. One by one you will acquire virtues that are solid and of good quality. And as they all are interconnected with charity, charity will glow and blossom on the ruins of egoism. You will feel your whole inner being ordered, pacified, subject to divine action. The way will be open for you to new flights toward the summits of holy mental prayer.

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Introduction to Affective Prayer The preceding meditations were of an ascetical nature and were directed to the intellect and the will. The purpose of these indispensable exercises is to strengthen the soul for the combat against itself, a combat involving correct seeing, willing and acting. The present meditation is of an entirely different nature. It aims more at the heart, at the affective side of the soul, in order to awaken its love, which is the food of mental prayer. The first meditations were an indispensable but indirect preparation for prayer. The present one is a direct and immediate preparation. This meditation is still "a mental prayer of reflection" since we are reflecting on the mysteries of our faith. But since the mind here works on the mysteries of love, our prayer will now have a greater affective aspect. We might say that our present meditation will be an intermediary between mental prayer of reflection and affective prayer properly so-called and that is why we introduce it here. Besides, all mental prayer is to some extent affective and there is no sudden transfer from one form of mental prayer to another. This meditation on love crowns all the preceding ones, for love is the term of all our spiritual exercises. As we take leave of the austere meditations on renunciation, the battle against self, and approach our prayer of love, we have the impression we are leaving some dark and somber valley to emerge into the bright and clear light of the highlands.

Sentiment and emotion Lest we lead ourselves astray, it is advisable at this point to state clearly some well-established conclusions from psychology. Feelings, emotions, sentiments, passions are words used to describe common human experiences. But much confusion can arise unless we understand clearly the meaning of these various states and can distinguish one from the other. We become aware of, or conscious of an object. We adopt an attitude or predisposition towards this object. We are affected by the object. Then arises involuntarily what is called a feeling — a movement of attraction or repulsion. There are many degrees and derivatives in this movement which, when quickened, may even become a passion. If the 199

experience is sudden or violent, there is a disturbance in our equilibrium, and we have then an emotion. Feeling must be distinguished from emotion. The former is simply an affective attitude; it can be calm, perfectly balanced and even permanent, even though we may not be always conscious of it. Emotion is a state of agitation, and by nature is short-lived. Feelings "color" the object in some fashion and thus are a predisposition to the emotions, but they can exist without the emotions. We might say, that the emotions are episodes, exceptionally heightened states of our feelings. Apart from the bodily repercussions which accompany every human act, but which are particularly pronounced in emotional states, all of this transpires in the will, which is sometimes active and sometimes passive. However, everyday usage restricts the word will to deliberate action. When here is some "affection" involved, we speak of the heart or of affectivity.

Affective and sensible devotion Our love for God lies essentially in the will: "He who has My Commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me" (Jn. 14,21) . This is the only form of charity which is always and absolutely required, because it alone is immediately within our reach. On the other hand, it is natural and to be desired for piety that love be in our heart also. This is a perfection of charity which we cannot afford to neglect. This love of the heart appears under two different aspects. It may be simply affective: a sentiment, a deep and permanent disposition of the soul, or it may translate itself through sensible emotions. The same must be said of devotion, which is an attitude of love toward God. This is so true that we have three forms of devotion: devotion of the will, promptness in the service of God; affective devotion, a predisposition of the heart toward God; and sensible devotion, made up of the emotions which flow from this sentiment. Affective devotion is certainly an excellent thing. It is the flower and perfection of charity. Added to the devotion of the will, it brings about the total gift of ourselves with all our faculties to God. The second part of Christ's commandment of love reads: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind" (Mt. 22,37)

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It differs from the first commandment in that we are required to practice it in so far as we are able; but to refuse it to God intentionally would be a sin. As for sensible devotion, it too is good in itself. It is normal that the sentiment of love overflow sometimes into the emotions. But because of its accidental and unstable nature which withdraws it from our free will, sensible devotion is only secondary and accessory. These two forms of the love of the heart are often confused and both are identified by the name of sensible devotion. Mistakes necessarily result. During this era of intensive action, there is a tendency, at least in devotional matters, to underestimate affectivity and to reject it outright under the disdainful term of sentimentalism. This is an error which can be prejudicial both to the spiritual life and to action itself. We should, most assuredly, beware of falling into sentimentalism, and there are good souls who are victims of a silly and annoying sentimentality; but the abuse does not condemn the good. God, our heavenly Father, demands this love of affection from us. If He has given us a heart, He did so primarily that we might use it primarily to love Hhim. "My son, give Me your heart" (Prov. 23, 26), He has said. And to convince us all the more of this, He Himself took a human heart that He might love us in a human way. Without affective love, our love is incomplete; and we see that all the saints have loved Him with wonderful outbursts of affection. How very natural and human that a profound love of the will should burst forth in affective love! As for those who feel nothing in their heart, the reason often enough is that their will is not sufficiently nor deeply conquered. Not only is this form of devotion good in itself, but it is extremely useful for the exercise of affective love itself. Everyone knows the enormous influence which sentiment exercises on the will: sentiment sparks the will with an enthusiasm which increases its power tenfold and makes the practice of virtue surprisingly easy. It would be a sad mistake, indeed, to pooh-pooh such an asset.

Sentiment and mental prayer Finally, and this is what particularly interests us here, affective devotion is an indispensable transition from the mental prayer of reflection to that new form of union with God which is a step forward in

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the ways of prayer and which is correctly called affective prayer. Even if the contribution of the heart were not necessary for your ascetical life, it would be for the life of prayer. Affective devotion makes all forms of prayer singularly easy, especially those frequent returns to God which we began with. But we must ever forge ahead. "To pray always without interruption" is the goal we must strive for. Those who have tried it know that it is not easy. No matter how many times we renew our good intention to turn our thoughts to God, the simple truth of the matter is that we fail frequently. Voluntary acts are never more than acts whereas prayer must become a state, a permanent activity. Go back to the first chapters of this book. What artificial means were proposed to try to approach this ideal! Yet complete success was never ours. Such means can never lead us to the end and we are very conscious of the fact that they are so many expedients. To be sure, they are excellent; they must be used, but they are but a step toward something more profound. To interrupt the flow of life every now and then and turn our thoughts to God gives us but a fragmentary union. And no matter how frequent these returns are, they are but transitory and never achieve an enduring union. To bring about this kind of union, another element, something more intimate, more vital is required: love, an ardent, invading, dominating love that impregnates life, becomes life itself, and transforms into itself all our activities. The problem, therefore, is to reach a degree of fervor where love plays this unifying role. And such a task is not accomplished coldheartedly. The affective life is especially irreplacable in order to reach those higher forms of prayer which are nothing more than the uncontested reign of divine love in the soul. Spiritual authors unanimously agree that discursive prayer must normally be followed by affective prayer, the latter being the transition and ordinary step leading to contemplative prayer. This doctrine is classical. The reason for this is that the life of the heart, pious sentiments, and holy affections are prerequisites for active goodness; they constitute an instrument which the Holy Ghost has but to take hold of in order to substitute his victorious action for our feeble efforts. But how can we talk of affective prayer if we frown on sentiment? Those who will have nothing to do with this life of the heart will never go beyond discursive prayer. Moreover, they will need a strong will, for too often this exercise in the long run weighs heavily upon 202

them; and they abandon mental prayer in order to devote themselves exclusively to action. Or, if mental prayer is imposed on them, they look upon it as the most unpleasant point of their rule and seek every opportunity to excuse themselves from it. If we are to persevere in prayer, them prayer must be made attractive. That precisely is the role of the heart. It alone puts savor into prayer; it alone gives it an ever-new and ever-increasing charm. The man whose heart has fallen in love with God never grows tired of prayer. He alone will reach the summit of the unitive way.

Applications From what has been said above, certain practical conclusions can be deduced. We must cultivate sentiment, stir up, feed, and activate affective love for God by appropriate meditations and exercises. You must not say: "I am an unemotional person, a self-controlled individual. Sentiment is not my strong point." To be sure, we must take temperaments into account. Some are more inclined than others to affective devotion, and even among these there will be shades of differences. But that a man can be totally incapable of affection is impossible. Those who think they are have neglected this facet of their personality or have not made the necessary effort to develop it. For a real effort is required, in fact a complete interior asceticism is needed in order to reach that point where the heart is in perfect harmony with the will. On the other hand, sentiment is not always "felt." There are moments and periods when it sometimes veils itself to the point where it seems to have vanished. But it has not. It is only asleep. It remains in the recesses of the heart, making itself felt by a vague yet permanent dissatisfaction, which precisely proves that it has not detached itself from God and that its fundamental predisposition has not changed. When the chance to make a sacrifice for God presents itself, it will welcome the opportunity spontaneously, even though it no longer does so with the same joy or the same ardor as before. You should be neither surprised nor discouraged by these eclipses. They are normal. It seems to be a law of sentiment that it has to rest periodically, just as one leaves land fallow which, when cultivated later, has renewed vitality. Knowing that love is none the less real even

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though it is not felt, let us not try in an exaggerated way to awaken this dormant devotion. We can try most assuredly, and we must begin to do so. Often, the source of our aridity is a cause for which we are responsible and are in a position to do something about. The cause may be laziness, dissipation, a sin, an excessive anxiety, or a poorly suppressed passion. The first thing to do is suppress or neutralize this noxious agent, then have recourse to thoughts and exercises which we know from experience have stimulated our fervor, and lastly pray God to touch our heart himself. Should these efforts prove fruitless, then instead of obstinately and uselessy exerting ourselves, it would be better to await grace calmly, assure God of our love, and carefully maintain that basic disposition which will be strengthened by this diet. The usual associates of affection will have disappeared: impressions, emotions, and the satisfactions which they give the heart, in a word, sensible devotion. The rule to follow in the matter of sensible devotion is very simple: accept it as it comes. You must convince yourself that sensible devotion is entirely secondary and that to experience impressions is in no wise necessary for the love of God nor for good prayer. If you are enjoying sensible devotion, profit by it and thank the good Lord for it. If you are without it, learn to do without it, to be satisfied with the essential, and to unite yourself with God as you are. That is a good way to make it return in its own good time. I am not saying that we cannot at times seek it for the spiritual good it affords, provided we use it with moderation, as something accessory, and never becoming attached to it. In this matter certain souls fall into a gross error with unfortunate consequences. Confusing love with sensible devotion, they place the essence of perfection in sensible devotion. All their efforts are concentrated in cultivating it exclusively. When they have it, they think they are saints because they experience sweet emotions. Meanwhile they neglect to struggle against their faults. If sensible devotion is absent, they become sad, are discouraged, and no longer do good, not to mention the over-nice airs they sometimes take on and which make devotion intolerably odious and ridiculous. Each thing has its proper place. Impressions must be used intelligently as an additional grace without placing too much dependence on them and the will must ever be kept active. The heart is of the best of things, provided it is governed wisely. Keep a watch then on your sentiments, but having said that, do not develop a phobia for sensible devotion nor especially for affective 204

devotion. Do not imitate some who despise sentiment, who exclude it from their spiritual life, who denounce it as useless, ridiculous, and as something in itself dangerous. This form of love, which is so human and so beautiful, is a grace from God, and wisdom dictates that it be welcomed with gratitude and that it be used to make you more faithful and ever more generous. Let us be simple and natural in our dealings with our heavenly Father. Love him like the men that we are, with all the powers he has given us and, as he has asked us. Let us give him our heart along with our activity.

Meditation on the love of God "That is all well and good," you say, "but how do you put sentiments in the heart when they are not there: Love — affective love — cannot be requisitioned. It depends on a thousand imponderable factors independent of the will." Are you so sure that love is not requisitioned? Not directly, to be sure, but we can to a certain extent incite it, open the way for it, and help to awaken it. See how matters come to pass in certain "arranged marriages." A meeting is arranged in which the parties concerned get acquainted. They have never seen other, and at the outset they are perfectly indifferent toward each other. But notice the exchange of looks. Despite their concern to conceal their pleasant surprise, the exchange of glances is very enlightening and we easily surmise the following reflections. "What pretty eyes she has," he notices. And she is thinking: "He is good looking." Then, he says: "I like her serious and modest manner." Then, after he has retorted with a happy repartee, she says: "How intelligent and witty he is." And so on. They find out more about each other; they study each other; they discover one another. They accumulate the wherewith for the work of idealization which will be in the making during the hours to follow. Since everything seems to point to their eventual marriage, the parents will arrange for later meetings which in turn will lead to new discoveries. So much so that at the end of six months both partners are convinced that they have found the pearl of great price and that God created them especially for each other. The announcement of the engagement has all but to be made. The curious

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thing about it all is that the same thing would have happened had a different candidate been involved. We might note this also: sometimes it suffices that this evolution of love takes place on the part of one only. The other becomes aware of how much he is loved, and is touched by it. This prepares the way for the rest, and soon love is returned. Love attracts love. In order to love anyone, the first requisite is to become acquainted with him, to keep company with him, and to discover little by little the virtues that make him lovable —among others the affection he has for us. The exact same thing transpires between us and God. If men love Him so little, He who should be loved so much, the reason is because for them He is the Great Unknown. And they do not know Him because they do not think of Him; they do not look at Him; they do not study him; they do not keep company with Him. The first step to take to set their hearts aglow with divine love is to set about knowing God better in order to discover how amiable He is, and to try to understand that He loves us and the extent of His love. As His sublime beauty, His unfathomable love, and the deep-rooted resemblance which He has established between Himself and us come to light, love will bud, grow, and blossom in our souls. Here are a few points for meditation on this subject: 1. The Beauty of God. We cannot know God directly, but He does make himself known to us through his creatures. Everything we admire in creatures comes from God and is found in Him in a far superior and perfect mode. Let us try to perceive the beauty of God in all the beautiful and wonderful things we see, and we will be dazzled, transported, and drawn to Him. But our love goes out to our fellow-man. Now, man is the image of God, Who is the supreme object of all love. Summon up all the qualities that have moved our heart in all those whom we have ever loved and admired, and the sum total will be but a faint reflection of the infinite perfection of him who is their source and exemplar. 2. Love of God. But, God is especially love. Not only is He our Creator, but our Father. He created us out of love that we might be His children. He gave us the most precious thing He had, intellect and will and, to crown these, supernatural grace which deifies us.

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His love for man is so excessive that even sin could not discourage His love. Instead of abandoning man, He, our sovereign God, became incarnate to save man and assumed the debt of the culprit. And despite the repeated ingratitude of man, God continues to love him, seeing always, beyond man's stains, the original beauty that He had clothed him with. If God hates sin, He has pity on the sinner and he tenderly and untiringly invites man to return to Him. 3. Love incarnate. Knowing that it was difficult for us to raise ourselves to the heights of his transcendence and that the only thing we understand well is human love, He did an unheard-of thing: He lowered himself to the point of becoming one of us, for the twofold purpose of redeeming us and to make love easy for us. He showed himself to us as the most beautiful of the children of men, and He took a human heart which is capable of loving us with a human love, as we wish to be loved. Read and reread the Gospel as the earthly story of Love incarnate. Bear in mind as you read of His labors, His fatigues, and His cruel Passion that we were present to Him, that He thought of us, that all He did and suffered was for us, for each and everyone of us in particular. 4. God with us. Finally, on the eve of dying for us, it was as if He needed our companionship as much and far more than we need His. And so He wrought His final miracle whereby He continues to remain in our midst. In the Divine Eucharist, He ever offers Himself as a victim, unites Himself in an unspeakable way to us, becomes our very food and, in the tabernacle, dwells in our midst. Then, too, He is in us by His grace, in the center of our heart, closer and more intimate to us than those around us, sustaining us, comforting us, enlightening us, loving each and every one of us with an unspeakable love, with all his Sacred Heart, as if He had no one else to love but us. He is ever the Friend who understands and lends a helping hand. And, whereas other loves always disappoint us in some respect, in Him we find a perfect love that ever surpasses our desires and which death will but deepen. Happy the man who understands and values this sovereign love! Our hungry heart will find rest and happiness in him alone, for our heart was created for that purpose.

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The Divine Friend Budding affection love soars Meditations of this kind on the love of god gradually impregnate the soul with love of God, bestir it to its very depths, and dispose it to return the love of God it has slighted. Our previous meditations with their attendant exercises have prepared the ground. Our faith, henceforth, has become clearer, and especially more active. Whereas detachment loosens the shackles of the soul, asceticism purifies it, removes the obstacles in its way, and cools the passions. The soul becomes fit to receive the action of love. The thought of this love must continually nourish the soul. To do this, we must read and re-read everything that speaks to us of love, and piously go over all these things in our heart. The search for love must become the dominant thought, the preoccupation, and the foundation of our very life. In this way our heart will obey our will. The conformity of the will blossoms into affection. The new discoveries that will result from the incessant thinking on this love will impress, touch, and captivate the soul. A new day will begin to dawn and with it a light that warms as it enlightens the soul. We begin to understand, to discern the delicate touches of divine love which formerly had little hold over us. Then, our heart will gradually open like a flower at dawn. At first, we gasp with surprise at the delightful discovery of knowing that we are loved. Nothing sparks love better than the revelation that we are the object of love. And so now, we discover that an unfathomable and burning love has ever been pursuing us, surrounding us, hovering over us, and defending it jealously, that this love has even sacrificed its blood for us, that to save us and win us it has done the most un-dreamable and the most heroic acts that tenderness could dictate to an enraptured heart. The thought had never struck us before — at least not enough and not personally enough. Had we thought of it, we would never have dared to hope for such condescension on the part of a God whom we had grown accustomed to serve simply as a good Master.... But the dream now faces us in all its radiant beauty and attractive sweetness. My Lord and King is asking for my heart. We knew that God loved us, but the knowledge remained theoretical, extraneous to us. Now we see; we grasp this dazzling truth as a reality incorporated into our life. Then with the realization that we have walked beside love without seeing 208

it, there wells up a cry of gratitude in our heart: "Thank You, my God; thanks." We raise our eyes toward him who extends so cordial an invitation. And for the first time, so it seems, the soul understands that God is Beauty, that He is Light, that He is Love, that He is All. In Him, everything lovable and desirable is offered to the soul. "The instinct for God" is awakened in a heart that was made for God, and in our desire to be united with him, the soul begins to beat its wings. The crowning experience is to see Our Lord come to us not only as our sovereign God but in the garb of a Brother full of sweetness, tenderness, and charm, qualities that are so indicative of his heart. We smile at this love so tailor-made for our hearts: an infinite love accomodated to our needs which, without ceasing to be divine, made itself so truly human. We contemplate the face of Love incarnate in ecstasy. The longer we look the more beautiful it becomes, and with each passing day the more touching. When we think of the martyrdom our Saviour suffered for us, a sting of compassion pierces our heart. Piously, we bow down before his loving sorrow. We feel the need of consoling him, and a wave of sorrow sweeps us to the foot of the cross. Oh, soul loved by Christ, go to him; look at him a long time; cling to him. Through him you will obtain access to divine love. He is the way, the truth, and the life. He became incarnate to reveal love to you and to give you love. The whole humanity of Christ is the cartridge of divine love. It is the easy way, the one which God in his infinite goodness selected for us. Jesus, perfect God and perfect man, the natural intermediary between man and God, is the mediator of love, as He is of all grace. Through Him and in Him the soul easily comes to understand the love and the beauty of God. He will move your soul and ignite the flame of His holy love in your heart. But if Our Lord lowered Himself to the extent of clothing Himself with the rags of human nature in order to make us love Him, we must not belittle His love to the point of seeing His humanity only. Beyond and in this very dear humanity, we must always find the divine Person of the Word. Jesus is God. His divinity explains Him; it confers on Him a depth, a radiance, a uniqueness and unspeakableness without which the love we bear for Him would lose all meaning. It is the presence of this divinity in Christ which for twenty centuries has lighted up that supernatural tenderness for Christ in the hearts of Christians that has no analogy on earth. What excellence is His! To contemplate the 209

most wonderful, the most perfect of created beings; to see Him illumined in such an unequaled glory; to know that he, our love, is our God; to see Him at once so humble and so mighty, so close and so sublime, that is what has incited the astonishing love of the saints of all ages. Such contemplation of Christ floods the soul with a wonder that makes the seductions of the world pale and attracts the soul to Him, the One and Only, the God-Man. In this contemplation, our eyes gain a greater vision; the veil that hid God from us becomes more transparent. Instead of being hardly more than a name and an idea, as He was before, Christ now becomes a Being loved, the divine Friend who has moved our hearts. We have not yet, to be sure, reached the ardent love of the Seraphic Francis of Assisi. Our love is none the less a very real affection, full of sweetness and one heretofore unknown, one that inclines us toward Him, attaches us to Him and which will deepen as we come to know Him better. This love of friendship now has a decided place in our life, will grow little by little, and will more and more penetrate our mind and our heart. And in our life, sweetly invaded by love, a transformation is wrought. It is as if a supernatural springtime were making itself felt. The delusion in which we were living gives way to light; vain cares fade away before this new interest; a peace comes over us, and an unknown joy begins to sing deep within us, the enduring joy of the man who has found his center and who lives in abiding truth and fathomless love. "O Lord," the soul murmurs, "where was I when I was not with you? What was I doing when I did not love you?" The Spirit of Love has entered our heart and gradually raises it up, helps it to spread its still awkward wings, and teaches us to soar toward God.

Intimacy The man whose heart has thus been opened to the tide of holy love soon becomes aware of what proves to be a great joy; thinking of God, living in the presence of God now becomes easier and more natural. He has less reason to have recourse to the laborious and multiple inventions which he needed to remind himself of God's presence. He is like the cured sick person who rejoices that he no longer needs a

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wheelchair. The thought of God comes to mind spontaneously now and then. Any thought that interests the heart repeatedly comes to mind. In truth, it is more than a thought. Now that Christ has captivated us, a secret attraction brings us back to him. Each time we now think of God we do so because our heart calls out for Him. Thinking of Him is an enjoyable and stirring thought, because it is a thought of the heart that has issued from the depth of our being. We have understood how sweet the Lord is; we feel at home in His company, and love to tarry with Him. A real intimacy is created between us and our Savior. "I will call you M friends." We now experience the truth, and taste the sweetness of these words which heretofore seemed too beautiful for God to say to us. Now, fear gives way to love. Jesus is, in truth, our divine Friend, full of condescension and tenderness. He himself has invited us to this "astonishing familiarity" which a God only could permit to those who love Him. In our conversation with our dear Lord, we gradually throw off our shyness; we come to Him with an ever-growing confidence and abandon; we grow accustomed to telling Him everything; we confide our joys, our difficulties, our troubles, and our projects to him. Our Lord loves such simplicity in a friend, and rewards it with new graces. Between Christ and the soul there is an affectionate exchange of attentions. Here is a soul that was a straying sheep; it has now returned to the fold. Right order has been restored and God has regained his rightful place. And he does so in order to restore all other things to their rightful place. The man preoccupied with loving does not, nevertheless, forget the duties of virtue. On the contrary, he practices them with greater solicitude and ardor. But this asceticism now takes on a different form. Love more distinctly and more directly motivates his efforts. And this is as it should be, since love is the root of the other virtues. He considers them less in themselves than as proofs of his love and as occasions to show his love for Christ. Thus, he makes more rapid progress than he would through pure asceticism and comes to realize the power of detachment love has. By clinging to Christ, he detaches himself from the world; by seeking to please Christ, he forgets himself — a form of abnegation that is both most lovable and most profound in that it purifies the soul without hardening or depressing it. It gives wings to sacrifice, makes virtue pleasant and, as it were, natural. We say "natural" because it is of the nature of man that the action of ever-increasing charity brings about a change deep within him. 211

The apprenticeship of love precautionary measures This idyllic life, however, is not without its setbacks, for as yet it is not very solid. There will be ups and downs of fervor. Love does not invade all of man, turn him inside out, nor transform him all of a sudden. Save for exceptional cases, love penetrates the heart little by little, by a slow infiltration. Affection at the beginning is keen and often operates the change, but it is a flame that still lacks heat. It only grazes the surface, quickly consumes the superficial twigs, only to die out before more resistant matter. In truth, it is not yet love in the full precise meaning of the word, but only an affection, an inclination toward God, an ardent flame — but a flame that will have to go on growing a long time before reaching its maximum intensity. The reason for this is that self-love is still far from being annihilated. Self-love is the humidity that permeates the hearth, injects vapor into the flame, and prevents the fire from catching. Our preceding meditations, efforts, and devotion of the heart have dealt a blow to our self-love and as a result it is already muffled, but there still remains a great deal to do. Unbeknown to us, our soul is still attached to too many things to be truly free, and its flight toward God is constantly being thwarted or slowed down by all these antagonistic attractions. Its flight is like the first attempts of a fledgling, clumsy and brief with the danger always of a sudden fall to the ground. When that happens look out for the cat! One cannot underestimate the many dangers that lie in wait for the soul that is so pleasantly occupied with loving. The apprentice in divine love must not, therefore, count too heavily on his wings. How many budding fervors have known no tomorrows because the departure was taken for the arrival. They thought that everything was finished and that this beautiful flight was definitive. Absorbed in the effusions of sensible devotion, the novice soon became accustomed to depending on them exclusively. It was so much more easy and pleasant. Such souls forgot the austere exercise of the will, and when aridity came they did not have the courage to go back to these austere exercises again. Presumption brought on inconstancy, and what was a grace became an evil, for lack of having used it wisely. Such is the history of a great number of pious souls, and the reason why so few ever succeed in soaring higher. As a rule, this grace is given them several times, and each time with the same result. It is not altogether rare that the

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first attempts result in failure. Fortunate are they who find a wise guide who will keep them on the right road, and who have enough humility, common sense, and courage to obey him. They will, as it were, break through the sound barrier and soar higher. The others will come to a halt. They will settle down where they are, and that will be their status quo for the rest of their life or, as happens all too often, their fervor will slowly diminish. In view, then, of the conclusions of the preceding chapter, here are the rules of conduct to follow in this matter: 1. As long as the affective elan lasts, you must follow it, and with great joy; but you must not abandon the usual ascetical exercises, however useless they may seem to you at the time. Such will not always be the case, and it would be dangerous to break off the habit of using them. You must keep this reserve motor running. Neglect none of your daily duties; practice the virtues with great fidelity; pay special attention to keeping yourself humble. Far from relaxing your efforts, profit by the help which the heart gives you to reinforce the action of the will. Do these things with a discretion equal to your earnestness, for there are some who at this point fall into an opposite excess and who by reason of their rash austerities put themselves hors de combat. 2. Persevere in praying and in practicing virtue even when you do not feel like doing so as well as when you do. Use the other motor. This is the crucial moment when you will have to decide whether you are going to forge ahead in the spiritual life or come to a standstill, when you can show whether you are seeking God or His consolations, and whether you are made of the metal of a mystic soul. Believe, too, that such constancy in the midst of dryness is the only way to regain sensible fervor later on. 3. Do not at any cost desire to enjoy this sensible fervor continually. It depends on too many imponderables and is by its very nature transitory. There is no reason why we should not try to regain it, and it is well to do so, but always with the moderation befitting a point of secondary importance and with serene resignation if you fail. To persist in trying to do so, to want by sheer force to arouse pious emotions would only end in tiring your nerves. 4. Be humble and wise enough at such times to return to the little means previously suggested to talk with God in the even purely ascetical mental prayer of reflection and in a prayer that has no appeal, no pleasure, or no apparent profit, namely to a purely vocal prayer. This 213

might seem irksome after having tasted the first sweetmeats of Eden. But it is the only thing to do if you do not want to waste your time while waiting for a second encounter with the Lord. This happy meeting will most assuredly take place if you have remained faithful. And what an exquisite moment! Some day, perhaps when you least expect it, when everything in you and around you seems empty, of a sudden, we know not how, Jesus is at the bend in the road, more beautiful, more tremendous than ever before. Enthralled, the soul cries out: "Rabboni!" (Jn. 2o, 16) . Master! And the soul runs towards him with a renewed love, overjoyed, and pent up by the waiting of long days of absence. But it is the hour of God, and the Spirit breathes where he will, for it is already the Holy Ghost who, in a still latent way, here acts with man and mysteriously assists his efforts.

Maintenance regulations He who is careful to observe these wise rules — everyone will necessarily have to subject himself to them some day —will taste the delights of love in all security. He will have to protect and foster this still fragile and rather weak love despite its appearances of great fervor. A fire we have just lit, no matter how crackling it is, must still be protected against gusts of wind, against water, and the blows that would extinguish the flame, and more wood must be added from time to time. So, too, the fire of love must be kept burning by detachment and recollection, and fed by meditation and union. Detachment. As long as love is not solidly entrenched in the soul — and we are still far from this — the sensations of love are extremely unstable and constantly being thwarted by antagonistic attractions. The touches of the Holy Ghost are infinitely delicate: a small omission, a selfish thought, a gratification of self-love, the slightest thing suffices to lose contact with him. Then a lapse of time and many efforts will be needed to re-establish it. You have, I suppose, held a captured bird in your hand at one time or another. You stroked the little quivering body lovingly. Then you opened your cupped hand for one second and he swiftly flew away. When you feel the divine action in you, be careful not to neglect it for some other paltry interest. Beware, the Holy Ghost has wings, too. He is not represented under the form of a dove for nothing.

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The Lord is a jealous God. He has to be. Because He loves us so deeply He cannot bear a rival. To those whom He manifests himself He expects that, being preoccupied with Him in all things and detached from everything, they will hold Him close to their heart. Inattentiveness, egoism, and a divided heart wound Him and, being sad, He departs. Recollection. During this period of the spiritual life, recollection is more indispensible than ever before. The fact that it has not yet become natural and self-assertive, as it will later on, requires all the more vigilance. It will not maintain itself in a somewhat habitual way except at the price of constant efforts of attention and concentration. It may perhaps be necessary to take irksome measures, to suppress certain distractions from your life; and finally, the mind must be kept alert as it constantly and repeatedly scrutinizes the soul coddling its inner treasure. Like the practice of asceticism, this must be done without exaggeration or agitation. Keep in mind, too, your present means. Now, to remain recollected uninterruptedly is as impossible for the moment as to preserve sensible fervor constantly. Were we to wish this, we would induce an unfortunate mental strain that would be prejudicial to both body and mind and would jeopardize any further progress. The main thing is to do what we can; he who would like to do more will not go far. Remember, the road ahead is long. Far better, exert less effort and keep yourself fit. Patient perseverence yields greater dividends than unstable violence. Meditation. We must, in the second place, activate the fire of devotion by meditation and union. The preceding reflections awakened holy affections in the heart. But, if this first fervor is not to fade fast, we must continue to meditate on the love of God. It is not enough, evidently, to have made one meditation of this kind in order to have a sudden and enduring seraphic heart completely imbued with love. Such a result is reached only by returning to that thought for a long period of time, every day and several times a day and with the aid of God's grace. If this meditation is to preserve its efficacy, we must deepen it, inject new life into it, bring it points heretofore unexploited, surprise it with new aspects, not only by reflection, but also by reading. There is no end to the exploration of divine love. Each day has its unspeakable discoveries and meetings replete with charm. Read, reread, and meditate on the holy gospels in the manner I have suggested to you: as "the most beautiful of all love stories" and as 215

an ever-current story, one in which you are personally involved. Relive with Christ what He willed to live for you. Remember that He already knew you and called you by name. Follow Him in the company of the disciples and the holy women; admire His sublime wisdom and goodness; praise Him; pray to Him; love Him; have compassion on the fatigues and anxieties you have caused Him; in spirit render Him all the services that you would have offered Him had you been actually present. Follow Him, particularly in His passion; be a Simon and a Veronica; give Him in His immense suffering the comfort of your love in reparation for the abandonment of the Apostles. Imagination? Yes, but imagination of actual things, things only that the weakness of our present condition prevent us from discerning otherwise, but which for Him are ever present and ought to be so for us. Select, if you wish, some commentary on the Gospels to help you in this active meditation. By preference choose one that fosters piety rather than one that attempts to reconstruct the story of Christ's life — although this can be helpful to piety too. The Meditations on the Life of Christ for a long time attributed to Saint Bonaventure are most helpful. They gave depth to the devotion of our forefathers. In your meditations, return often to the mysteries which refer more closely to the person of Christ: the Eucharist, the Sacred Heart and, in the liturgy, the feasts of Christ which, in the course of the year, recall the outstanding deeds of his earthly history. In a general way, nourish your thoughts with everything that has to do directly with God: His beauty, His goodness, His love, His incarnation; in a word, all the things that make Him more lovable and that touch your heart. Do all of this quickened by the profound conviction in His loving presence. Do it in such a way that this interior work is not just a reflection but always and ever a union with Him. In other words, meditation at this point must be made in the presence of God and by talking to him. For that matter, as you will note well, you cannot do otherwise if your heart is already in love. This union, we have seen, will now be easier for you, because God has become closer to you through knowledge and love, and has entered more into your life. Profit by it and concentrate your attention on it for, despite this greater facility, your efforts are still necessary. Union. Union must be your main exercise, otherwise all else will be jeopardized. Try to keep the keen awareness of God's holy presence in mind as constantly as possible. Go back to the "mental prayer of life," 216

union with Jesus in all your activities. It will be more pleasant, more profound, and more true than when you took it up in the early stages of your spiritual life, when you were inciting it by artificial means. When possible, make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament and there before the tabernacle renew your contact with Christ. Converse with Him by aspirations, constantly repeated words of love. Do not neglect vocal prayer. It will now have a new savor for you, unexpected meaning, and a power that you were unconscious of. The divine office will be a spiritual feast for you, a conversation with God replete with graces. In short, let your whole life strive to be but one uninterrupted act of love. (I say "strive" because it is still an unattainable ideal for you for the time being.) This will resolve itself in practice in a twofold way: talk to Christ and listen to Him — the mental prayer of conversation — but quickened now by a current of affection which makes it vibrant and pleasant. Talk to Him of everything that happens. Lovingly accept what His love sends you, the unpleasant as well as the pleasant things. Offer Him your actions. Ask His help and advice in your difficulties. Tell Him over and over of your love, your confidence, your gratefulness for His immense goodness. Talk to Him about Himself as much as you do about yourself. Adore Him in all things and in regard to all things. Your conversation with God will be infinitely varied, as diversified and inexhaustible as your daily conversations with those you come in contact with. We have no difficulty talking with our friends. Yet, when it comes to listening to our Lord, some souls become nonplussed. "He does not talk to me," they say. They cock their ears, hold their breath, and naturally hear nothing. How mistaken they are! They want to materialize the spiritual, and this leads them to a void. God is a spirit. He does not talk to our ears, but to our soul. Words and human language are but a very imperfect vehicle of thought. God does not make use of them to communicate with us. By a sovereign action He goes directly to the mind and the heart, instructing them, warming them, not with words, but with illuminations and inspirations. Those who are accustomed to discern this divine language hear very well and make no mistake. Someone may object and say, "All this transpires within us. Do we not form these thoughts and sentiments ourselves?" Perhaps, but God makes us form them. He acts in us according to the nature of our soul which is His handiwork. This action, being

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completely spiritual, is not discernible in itself, but only in the expression with which our mind has clothed the divine inspiration. For the rest, do you really want to hear God? Then, keep yourself recollected in Him; tune your soul to God; make your thoughts agree with His, and your sentiments reflect His. Then His Spirit will espouse yours, and you will hear Him speaking in your soul in a more profound way than through words because He Himself will be communicating Himself to you. Over and above this constant conversation with the Lord, when you finally withdraw to pray, your mental prayer will take a new form: the mental prayer of reflection will very definitely become affective prayer — the next subject we shall treat.

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Affective Prayer Notion Affective prayer, or prayer of the heart, is ordinarily defined as mental prayer in which the affections predominate. Affections are certainly one of its most apparent characteristics. But there is something else. What distinguishes it from mental prayer or reflection goes much deeper. It is not simply a question of quantity. There is a clear-cut difference between the procedure and the very nature of these two types of prayer. In discursive prayer, reflection is necessary to arouse the affections: a kind of logical conclusion to the reflections. Furthermore, they often remain somewhat cold and purely voluntary. For example, we meditated on the goodness of God as Creator, Savior, and the Dispenser of all graces. And we concluded that He has a right to our complete love, to our total gratitude. And we said: "My God, thank You. I give You my heart and my entire life in gratitude for Your paternal love." We repeated that in a very sincere and convinced way. Now, that is precisely the point. It was a conviction more than a sentiment. It was in our head more than in our heart. It comes about, nevertheless, that through such meditations the heart itself is moved and pours itself out in spontaneous expressions of love. We then have an affective element in discursive prayer, but discursive prayer as a whole is not properly affective prayer because the procedure is based on reflection. In the mental prayer of the heart, the soul lives on its capital. Having finished gathering its raw material from the flowers, the bee returns to the hive and converts the nectar into honey. The meditations and the spiritual reading previously made have produced their effect, at least to a sufficient degree for the moment. They have wrought a permanent affective predisposition in the soul. There is no further need to stir up sentiment by reasonings. Sentiment is there, in the depths of the heart, waiting to be poured out. And these outpourings are no longer "voluntary affections" (we sense that the two words clash when juxtaposed) , but spontaneous affections conformable to the notion of sentiment. Some thought may be needed to bring this to the surface and put it into action, but ordinarily a reminder, a more or less prolonged glance 219

at the thoughts gleaned from previous meditations will suffice. Heretofore, these thoughts came to mind successively and the mind pondered over them one by one in an analytic fashion. Now they are assimilated and become part of our spiritual capital. They reappear under the form of a synthetic whole, and the soul reconsiders them in an intuitive look. These intuitive surveys are the very ones that move the heart and incite sentiment; we see things with all the imponderables that escape reason, with that depth of mystery, those unexpected aspects, those extensions that confer on them an evocative power and a new brilliance. All of this strikes the mind forcefully, and immediately makes the ideas moving ones. Intuition is to sentiment what reason is to the will. Like sentiment, intuition gives the impression of forming itself in us without us, often without immediate effort. Too serious an effort to incite intuition may sometimes even stifle it. But ordinarily intuition is the result of a long, previous work, of a slow maturing of thought. That is why the mental prayer of reflection and spiritual reading normally precede affective prayer. The soul now reaps the recompense of the sometimes disheartening exertion of meditation. It has but to dig into the acquired treasure. At the very outset of this prayer, the soul will instinctively go out to the thought most favorable to mental prayer: the one closest to the surface, the one that unconsciously was preoccupying the mind and which is ready to emerge. Being a vital thought, the heart will immediately follow it. Often simply returning to the thought of the presence of God, or the mere interior pronouncing of the name of Jesus with all that this blessed Name represents of sweetness, beauty, and love will suffice. Sometimes, too, none of this is necessary. The intuitive synthesis was there, all ready, and so was the affection. As soon as the mind is free of external concerns, these latent forces being no longer held in check, enter into action. We kneel down and the union comes about. Mental prayer begins of itself. This, of course, takes place in an ordinary manner only for those who have already practiced the mental prayer of the heart, whose spiritual synthesis is rather rich, whose heart is sufficiently conquered to love, and whose life is impregnated with the divine in a rather enduring way.

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This happy facility will be given to those who are lukewarm, who are insufficiently trained in the affective spiritual life and too accustomed to methodical mental prayer, practiced only now and then and for rather short periods of time. Let them capitalize on these precious occasions. As for the rest, let them persevere in the form of mental prayer they are accustomed to, trying only to simplify their thoughts during meditation and to give more and more place in their meditation to the affective element. The transition from one form of mental prayer to another, as we saw, is not brought about suddenly nor without turning backwards. Between the two there will be a period of transition when mental prayer will be now discursive, now affective. More frequently it will take on that mixed form just alluded to: a mental prayer or reflection in which the heart strives to assume a more and more preponderant role. For those who are accustomed to the mental prayer of the heart, things will not always follow the smooth course we have just described. Do not forget that intuition, like sentiment, is an essentially fleeting thing over which we have no immediate command. Both are the reverse side of the medal. Many times they will not respond to the call and elude all pursuit without being able to put our finger on the reason for this defaulting. We shall see that the method of procedure varies with each case, but that more than once we will have to make up our mind to put the motor in reverse and return for a time to meditation or to mixed mental prayer.

Affective prayer in general Mental prayer of the heart is certainly more common among pious souls than the other forms of mental prayer. Unfortunately, there is precious little that can be said about it and few precise rules to be offered. In the case of mixed mental prayer, all that concerns the discursive part has already been explained. As for the affective part, it may be well to restate this essential point: as soon as the heart is moved, give it free rein. Do not thwart it by new reflections. Rather avail yourself of the sentiment that comes to the front. Enjoy it as long as it lasts, and have no scruple about omitting this or that point you intended to meditate on, even if the entire time of mental prayer is spent on this

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one affection. Take up the thread of the meditation only when the sentiment has died away. Affective prayer properly so-called resembles mental prayer of conversation a great deal, except that in affective prayer love is more ardent. It will be easier, more cordial, and more affectionate, and will center more and more directly around the Lord himself. Like the mental prayer of conversation, and more so, its course will be quite free. It should be, because intuition and sentiment can hardly bear regimentation. To want to impose this on them would be like clipping their wings. The approaches which the soul will take will be infinitely varied. It is impossible to suggest an outline for so varied a mental prayer. The best that can be done is to give a few general instructions on the way to conduct ourselves.

Preparation The preparation for affective prayer is of capital importance. Since all the soul has to do is to draw on its capital — mental prayer should spontaneously arise from it — everything depends, barring a possible sudden change, on the spiritual state in which we find ourselves as we begin to pray. Cassian's remark is especially applicable here: "What we wish to be when we pray, that we ought to be beforehand. The dispositions of the soul at prayer depend on the state of our soul before prayer." The important thing, therefore, is to come to mental prayer in a state of soul favorable to divine union. This state of soul will depend much more on the remote and general preparation than on the immediate preparation for prayer. Our manner of living, and the habitual state of our soul, set the stage for mental prayer; they create the favorable climate where it can blossom. What is particularly important is to keep ourself in a permanent state of fervor by purity of heart and union with God despite our everyday occupations, in such wise that mental prayer will be but the extension of life, a freer and more intense expression of a prayer that persists in a more or less latent state. We readily understand that, under such conditions, prayer will arise spontaneously. Having risen to the level of affective prayer, the soul begins affective prayer without any difficulty. That is true of all prayer. You will remember that in the beginning of this book that was the answer given to those who, so they

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say, "do not know how to pray." But the point is particularly true of affective prayer. It is always possible, whatever the initial conditions are, to speak to God about simple and daily events or to take an idea and examine it under different aspects and reach some concrete resolution. This question of putting ourselves in a certain state of soul which depends precisely on our basic dispositions is quite different. Likewise, to those who complain that their heart is dry during mental prayer, we must always begin by answering: "Look at your life. Is it habitually and basically orientated toward God? Do your thoughts frequently revert to Him? Is your heart pure? Is it free of blameworthy ties? Does it not conceal, is it not itself a permanent obstacle to prayer? There is where you must begin. You must once again take up the business of your personal reformation, supernaturalize your entire life, and work at it harder than ever before. Make your whole life more a life of prayer, a life dedicated to God. The bulk of affective prayer is done in advance, outside of mental prayer itself. As you live, so you pray. Never forget that; it is essential. Once the reform has been accomplished, will matters go smoothly? Not necessarily so. Despite your good habitual dispositions, it can happen on certain days, even during certain periods, that the heart will recoil from mental prayer. We shall treat of these cases later. But at least the main obstacle has disappeared, and normally mental prayer will be easy. The immediate preparation will consist simply in choosing the thought that will fan the affections, in emphasizing the sentiment of the divine presence (this is always essential) , and in strengthening the union. Is it advisable to have considered this guiding thought beforehand, to have, as they say, prepared a subject for our mental prayer? That depends. For those who are beginning affective prayer, the answer is yes. In time, the usefulness of this precaution will diminish and eventually become needless. Generally, a very simple and completely intuitive idea comes to mind spontaneously at the time of mental prayer. Very often it will be the one that filled your mind during the day. Accept it and it will give your prayer the maximum freedom and the advantage of being conformed to the present state of your soul. It will, nevertheless, be well to have a subject on reserve in the event that the mental prayer does not arise spontaneously. For the rest, it is up to everyone to know himself and to take his past experiences into account.

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Description of affective prayer We now come to the prayer itself. At this point there is no question of dividing it into logically connected parts, but simply of exciting sentiment in order to allow it to develop itself according to its own interior rhythm which is the logic of the heart, a logic completely different from that of the intellect. I presume that you are in the requisite dispositions. If these are excellent, if you are in a state of fervor, you will neither need to search nor to reflect: the mental prayer will form itself, or rather will proceed with an increase of devotion. The fire is already ablaze. There is no need of lighting it. A little agitation with a poker is all that is needed. A simple aspiration often enough will revive the hearth: "My God and my All!" "Jesus, I love you," or the word "Jesus" alone, and the flame will spurt and will be followed by ever brighter and more lively ones. For you will naturally continue either to repeat the same prayer indefinitely with an ever-growing fervor, your heart becoming more enkindled as you pronounce the affectionate words, or you will modify them, allowing your fervor to develop freely as you go from one aspiration to another. You might say for example: "My God and my All! My God, my supreme Good, my beloved treasure, my joy, my hope, my light, my love, my life, my all! Indeed, you are my all, you who are all in all things and give them being and life. O sole desirable One, O beauty, O love, source ever rich of all good, how late have I known You; how late am I in loving you! . Close my eyes to the vain things of this world that have estranged me from You; detach me; tear away from everything under heaven. Let me know, desire, and love nothing except You or for You, my God, my Creator, my Lord, my Savior, my All! ..." And so, you can continue in this manner using either the same beautiful theme or any other that deals with God. Or: "Jesus, I love You.... How could I not love You, You the splendor of the Eternal Hills? The honor and happiness I have is too great. You permit me to speak words that only spouses whisper to each other. Thank You, my Lord, my too good Lord, for having deigned to manifest Yourself to me and for calling me to Your sublime friendship ... How could I not love you, you who, when you could have condemned me, yet came to suffer and die for me? O, how poorly I still love you in

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return for such love. Help me to love you somewhat as You deserve to be loved. Send me Your Spirit of love.... " Instead of a simple aspiration, it will often be a more explicit thought that will set your mental prayer in motion and will act as a theme — at least at the beginning of your prayer, for you must not hesitate to follow your heart and go on to another thought, even if it bears no relationship to the theme you began with. This might consist solely in remembering the presence of God, and this will often suffice, as we have seen, to establish the union and begin the conversation: "O my God, You are here, so close, ever to close to me. I lovingly adore You. Because of Your presence, this place is a Tabor. 'How lovely is Your dwelling place' (Ps. 13,2) . It is good to be with You, in this divine intimacy.... " And going on from there, you will continue to talk to Him, and you will find all sorts of things to say to Him, the important thing here being not what we say, but the love we bring to this conversation with our divine Friend. Or finally, it may be some other pious thought. By way of furnishing you with more examples, here are several mental prayers of the same kind which I merely sketch, since space does not permit me to develop all of them at length. Furthermore, why should I attempt to do so, since everyone will have to follow his own inspiration? The goodness of God: "Our Father who art in heaven...." How wonderfully comforting to know that I have a Father in heaven and a Father like You, so immensely good, so infinitely powerful, so delightfully indulgent! How calming to know, my Father, that You take such watchful care of me, arranging all things for my good! My good Lord, I owe You everything. What have you not done for me?" Then recall to mind all God's goodnesses toward you, as you did in the previously suggested meditation on the love of God. But do so freely and simply, speaking to Him and transforming these thoughts into holy affections. And you will continue: "Thank You, my God, thank You a million times — and forgive me, too. I am a poor child who commits many sins and a very ungrateful child. My Father, you ask me for my heart. It is so difficult for me to give you a perfect heart. Take it yourself, transform it, and may I be a grateful and faithful child of yours, one completely devoted to your love.... " You will naturally vary this plan to your liking, pausing at each thought, at each sentiment if they nourish your devotion. 225

Suppose you are suffering from some reverse, that some trouble weighs heavily upon you, and throws a gloom over your day. If your soul is well disposed, you will be aware that these trials detach you from the world and purify you. Bring your suffering, then, to the God of all consolation and say to Him: "My God, life is deceiving and sometimes very sad. It has been cruel to me.... But I still have You. What am I complaining about? I have You; I have Your love, and ultimately heaven which You are preparing for me in compensation for my sorrow. My heart is wounded; You know how to heal it. Let me rest my forehead on Your Sacred Heart and I will forget my pain.... You, my Father, purposely dispose things in this wise for my good. You did not want me to become attached to vain things, and so You took them away from me that I might belong to You all the more. You are jealous of having me because You love me. Thank You, my God, for this jealous love; thank You for this trial. Continue Your work of wisdom, Your work of tenderness in me. Detach me more and more from this deceptive life, and convince me, no matter what the price, of the truth of your unique love." In this prayer, you should linger over the thought of heaven, the fleetingness of earthly things, the sweetness of divine love, and the usefulness of suffering. The love of Jesus: "It is true, my Lord, that You love me, that You love me out of love, that You seek me, that You are waiting for me, and that You take pleasure in my poor companionship; You, the sovereign King of glory, You who are God! indeed, You are too good, too humble, too condescending. And I am the happiest of men! O wondrous love! My Lord and my King has come to me, full of meekness and love. It is indeed His desire to make me a present of this sweet and precious gift which alone gives meaning to life: the gift of love ... of His sublime love! O Jesus, You came from heaven to earth to have me all to Yourself. It was Your wish to call yourself my Brother. You worked and suffered. Love made You do foolish things. What return shall I make for so great a love? The answer is the only thing You ask: to welcome with trembling gratitude the too beautiful gift of Your Heart. And I offer You mine, since You are kind enough to be content with it. Dear Lord, let us walk away together from this feast of love which You so graciously offer me. What harm now can the setbacks of this life do to me, seeing that I walk beside You, bathed in Your loving look? What sadness could lay me low, now that I know that You love me? My life, my joy, my sweetness henceforth will be to love You in return, to serve You, to be 226

kind toward you who have been so thoughtful of me, and to try not to be too unworthy of calling You by the Name that You Yourself deigned to take: "Jesus, my sweet, my dear, my divine Friend!" The Passion: "My Love, how You have suffered! ... You suffered for me, for me! ... Your meek Heart was crushed in the Garden of Olives. During Your agony You called me, but I did not answer. Your sensitive body quivered under the sting of the whip; blood flowed from Your forehead pierced by the thorns; You painfully bore Your gibbet amid the jeers of the crowd, You whom they should have adored on their knees! ... Instead of welcoming with grateful hearts the redemption You brought them, they seized Your arms and legs and nailed them to the cross. This, to You, my love; You, my immaculate One! They tortured You brutally. Alas! in Your martyrdom you called out to me again ... and I did not come. And so you breathed Your last in desolation ... because of me. O Jesus, kneeling at Your bruised feet, let me bemoan and weep over Your indescribable and so undeserved sufferings. Let me sob over my cruelty to You, my well-beloved, You whom I should never have offended. How I would like to spend my life pouring the balm of my love over Your wounds and by repeated attentions dry Your tears and blood. I want to be so kind to You that Your beautiful but dimmed eyes might again smile and make You forget what my wickedness caused You to endure. My wish, O too generous Savior, is to help You in your Passion, to accept my share of Your sorrows, to put my lips to Your chalice, to welcome the pains of life as graces, and suffer all for You Who suffered everything for me." Likewise, you might take any other Gospel scene as the theme of your mental prayer and follow Our Lord through it as was previously suggested, recalling to mind that He was then thinking of you, and that He wore Himself out and spent Himself to such an excess for you personally. Tell Him of your gratitude. Contemplate Him in His apostolate, His struggles, His labors. Learn from His divine virtues of His goodness, generosity, patience, humility, and courage. Promise Him that with His help you will try to resemble Him somewhat, especially in some particular virtue which is very difficult for you. And all this will translate itself into flights of love. Should you want other examples of affective prayer, I might point out, among others, the Meditations of Saint Augustine, of Saint Anselm, of Saint Bernard, and of the "Simple Man," The Exercises of Saint Gertrude, The Little Book of Eternal Wisdom and The Little Book 227

of Love by Blessed Henry Suso, the Indica mihi, the prayers of Venerable Louis of Blois and those of Cardinal Bona in his Voie de raccourci vers Dieu. You will note that in the majority of these prayers the personal pronoun "I" plays an important role and that there is nothing corporate about these prayers. In this context there is nothing detestable about it. It is of the nature of friendship, which is a two-way relationship, and which loves to withdraw itself from others during the hours of intimacy. There must be no excess in this attitude, for it is also of the very nature of a true affection to forget self for the Loved One. In certain mental prayers it would be well to focus your attention on God and others, with no thought of yourself: sentiments of admiration, of praise, of pure adoration; and to talk to him about His own interests (which are your own if you love Him): His redemptive work, the needs of His church, the apostolate, the state of other souls and of humanity in general, everything which is a source of sorrow or of joy to Him. In this communion with His sentiments, you forget yourself, but He finds you that much more lovable.

Conversation Finally, just as in the mental prayer of conversation, there are a thousand and one details of your everyday life that you might talk about with him in the confidence and simplicity of friendship: everything that concerns you, everything that concerns him. These small confidences, this complete openheartedness, this closeness of mind and heart maintains and quickens affection. You will group all of this around the central point of mental prayer which is always love. And love will feed itself on this variety. But more and more, in your daily life, the principal point will tend to love itself and that affectionate union which must be the motive of all your actions. You may talk to him at length about this during mental prayer. Your examinations of conscience on this subject, which you should not omit now any more than before, will be more general and more affective. They will be examinations on love, made out of love and with an ever-growing love. If you become aware that you are distracted, ask his pardon with great sorrow. You will experience the need of making reparation by greater effort and more vigilant attention. You will

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keenly feel how hateful are these moments of forgetting him who never forgets you. And so, in his presence you will sincerely make new resolutions. Do likewise for every other fault which you recall in the course of your mental prayer. Each mental prayer must be a bath that purifies you of your sins. Never engage in mental prayer with a sin on your conscience. If you do, your mental prayer will be poorly made. In keeping an appointment with a close friend, we carefully avoid wearing soiled clothes. Should we find a spot somewhere, we run for the cleaning fluid. If our friend offers to help us, we grant him the opportunity to do so. If some point of discord comes between two friends, their first concern is to clear up the misunderstanding. If you love Christ, the only thing left for you to do is first to ask His forgiveness for your sins and for the sorrow you have inflicted on Him. Secondly, you will want to make reparation at once. In that way you erase, you drown your fault in love. You will thank Him for forgiving you so easily and for forgetting so quickly and, overdelighted by the fact that He has kept all His love for you, you will feel your heart being imbued with a new affection. The sin served as a springboard to a more fervent union. The contrition itself, as is evident, here takes on a more affective tone than before. It becomes in addition an act of love. Hundreds of other subjects can be used to feed your affective prayer. In speaking of a subject, I do not mean that you restrict yourself to one theme. Never fear, I repeat, to follow your heart and turn to another point as soon as it feeds the flame of your love. It matters little what we throw on the fire as long as it burns. Some may object and say: "But such a mental prayer lacks unity; it does not hold together." Pay no attention to that. Love is the bond, and it completely satisfies. It is both the goal and the instrument of mental prayer. These different sentiments and thoughts with which your conversation with God is woven must be expressed with great simplicity and with perfect abandon. There should be no concern about balanced sentences. Let the thoughts come freely from your heart. God has no need of literature; He is interested in your soul. Open it to Him; give it to Him such as it is without any frills. Then, too, listen to Him. Be wise enough now and again to keep silence in order to catch his answer and intercept his holy inspirations. Question Him; ask Him for His light. Rest assured that He will answer 229

your prayer. It is especially during mental prayer that the Holy Ghost speaks to the heart, and one of His precious words will be more profitable to you than anything you can say to Him. Happy is the man who knows how to listen to this mysterious voice! He will hear marvelous things which will deeply touch his heart. One alone will suffice to quicken him for days and, sometimes, for years.

Difficulties When you feel moved by divine grace, linger over the sentiment that it produces in you. Do not thwart it by changing to some unseasonable idea. You have reached the goal. Remain there. Hold on to this sentiment as long as it feeds your love. Should the flame lower, try to revive it. If that does not succeed, then go on to some different thought which will revive the flame. All this should be done without exertion, without being too methodical or too reasoned, but simply and naturally. The more free and spontaneous these movements are the better. If you are enjoying a period of fervor, these dead stops ordinarily will be skipped over rather rapidly and your mental prayer will proceed without difficulty. But it also happens that the period of dryness may prolong itself and that even from the very beginning of our mental prayer you find yourself in a state of stagnation. The cause may well be poor physical health. Beware then of becoming sad and of complaining. On the contrary, accept the trial that God sends you gladly. Let your filial acceptance of the will of God serve as the theme of your mental prayer. Your generosity, which is an act of love, will sometimes be wonderfully rewarded. It will stimulate devotion so well that the fervor of your soul will overflow into the weakness of the flesh, and even your body will come to the aid of your soul. In the end you will make a better and more pleasant mental prayer than had you been in far better physical condition. Such is not always the case, however. If not, be patient; do your best; offer your torpor and your distractions to the Lord, and repeat: "Your will be done, God, and not mine." It could also be that your inability to pray stems from a defective disposition of your soul. The trouble lies with your life, with your remote preparation, with your behavior before the time of prayer. Examine these first, and if you uncover a disorder, make amends for it at once by a

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repentance, a disavowal, a good resolution, and a vigorous attempt to practice detachment. This will re-establish order in your soul. Having done that, bestir yourself, summon all your faculties, face the truth squarely, put yourself before Christ Who is looking at you, think of Him on the Cross, and protest your love. Repeat: "Jesus, I love You. You know that I love You, even if I am unable today of feeling it or of telling You about it as I would like." Then, pray to Him; beg Him to help you. Pray also to the Holy Ghost and to our Blessed Mother. Then choose a thought which you think is best capable of awakening your dormant heart and of sparking sentiment, and penetrate yourself with it. Or take some prayer which on previous occasions has helped you. Repeat some pious aspiration until a spark is forthcoming. If you have no success, take a book, not simply to read, to occupy your time or to study a question, but to glean some good thoughts from it. Try to find something that might light or relight holy affections. As soon as they appear, close the book and let your heart take flight. Look no further. If the sentiment is short-lived, begin to read again. And finally if none of these attempts succeed, there is no reason why you should hesitate to return to discursive meditation. All roads lead to God and must be used when necessary. Yet varied cases may present themselves: If discursive meditation answers your problem, continue to use it. It is a sign that its full benefit was not exhausted and that the work of reflection was not carried to its completion. Perhaps returning to discursive meditation will be repugnant to you. It may seem to chill you even more and estrange you from affective prayer. But, think nothing of it; this is normal. When we throw more coal on a dying fire, it becomes black; it smokes, and seems to die out. But let the coal take fire and the hearth will take on a new vigor. Be patient enough to await the results and continue with discursive prayer until a new affective area takes fire. It may even happen that discursive meditation does not take hold any more than affective prayer. Should the cause be a bad physical or moral disposition, hindering thought as well as sentiment, we have already told you what to do. If you discover no such obstacle and the difficulty continues, it is perhaps the sign of a new evolution of mental prayer which we shall treat of later on. I say "perhaps," because you should reach that decision only with prudence. Whatever the case may be, during these periods of complete inability to pray, the program to follow is as simple as it is unpleasant. After doing what you can, the only 231

thing to do is be patient. Stand before God as you are, keeping the depths of your soul quietly directed toward him and with the psalmist be reconciled to God's holy will: "Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit" (Ps. 30,6) . Whatever the fervor of the mental prayer may be, you must not deceive yourself. Simply because affective prayer succeeded once is no guarantee that it always will. You are treading on very unstable ground, that of intuition and sentiment. You must expect baffling ups and downs and constant sudden changes. Resign yourself to the inevitable and firmly believe that the only important thing during the time of these setbacks is to preserve the gift of your entire being to God intact. Never abandon mental prayer under the pretext of dryness. Nor does it automatically follow that once mental prayer has been begun with great fervor that it will necessarily continue this rhythm and not slacken off during the entire half hour. Such cases are rare. If such is your good fortune, thank God for it because He alone has wrought this blessing in you. But you will ordinarily notice that your best mental prayers will have flaws and be punctured with moments of distraction. Do not be surprised at this, for this too is normal. Every time you become aware that you are distracted, be humbled by the weakness of your love, then patiently, courageously pick up the thread of your prayer, if necessary a hundred times. God will be pleased with you. Try, as much as possible, to forestall these side glances by greater mental effort and more sustained attention to the fact that you wish to have an uninterrupted conversation with God who is present. If affective prayer should not be directed, it must be supervised, or rather the attitude of the soul whence affective prayer constantly proceeds must be watched over. There is, at this point, sound justification to repeat that one of the most dangerous temptations of affective prayer is to want to force sentiment. Some souls do not want to see themselves deprived of their dear emotions, no matter what the price. They believe that their mental prayer has been unsuccessful if they have not experienced affectionate impressions from it. Every effort is expended to excite them and by any means whatsoever — and sometimes by questionable means. This is absurd; these souls are confusing the whole issue. What happens is that they seek emotion for itself. They make mental prayer an artificial exercise which misfires. They deceive themselves and fall into sentimentalism.

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Be simple and natural in your relationships with God. Be utterly convinced that all He asks of you is that the depths of your soul stay turned toward Him. Having done that, sensible devotion will follow; but in His way, with unforeseeable ups and downs according to the circumstances, the dispositions of the moment, and the designs of God.

Conclusion of affective prayer The question may rightly be asked: Does affective prayer have its own resolutions? And the answer is yes. You will find examples in the sketchy meditations that have been proposed to you. But resolutions will be more rarely imperative than in the mental prayer of reflection, and especially in the moral mental prayer, where they are practically always indispensable. The only rule here is that resolutions should be made every time it seems useful to do so. But more often, in this new type of prayer, the tendency will rather be to create a general and profound disposition, or quite simply a salutary impression. The resolve, which may not be formally expressed, will be to remain in this disposition or under this impression, to preserve and maintain this grace in order that it may have an over-all influence on your entire conduct. To assure this perseverance, it will sometimes be necessary before concluding your mental prayer to forearm yourself with certain means, as was suggested for the presence of God. Of course, just as for all mental prayer, there must be a coupling. Affective prayer must be carried over and pursued in your everyday life with no hiatus between the two. The procedure is the same as before, but here it will be noticeably facilitated by sentiment, which from now on is in the depths of the heart and asks but to come to the surface, with no effort of the will. Once again we must not presume on its fervor. It would be wise to watch this delicate point.

Place and importance of affective prayer Affective prayer normally follows mental prayer of reflection. It is the natural term of meditation. In meditation, according to the classical plan, the "considerations," which are the meditation properly so-called, are oriented to the acts of the will, to the affections, and to the resolutions, because that is where love enters in, and love is the goal. 233

The assiduous practice of meditation, we have seen, exerts a gradual influence over us, and creates in us a climate of purity favorable to the blossoming of holy affections. The time comes when this inner work brings about a happy transformation in the soul. The soul now has a supernatural sense and a deep-rooted supernatural way of acting. It moves about habitually in the domain of God, and a tendency of love begins to take shape in it which requires expression and which at times spontaneously gushes forth. The hour has come to give it free rein and to introduce it to affective prayer. At what precise moment should one pass from one form of mental prayer to another? There is no precise moment. There is no moment at all, no cut and dried transfer, save in exceptional cases; but rather a slow and sometimes long transformation in one's manner of praying in the course of which the two forms are ordinarily found juxtaposed or mixed. It is a preparatory step rather than an abrupt turn. No hard and fast rules or clear indications can be given in this matter. The point is too delicate, too subtle to be put down in formulas. It must be felt, not reasoned. A simple soul, who is not deceived by false ideas or bad direction, will easily and quite naturally feel it. Two general signs, however, can be given which will quite clearly point out the reasonableness of this change: First, the soul will experience an attraction for this new mode of prayer. It becomes aware of a movement of affection within itself which feels the need of expressing itself, of certain pleasant impressions which it willingly lingers over to extract their full flavor, and of intuitions that rivet its attention. The soul feels that Christ is inviting it to speak to HHim. How can it tarry with reasoning? Thus, without being told, the soul little by little slips into affective prayer, by simply following the bent which has been taking shape and the grace of the moment. On the contrary, when this grace is operative, the soul no longer has any liking for meditation because it no longer needs it, and for the moment derives nothing worthwhile from it. The second sign, which is a verification, is that this affective prayer succeeds. The soul is easily interested in it, is not bored with the half hour, and in particular draws appreciable fruit from it. This heart-toheart discourse with God does the soul good. It feels that it has become better, more patient, more generous, more detached, its recollection more profound and more permanent, and the love in the soul happily influences all its behavior and makes virtue easy for it. Now, this is the 234

touchstone of all mental prayer. These are the marks it leaves on one's life, the improvement it works in the soul. A good mental prayer resolves itself into virtues. Which does not mean that he who prays well will immediately find himself changed into a saint ready for canonization nor that, if a pious soul retains its faults, we can censure, as often happens, his way of praying. This would be over-simplification and unjust. The proof of a good prayer is simply that it helps us to correct ourself and to become better gradually. There are some people who begin immediately with affective prayer, without having first gone through the mental prayer of reflection, either because they were unable to practice it or because they received certain graces which introduced them immediately into a more cordial relationship with God or simply because, from the very beginning, sometimes from childhood, they reacted that way spontaneously and quite naturally. After all, it is the most natural way of going to God. This does not mean, of course, that there was no previous thought. For them it was a more intuitive, latent, and general thought fed by free reflection and by reading. And it is important, as we have seen, that they continue to maintain that thought by means which are suitable to them, otherwise the thought will become anemic, and so will the affections, because the thought feeds the affections. Under these conditions, they can make progress without running counter to their nature. But there are other souls who make no headway in affective prayer because they neglected the basic work and because they have never consented to make a meditation that for them was a necessity. Once they have this courage to do so, they will see sentiment renew itself and take on new vigor. On the contrary, there are those who obdurately cling to discursive prayer. Some do so on principle, because they can not conceive that there might be a method better than their own, or because they disdain sentiment. Others do so out of routine. That is the way they were taught and that is the way they have always done it. These, too, run the risk of remaining stationary. For if, on the one hand, affective prayer follows discursive prayer, on the other hand — and this is its main advantage —it progresses toward higher ways, and ordinarily it is necessary to give in to it. This mental prayer will gradually take on a simplified form which is an immediate preparation for contemplative prayer. To refuse to 235

engage in it would be to renounce deliberately the precious graces of holy contemplation We are not saying that at a certain moment we must abandon all meditation. We must not and we cannot abandon it under pretext of affective prayer. In fact, we can never abandon it completely. Divine truth is unfathomable, and we must constantly force ourselves to probe it to renew and enrich our capital of supernatural thought. Thought is the food of love. But this meditation will be made preferably outside the time of mental prayer properly so-called or at the beginning by way of a primer, and no longer under the form of methodical prayer, except when there is reason to revert to it temporarily. In conclusion, affective prayer is not uniquely recommendable as an introduction to contemplation. In itself affective prayer is excellent, pleasing to God, and efficacious for spiritual advancement. It marks real progress over the mental prayer of reflection. It goes more directly to God, tends more to union, and thereby increases love in the soul. We take to it more easily because it is more pleasant and less stilted. It prolongs itself more easily in our everyday life and favors habitual union with God. The soul is gradually changed in all things by the affection it bears deep within itself; and this disposition produces in an unconscious yet sure way a general progress in all the virtues on which it stamps a motive of love.

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The Prayer of Simplicity Halt or progress In affective prayer, as just described to you, we go to god with all our soul. All our faculties are consecrated to Him and are used to love Him. At first sight, it would seem that the goal has been reached and that nothing futher remains to be done. However, we are still wide of the mark. This gift of the soul to God is yet very relative, and so too is God's possession of the soul. There is plenty of margin between the giving of ourselves and the full realization of this gift. This will be accomplished only when, after long work and many trials, our being has been conquered, transformed, and assimilated by love to its very roots. And so there will always be an unlimited road stretching before us waiting to be traveled. In fact, this affective prayer is but the first step into a vast domain. It presents itself to us more as a transition between the first forms of prayer and other higher kinds of prayer, and hence its necessity for those who are eager for the perfection of divine love. It is, normally, a necessary passage in order to attain to a higher union with God. We must therefore advance toward it, and even to the point of going beyond it. The unfortunate truth is that the majority of souls never advance beyond it. The reason is that progress demands an increasing effort of purity and a more and more profound concentration in recollection. This is not accomplished without great generosity. In general, we do not have such courage. This is all the more true because, of those who take up affective prayer, the majority do so from natural inclination, being by temperament affective. Now, these souls are usually poorly endowed with strong wills. And as for those who have a strong will, they are inclined to sacrifice too much to action; they neglect mental prayer and never place any price on it. Hence, perpetual fluctuation in fervor on the part of both. In mental prayer, they reach a degree of union which is certainly already considerable, but they will never exceed it. After ten or twenty years of interior life, you will find them on that same level. They will never enter into the Promised Land. Their mediocrity closes the door to the action of the Holy Ghost, Who alone could introduce them to it. For — and this is capital — to cross the frontier that now faces them it is absolutely necessary that Another join in and by his 237

sovereign action lend effective assistance to the soul's human efforts. Only the Spirit of love will create perfect love and perfect mental prayer in us.

Simplified mental prayer The soul that is generous, that strives to put the Lord at the center of its life, that perseveres in detachment and in prayer, giving to the latter the time and the effort it deserves, will generally experience an evolution in its mental prayer. The latter tends to simplify itself. Thought becomes more purely intuitive. Whereas in the beginning the soul had to appeal to certain particular ideas, gradually, effortlessly, and in one look, it espouses an already formed synthesis. Even the object of this contemplation is simplified and tends to unity. The attention preferably centers itself on the love of God, on God himself, on Christ. Such is the natural effect of an ever-growing affection. This dominating sentiment either drives back or integrates all the others into itself. The soul more and more lives on it, there finds its joy, its pleasure, and its interest. The simplified, concentrated look which it rivets on the Lord is a penetrating gaze that makes its affection more alive and deeper. It discovers that one learns to love not through reasoning but by contemplation and experiencing from contact with the Lord how sweet and lovable he is. The soul is happy when the time comes for mental prayer. Its primary concern now is to shake off the cares which were fettering it and to pray in union with God Who is present. It immediately finds God to speak to Him and knows what to talk about. In truth, it speaks little, very simply and without studied refinement. It reflects still less. No attempt is made to arouse various impressions and affections; but the soul takes them as they come, as they flow from a sentiment that has become permanent, and follows them more than it induces them. Its mental prayer consists in remaining attentive to God by faith and in remaining united to him by affection in a simple, pleasant, and peaceful contemplation, based on a simple theme, ordinarily somewhat indefinite, with variants depending on the grace of the moment. Frequently there is no definite theme whatever.

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Naturally, to be able to cling to so divested a mental prayer, the soul must have made sufficient progress in faith and in union with God; affection, which alone feeds such a contemplation, must have already become a rather rich and profound sentiment, and its life must reflect its mental prayer: a state of almost permanent attention to God and to his holy will. Then mental prayer will be the image of life and will proceed directly from it. The soul will feel inclined of itself to pray in such wise. It will habitually enjoy a great sweetness from it. It will be its repose after work, a joyful and serene repose in him whom it loves. More than once, however, it will have to make an effort to put itself in this recollection and to maintain itself there. But the mind, the imagination, and its natural penchants will strive resolutely to stir up a host of anxieties and distractions. Although the soul is aided by divine grace, it must still use its own means to recollect itself contrary to the prayer of contemplation. The heart is not sufficiently conquered to remain fixed on God for a long time in the immobility of contemplation. Likewise, the moments when it is thus absorbed in God will generally be rather short in the beginning. It will have to return to an ordinary affective mental prayer, patiently chase away its distractions, strive to keep its mind attentive on God who is ever-present, untiringly repeat simple and affectionate invocations and aspirations, and persevere in this search for God until interior recollection is regained. The soul will grow accustomed to this kind of simplified mental prayer. And this will be a period of waiting for the gifts of the Holy Ghost. As the soul in its prayer grows more and more independent of the over-active operations of the mind and comes much closer to full love, it will be all the more capable of receiving the divine influx. The way is thus open to the action of the Paraclete. The mind and the heart reach the point where they are in the dispositions necessary for it to embark on that special, mysterious, and unspeakable way which will introduce the soul into new regions.

Beginning the prayer of simplicity As for embarking on this form of mental prayer, there are some souls who are at a loss. They cannot decide to abandon the more active and more precise procedures to which they have grown accustomed. It seems to them a waste of time not to do anything, and they struggle

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desperately to return to a type of mental prayer which alone seems acceptable to them. They confuse recollection with idleness and, of course, are mistaken. The adoring silence of the prayer of simplicity is an active silence wherein the soul is by no means inactive. The soul is talking to God, more eloquently than with words, and God is speaking to it in the same way. The soul contemplates God intensely and the persistence of this look is a state of tension, lovable tension unquestionably, perhaps unconscious, more united but stronger than in discursive prayer. For the rest, the value of a mental prayer is not measured by the difficulty it entails but by the union it produces. Now, here every thing converges toward this union. Even if the soul no longer acts, God acts in it, which is better. There are moments when we must know how to step aside and let God take the initiative. When is the proper time to take up this type of mental prayer? When God inclines us to do so. The soul feels this, and the transfer is made spontaneously, provided we are free of prejudices and accustomed to follow the movement of divine grace. It is especially a question of the maturing of love. There comes a time when love is such that we feel inclined to pray that way. And on the contrary, the preceding ways become irksome. All we need do is obey this inclination. To follow this attraction is one of the great rules of the life of mental prayer, and this in spite of the opposite pull of the ascetical life. It is important that we wait until the fruit is ripe and not try to anticipate the attraction. For here are some people who sin by excess of zeal. Having read some description of this type of mental prayer, they try to introduce it into their spiritual life ahead of time and do their utmost to produce it artificially. Such an effort is as useless as it is ridiculous. They recollect themselves, but over a void, and not having the wherewith to feed their silence, they will not remain in it very long, at least not without creating a dangerous mental tension. This is another rule for mental prayer. A mental prayer is good if we perform it well. When a method of prayer easily nourishes our conversation with God, when our previous way proves fruitless and leaves an empty impression, that is a sign that it is time to change. And the third sign is the profit we draw from mental prayer: progress in virtue and in union with God. These three signs are the same as those we gave for passing over to affective prayer, but on a different plane. And there is no possibility of a mistake, the moment we approach it with that good simplicity which 240

brushes illusions and counterfeits aside, the moment we begin it with no vanity, no extraordinary desire, no concern to copy the descriptions found in books, resolved not to look at ourself, not to study ourself, but seek only to love God and to please Him. Once these conditions are fulfilled, there is no reason to hesitate, nor any reason why we should look upon this type of mental prayer as something exceptional. In general, those who pray this way find it very natural, like the peasant from Ars with his candid and meaningful remark: "I look at Him and He looks at me." That a pious soul should attain to this manner of praying at some given time is normal, for it is but the spontaneous expression of love. People deeply in love with each other naturally reach this most exquisite stage of communing with each other in silence.

The conduct to maintain If it is difficult to describe this prayer of recollection, it will be all the more so to point out the course to be followed. There is no question, naturally, of a method in an exercise whose sole rule is not to have any. All that can be attempted is to lay down a few counsels on points where errors are possible. Let us first insist on this advice, one moreover that has already been given and which is of capital importance here: if one may still speak of a method, it would concern not the mental prayer itself, but rather our conduct as a whole. What is important is to lead a pure, detached, pious, and recollected life, to be habitually occupied with the Lord, and to be very generous in our service to him, in such a way as to create a general disposition favorable to the visits of the Holy Ghost. This is our principal contribution. The rest will in greater part be God's business. As for prayer itself, although it relies on a divinely marked action, it is amenable to ordinary graces. The soul to a good extent has to use its own resources. The bulk of its effort will be to withdraw within itself, to hold itself aloof from everything temporal, and to be keenly aware of the divine presence. Often that will be enough to place it in the state of simple regard of God — where heart speaks to heart uninterruptedly. If necessary, the soul will choose the thought best suited to bring this about, a simple thought that has reference to love: Jesus in

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the tabernacle, if you are praying in church; a token of His goodness; some act recorded in the Gospels; or it might be some short prayer, a simple aspiration (sometimes this is better than a thought) , a word that bespeaks your affection. The soul will then discontinue its search and will be content with this one sentiment. It will quicken the sentiment with unaffected words — often by frequently repeating the same word with periods of silence to let it sink in — by reviving the sentiment if it grows feeble, either by taking up the same thought again or by having recourse to another, by conversing with the Lord, reassuring him of your love and adoration, by praying to him, thanking him, praising him — and by keeping silence when your heart inclines you to do so. All this transpires peaceably, with no systematic plan, and without offering resistance to the mind. The important thing in this mental prayer is not to complicate matters. It is the contrary of methodical prayer. You must be truly convinced that this is not the time for reflections nor for acts of the will. All that is asked of the soul is to abandon itself to the movement of divine grace. This does not mean that you are deliberately forbidden to think. In the prayer of simplicity nothing is deliberate, except the will to be with God. If some thought therefore comes to mind, issuing from love or capable of stimulating love it would be wise to pause over it, but very simply, making no attempt to develop it in a bookish way, but linger over it in a way more affective than speculative, and by adhering to the one and only point which the sentiment aroused. Nor is there any necessity to maintain a strict silence. We are silent because we feel the need of it. If, as sometimes happens, we feel inclined to speak inwardly or even exteriorly to our Lord, we should, naturally, follow that attraction, but according to the same principles as for the thought. It is rather normal that love at times should seek to translate itself through a few words: very simple words that gush spontaneously from the heart and which express no other thought than love itself.. Often a single expression such as: "My God! ... Jesus! ... My love! ... " is repeated with great fervor for a few moments, only to end in a new silence. But if the love lasts longer, that, too, is all very well as long as it is spontaneous. The essential thing is to follow the movement. Every effort must be brought forth to maintain yourself under the divine action, to be supple to supernatural attractions, to remain attentive to the inner Master, to whom you are united by contemplation and love. And as long as the 242

recollection persists, the preferable type of such a mental prayer will be silence, not in a voiding of the faculties, but in a sort of filling them: in a synthetically rich thought and in a dominating sentiment which, because of a lively faith, a fervent love, and a peaceful detachment, arrests the soul as it is caught up in the simple regard of a sweet contemplation of the Lord: an attention to the Loved One, a prolonged smile to Christ and, without any self-seeking, a confident abandonment to his sovereign action. The soul basks in the radiance of God. One last point: the resolutions. Ordinarily, they will not be expressed nor is it necessary to do so. The good resolution here is synthetic, even virtual and, like the rest, is in the depths of the soul. It consists in the will, whether conscious or not, to belong to God and to love him entirely and in all things. Should a particularly useful resolution come to mind, there is nothing to prevent you from lingering over it. But ordinarily this will take place after or at the end of the mental prayer, and not during the time of recollection.

Dryness and distractions The prayer of simplicity offers alternatives of joy and sorrow more marked than in the preceding form of prayer, because love has become more ardent and the soul is more sensitive. When God reveals his presence to the soul, when divine grace passes through it like a refreshing breeze, the soul throbs with fervor. It then experiences a great sweetness in living with him. Even when it has compassion on the sufferings of our Lord, its sorrow has within it a kind of plenitude, because it is the expression of love. But there are days when this fervor declines. We know neither how nor why. The soul becomes dry, and mind empty, and the heart inert. The electric current, so to speak, is turned off, and all our efforts to turn it back on are fruitless. The fault may lie with us. Recollection, it was said, is not idleness, and we must beware lest this eventuality ever comes to pass. It will never happen as long as we are under the influence of sensible grace. But when this action ceases the danger is real. Our attention is no longer sustained by reflection nor even by a variety of sentiments and, if we are not careful, the uniformity of the simple regard can turn into inertia. Or what may happen is that the heart has over-exerted itself with

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the result that our nerves need to relax. (Never forget the instrument, our body, on which we are dependent.) And so abetted by our sluggishness, we fall into an uncontrollable reverie which has nothing prayerful about it. During this period of spiritual dryness we must bring to mental prayer an alert and active mind, an unflagging attention, and a will resolutely intent in its flight toward God. Love of God, alas! is no longer "natural" to us like human love; and if it is proper to abandon ourselves to the invitations of the Holy Ghost, we maintain ourselves in it only at the price of a constant spiritual energy. We can, on the contrary, err by an unwarranted tension of the will. Certain souls, having tasted the sweetness which this mental prayer affords at times, would like to be in this happy state always. They bend their faculties without respite in order to excite this condition or to prolong it forcibly. This is very foolish. All they succeed in doing is to force themselves into a completely artificial immobility. And this is dangerous. Not only does such inhuman and fruitless gymnastics head them for a breakdown, but is to be feared that the time will come when they will become disgusted with mental prayer. More frequently we have no hand in this state of dryness or at most we are unable to discover the cause. It is simply the effect of the inherent instability of the affective states. The fervor experienced is ordinarily transitory and in any case cannot maintain itself indefinitely. God's action, furthermore, depends on Him alone. When it is withdrawn from us, we must resign ourselves to it, be sensible enough not to wish for more than is given us, remember that the one thing necessary is the profound disposition of the heart, and be satisfied to love as we are, with the sole support of a bare faith, stripped of enthusiasm, pleasantness, with our inability to recollect ourselves, together with our distractions and aridity, waiting for the hour of God. All that He asks of us, then, is to will to remain before Him, abandoned to His holy will, not to please ourselves but to please Him, and to persevere thus, knowing that whatever He desires is our will, that when we want to love we love, whatever be our psychological state, that this attitude of dry and unarrayed adoration is acceptable to Him, better perhaps than the other, being more uniquely the expression of a meritorious abandonment, and because of our courageous fidelity we induce Him to grant us other graces. The statues that adorn our churches honor God by their presence alone and we ask nothing further of them. And so it is with us when, despite our desire, we feel as cold and inert as a statue. 244

One might think that in the prayer of simplicity distractions would be rarer than in the other preceding types of mental prayers. To the contrary — except at times when the divine influence uplifts the soul. This is due to the fact that the heart is more occupied than the mind, with the result that the latter will tend to wander. In the other types of prayer, the mind played its part and was thus kept on the alert. In the prayer of simplicity we ignore the mind, except to apply it to God in a simple act, or at most to some simple thought without variety. It is not surprising that the mind grows tired as soon as the enthusiasm of love no longer focuses the attention on its object from which it is ever seeking to break loose. Distractions in this connection have less importance than before because the mental prayer transpires in the depths of the heart, outside the domain of distractions. Despite them we continue to love God and to remain united to him in this inviolable retreat, which is the center of ourselves. And so, the soul has a certain tendency to rid itself of distraction. Because of the need of God who dwells in the soul, the soul excites in itself an unconscious uneasiness which will soon lead it back to him. If you are aware of these spontaneous returns, there is no reason to be disturbed over your distractions, and you should struggle against them only moderately, because too intent a preoccupation with them would create a more serious distraction for simple contemplation. If these returns are not made, the probable reason, but not necessarily so, is that you are not in the desired state for the prayer of simplicity, and it would be advisable either to improve this state if possible or to try a more active mental prayer for a time. Even if that does not solve your problem and succeeds no better at warding off distractions, the reason is perhaps that God is inviting you to a more supernatural form of mental prayer (something you should not be too hasty to believe). In any event, this trial is willed by God and must be accepted from His hands. All that you can do is resign yourself to it and, with humble and lovable submission, without stubbornly wishing for what he does not want, persevere in the mental prayer of simple regard, difficult as it may be.

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Outside the time of mental prayer Because of its simplicity and its depth, the mental prayer of peaceful recollection tends to carry itself over into our daily life. It attaches us to God. The graces we receive from it give the soul a taste for God, a desire for God, so much so that the soul feels kindly inclined to return to Him and the life of union becomes as it were natural. It demands no present repeated efforts because it is a state, an attraction, a lasting sentiment deep in the heart which keeps the soul in a state of constant fervor. It begins to carry out the fusion of mental prayer and life which formerly seemed too difficult and required so much ingenuity and precaution, but which now as a result of the faith and love that impregnates it comes about naturally. Arid and apparently fruitless mental prayer instills a deep and persistent dissatisfaction in the heart, a sort of anxiety which is none other than the need of God. This painful need is also precious to the soul. It remains imbedded in the depths of the soul like a thorn whose stabbing serves as a constant reminder of God. With more concern than ever before, the soul begins to seek Him who hides Himself. If God hides Himself, He does so in order that we may come to know Him better and He does this by inciting a desire in us to love Him more ardently. These graces of sweetness or of suffering effect a profound detachment in the soul. It lives on His love, which becomes its main interest and which strips it of love for the things of this world. More and more it feels like a pilgrim in this world. The important duty here is to profit by the divine gift, to cultivate this detachment, to deepen it, to have it become part of our conduct. Should the soul then revert to certain considerations on the meaning of life and renunciation, it will observe that they have taken on a clearer meaning, something living, a kind of inner evidence, and that they tend to translate themselves into acts. It feels that God is asking it to belong to this world no longer. All our life must be a life of love, fostered by purity of heart and attention to our Lord. On awakening, our first movement must be to recall to mind His presence, to rejoice over it, to give ourself, our thoughts and our actions of the day to Him, and to dispose ourself to begin the day in the light of His gaze and in union with Him. At Holy Mass we should offer ourself wholeheartedly as a small host together with Christ, and we should steep ourself in the spirit of sacrifice. Holy

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Communion will be the grace of adhesion to Christ, which we should try to prolong in as lasting a way as possible, and by means of Spiritual Communion even until tomorrow's Communion. We will discharge all our obligations faithfully and devoutly in this spirit of faith and love, making each of our actions, even the smallest and the more ordinary ones, an offering, a prayer, a work of love. We will struggle against our faults in this union with God. With solicitude for love, we will practice all the virtues and accept trials with courage. Our exercises of piety will be impregnated with this union of love and above all they will become more fervent. This is nothing more than that "prayer of life," which we have already spoken of at some length: the exercise of the presence of God, only now it is supported by a lively and illuminating faith which effects a certain consciousness of this divine presence and is activated and enkindled by an ever-growing affection. Like mental prayer, both have become independent of reflection and of positive search, although the interior effort at detachment and recollection ever remain necessary. When the union does not come about spontaneously, we must revert to some of the means previously suggested. It is a sign that faith and love have not yet sufficiently penetrated the depths of the soul. This takes time; but gradually they will take the form of a stable and profound disposition, and God will more and more become the sole Master of our life.

Toward contemplation The particular value of the prayer of simplicity is that it leads the soul up to the gate of a domain where mental prayer will assume its perfect form. It is the threshold of the mystical life. The transition will not be sudden, that is for sure. Many obstacles may still be encountered. The door is half-open; unfortunately the path is blocked, and only hard work will clear the way. But this form of mental prayer creates an immediate disposition in us to receive the gifts of the Holy Ghost to the fullest extent and to profit from them. The soul is capable not only of welcoming these divine touches, but still more of letting God himself accomplish the necessary work of clearing the way and of purification. The reason for this sensitiveness to mystical grace is easy to understand. The Holy Ghost proceeds by illuminations and inspirations,

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a work that transpires in the secret depths of the soul, where intuition and sentiment reign, these being "passive" faculties which are receptive to His action. It is they which are called into action in affective prayer and, in a complete way in its outcome, the prayer of simple regard. The progressive simplification of the activity dispatches the soul toward that state where it will have to abstain from acting in order to leave free rein to the divine operation. It makes peace reign there, attention to the Host within, docility to the movement of grace, all of these being dispositions which are favorable to this supernatural action. All that is lacking is the touch of the spirit. This, in truth, is everything, but the soul for its part is ready. This prayer, by its very nature, stimulates and enkindles love. Now, this ardent love is the domain of the Paraclete, his gift par excellence and the essence of the mystical life. The soul already receives some small fragments of this gift and they will make it eager for more. Even now, they are definitely sufficient to transform its mental prayer. Through them the soul gains a much more perfect knowledge of God and a more intimate, more profound, and more loving union than through considerations. Without a shadow of doubt, the more God acts during mental prayer the better that prayer is, the soul obeying the inspirations which God himself awakens in it. He is now beginning to make a light and a new love mysteriously break through, even if feebly, in a scarcely apparent way, and in simple co-operation with the action of the soul, so much so that the latter is not aware of this. In fact, it may have the impression that it is drawing all of this form itself and that there is nothing new about its manner of praying, except a more marked degree of intensity and depth. But the truth is that these are the effect of the action of God. Already there is a latent influx of the Holy Ghost and of isolated mystical elements, still not very distinct and mixed with human activity. The mystical state has not yet been reached, but rather a premystic state, the last evolution of active mental prayer which, by the combined operation of man and God, is an immediate preparation for contemplative prayer. There is, as we see, a continuity between the two kinds of prayer. Nevertheless, they are essentially different. The definite preponderance of the gifts of the Holy Ghost which, in mystical prayer, shed on the soul lights and a love directly infused from on high make it definitely passive under the divine influence.

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This will have to be made more precise. It is, in truth, a new phase of the life prayer which is about to begin, in which there will no longer be any question of an "art of prayer," but an overflow in the soul of a completely supernatural prayer in which the Spirit himself prays in us "with unutterable groanings" (Rom. 8, 26). This prayer of contemplation presents such peculiar characteristics, the conduct to be assumed differs so radically from what it previously should have been, and the number of those who reach it is so few that it seemed best to make a separate study of contemplation. Please God, this I hope to accomplish in another book dealing with Mystical Prayer. For the moment, all I can do is point out to the reader that already visible Promised Land and urge him to walk courageously down the road that leads to it. Contemplation is the term to which the life of prayer normally tends. That should encourage us. But only they cross the threshold of divine ravishments who have first learned and practiced the art of prayer with perseverance.

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'Holiness of Life' Saint Bonaventure'

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