OF THE NATURE AND ADVANTAGES OF PRAYER--OF INTERIOR RECOLLECTION
Of ourselves we are utterly unable to attain to charity or any other
good thing. We have naught to offer to the Lord, the Author of all,
which was not His already.
One thing alone remains to us: that in every occurrence we should turn
to Him in prayer, as He Himself taught us by word and example. Let us go
to Him as guilty, poor, and miserable, as beggars, weak and needy, as
subjects and slaves, yet as His children.
Of ourselves we are utterly destitute. What can we do but cast ourselves
at His feet in deepest humility, holy fear mingling in our souls with
love, peace, and recollection?
And while we are fain to draw nigh with all lowliness and modesty, with
minds sincere and simple, let our hearts burn with great desires, with
ardour and heartfelt longings. And so let us supplicate our God, and lay
before Him with entire confidence the perils which menace us on every
side. Let us freely, unhesitatingly, and in all simplicity, confide
ourselves to Him, and offer Him our whole being, even to the last fibre,
for are we not in truth absolutely His?
Let us keep nothing for ourselves, and then will be fulfilled in us the
saying of Blessed Isaac, one of the Fathers of the Desert, who,
speaking of this kind of prayer, said: "We shall be one being with God,
and He will be all in all to us, when that perfect charity by which He
loved us first has entered into our inmost hearts."[68]
This will be accomplished when God alone becomes the object of all our
love, our desires, our striving, of all our efforts and thoughts, of all
that we behold, speak of, hope for; when that union which exists between
the Father and the Son, and between the Son and the Father shall be
found also in our mind and soul.
Since His love for us is so pure, sincere, and unchanging, ought not we
in return to give Him a love constant and uninterrupted?
So intimate should be our union with Him that our hopes, thoughts,
prayers breathe only God.[69] The truly spiritual man should set before
him, as the goal of all his efforts and desires, the possession even in
a mortal body, of an image of the happiness to come, and the enjoyment
even here below of some foretaste of the delights, the life, and glory
of Heaven.
This, I say, is the end of all perfection--that the soul may become so
purified from every earthly longing, and so raised to spiritual things,
that at last the whole life and the desires of the heart form one
unbroken prayer.
When the soul has thus shaken off the dust of earth and aspires unto her
God, to Whom the true religious ever directs his intention, dreading
the least separation from Him as a most cruel death; when peace reigns
within and she is delivered from the bondage of her passions and cleaves
with firmest purpose to the one Sovereign Good, then will be fulfilled
in her the words of the Apostle: "Pray without ceasing,"[70] and "in
every place, lifting up pure hands, without anger and contention."[71]
When once this purity of soul has gained the victory over man's natural
inclination for the things of sense, when all earthly longings are
quenched and the soul is, as it were, transformed into the likeness of
pure spirits or Angels, then all she receives, all she undertakes, all
she does, will be a pure and true prayer.
Only persevere faithfully in thy efforts and, as I have shown from the
beginning, it will become as simple and easy for thee to contemplate God
and rejoice in Him in thy recollection as to live a purely natural
life.