Growth in Prayer
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins, and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
As the soul subjects itself more and more to the influence of Our Lord and enters ever further into his views, its devotions undergo an important change. They become less and less the expression of a human spirit and more and more the expression of a divine spirit. We’re told by St. Paul, “Likewise the Spirit also helps our infirmity. For we do not know how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit himself asks for us with unspeakable groanings” (Rom. 8:26).
The liturgical prayers begin to exercise a powerful attraction over the soul. They begin to lay bare to its vision their beauty and to its understanding their hidden depths of meaning. The soul enters more fully and completely into the life of the church and begins to feel and think with the spouse of Christ.
The movements of grace forthwith in the soul correspond to the movement of the liturgical life. It is given to the soul to enter into and to participate in the different mysteries of Our Lord’s life as if it were a personal actor in those events, and it derives from these mysteries as unfolded and developed in the liturgical cycle the particular graces of sanctification which they are meant to impart.
The feasts of the church become for it spiritual feasts which fill it with grace and joy, making its prayer merge naturally into the sentiments which animate the church on these occasions and to which utterance is given in the various prayers of the Mass.
The soul begins to respond to every movement which vibrates in the church. Its life becomes mystic in increasing measure, for its whole natural existence, namely, the daily round of human duties, tends to be lifted into a supernatural plane by the close union with Christ’s life on earth that has been developed. Things which before cost bitter struggle have now become easy to it. Asceticism no longer costs an effort. It is no longer a rude self-discipline to bring the soul into subjection to Christ.
This subjection now follows as a natural consequence from the merging of the soul’s life in that of Christ and from the soul’s ardent desire to live in constant fidelity to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. The soul now attains to God’s viewpoint with regard to life’s events. It sees them as he sees them and in the perspective in which he views them.
The absolute futility of the things of the earth is revealed in a strong and vivid light and in a vigorous contrast with the reality that is God and with all that pertains to him and his service.
Through the activity of the gift of wisdom, creatures are seen in the light of their first cause and thus seen in their emptiness and vanity. Consequently, they cease to exercise any attraction over the soul. They no longer hold it, but it holds them, because it has risen above and established itself in the source of all created things.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). Its perfect detachment has won for it the reward promised in this beatitude. Having renounced earth, it has found God, and in him has recovered creatures once again. They become of interest to it, but to the extent only in which it sees God in them.
Creatures have not only lost the power to attract, they’ve lost also the faculty to wound. Things that hurt before can still strike, but they cannot move, for the soul remains unaffected by anything that touches itself personally.
Having merged its individuality in that of the church, it can be wounded only through the latter, its interests and ambitions being bound up with hers, its only pursuit being the extension and the building of the body of Christ. It is only the malice or the wickedness that opposes an obstacle to this end that can cause it pain.
It is only what hurts the church that can hurt it. Thus, it feels a passionate hatred of error, of false teaching, of false principles, of worldly maxims, and of every invention of Satan by which souls are corrupted and destroyed.
It can enter into wrath about these things, for it is yet imperfect and has not attained to that higher calm, where it enters into the unruffled tranquility of God. This calm it can enjoy only in the realm of passive prayer. The soul holding itself detached from creatures can easily supernaturalize its work, for it has become habitual to regard everything it has to do as being appointed to it by God himself.
The commonest things thus become of value and cease at the same time to have any value in its eyes. A strange paradox, one of the many with which the whole Christian life is interwoven, all being based upon the fundamental one of life through death and death in life.
Things are of value because they are God’s appointment. They cease to be of value because they are regarded as being nothing in themselves, as having only the worth that that appointment of God gives them. Hence the soul relinquishes its tasks easily as soon as obedience calls it to some other charge, no longer seeking itself, but seeking God in those things.
It leaves off as soon as God can no longer be found in them, and it knows well that God can be found in occupations only as long as duty and authority binds it to them. In a word, the soul lives and moves and breathes in a completely supernatural atmosphere. Out of it, it feels restless, unhappy, and ill at ease.
It views itself and all things else from the vantage ground of heaven. The supernatural has become for it the quasi-natural. Its prayer without deliberate intention tends to simplify itself more and more. Having learned by experience the poverty of the results that attend on its own eager activities and, on the other hand, the strengthening and transforming effect of the least action of God, it contents itself with putting itself in the divine presence and willing to submit itself to divine influence.
It knows full well that its best activity is to hold itself in that attitude which disposes it to receive from the hand of God the gifts of God. The soul is well-advised in giving itself to this form of prayer, when grace draws it to this manner of treating with God, for the soul is in the last resort, but a mere capacity. It has nothing from itself and in itself.
It is on God it must draw to fill up the void. And this it does by the union with him developed in prayer. It ought therefore rather receive than take. Consequently, the perfect state of prayer consists in this, that the faculties of the soul are united in a contemplation marked by silence, calm, and expectancy.
This being so, the soul’s cooperation in the work of sanctification consists in consenting to the gifts of God and in receiving them. This silence and this expectancy of the soul before God must constitute a state of dependence on the author of all gifts, of annihilation before him, and of adoration of his greatness.
This state of the soul, excellent as it is, is not without its own dangers. The process of purification is not yet complete. And that being so, there remains the possibility of lapses into serious and even grave faults.
This danger diminishes considerably, only in rare cases does it altogether disappear, when passive prayer begins. In the most perfect form of the prayer of simplicity, such as has been described, the soul is still only at the threshold of that life of comparative security. To cross that threshold, it must practice the utmost fidelity in the details of life.
It is only this constant and sustained and minute fidelity to the touches of grace that will make it pass into the stages of passive prayer. Its prayer at the point at which it has arrived is in its highest expression the prayer of simplicity.
This is still active prayer, though the activity is largely of the will. The operations of the intelligence are few and simple. They no longer involve reasoning and discourse. They consist mainly in a peaceful regard, which embraces in a single intuition all the aspects of the subject meditated on and its consequences.
Very frequently at this point of spiritual progress, the soul undergoes an experience which causes it, if uninstructed, a great deal of anxiety and misgiving. Prayer has become easy. Entering into contact with God presents little difficulty. The mind readily turns to divine things and the will is easily stirred up to affection for them.
Everything seems to point to a rapid and indefinite progress in the practice of prayer, when suddenly or slowly the soul finds all its hopes to all appearances shattered. When it places itself before God for its daily exercise of mental prayer, it finds itself, as it appears to it, utterly unable to pray. The understanding is apparently sluggish and inert. There seems to be no vital reaction on the part of the intelligence to the points that the devout soul prepares for its meditation.
Consideration after consideration is suggested, and they rest on the surface of the mind lifeless like stones on the surface of a frozen lake. They seem not to penetrate the mind, to become part of it, and to issue in further reflections or in affections of the will. There is as little response from the mind as there would be on the part of an inanimate body to a stimulus applied to it. The soul feels as it were paralyzed.
The time of prayer, owing to the apparent inability of the understanding to work, is filled with distractions. The soul is tempted to believe that it is a waste of precious moments, has no useful effect, and only excites the displeasure of God. It is tempted to renounce the formal exercise of mental prayer, as useless and unprofitable.
Temptation is all the stronger because it finds that outside the time of formal prayer, during the occupations of the day, in difficulties, in labors, in joyous incidents, it finds a comparative ease in raising itself to God in aspirations and affections.
Another troubling phenomenon, accompanying this species of seeming paralysis in prayer, is the loss of taste for spiritual reading. Up to this juncture, the soul found keen delight in perusing the works of ascetical and spiritual writers. Their thoughts nourished it, illuminated the understanding, stirred up the desire for divine things, and ministered ample matter for the exercise of the mind during the times of prayer.
Now, it reads and gets nothing from the reading. Whole paragraphs are gone through and no savor is found in them. The books have become to the understanding as food that has lost its savor and all its nutritious properties. If the soul holds on to its spiritual reading, as of course it should, it does so in a sense of duty, as it acquits itself of it as of a task, a task that seems to have little practical value or significance.
The soul sees in all this clear signs of having gone backwards and is naturally troubled, but it can console itself, for all these symptoms are not signs of retrogression. If deliberate faults have been avoided, and if the practices of the spiritual life have been clung to, the explanation of this peculiar and fearful state of soul is found in the very progress that the soul has made.
Up to this point, there has been a gradual forming of convictions with regard to the principles of perfection, and a steady approach on the part of the will to that point at which its affections are definitely weaned from all that is not God or does not lead to him. The result is that all efforts at thinking itself into this condition, which is the normal purpose of meditation, are wasted efforts and issue in a sense of futility.
It is a veritable carrying of coals to Newcastle in the realm of spiritual things. This explains the irritation of the soul when it strives to carry on its exercise as usual. If it were enlightened enough at the moment, it would understand that the impatience at the usual procedure of turning over points for consideration is due to an inner consciousness that this process has become a veritable distraction, turning it aside from something more profitable.
The soul has no longer need to form convictions. It is penetrated through and through with a sense of the desirability of God. This anxiety to grow closer to God, to know him more and to love him more, meets with very little resistance now. It meets with more when the soul finds itself in the presence of God for prayer.
The instinct of the soul at this point, if the instinct is not thwarted through a wrong understanding of things, is to content itself with dwelling quietly in spirit before God, with a single expectant look towards him, and without any multiplicity of acts, either of will or intellect. It has reached a stage when it has, so to speak, developed a decided taste for God, and can relish little else.
It has no need to persuade itself to this taste any longer. Hence considerations weary it and prove distasteful. Owing to the fewness and simplicity of the acts of the intelligence, the imagination is apt to run riot. Distractions are numerous and even disquieting, but the soul need not be disturbed, for underneath the rippling of these distractions over the surface of the soul, the soul in its depths is adhering to God in a sustained act of loving regard.
In spite of the wanderings of the imagination, the will is adhering to God, and the understanding is dwelling on him. The difficulty presented by spiritual reading is simply another aspect of the difficulty in considerations. The soul has learned all about the principles and practice of the interior life. It has nothing more to get from books. These fail to present it with any further stimulus to a cult of spirituality.
The period of forming convictions and acquiring ideas is over and past. The time has not yet come when the soul is so advanced that a paragraph or even a sentence from the most commonplace spiritual book can illuminate the understanding in a fresh and vivid way and stir up the affections to warmth.
A most ordinary word about God suffices to set perfect souls aflame, but that stage is not yet reached. The soul must therefore expectantly keep itself in peace, and in the meantime, choose for its spiritual reading those books which have a peculiar unction, the Holy Scriptures, The Imitation of Christ, the works of the great saints and doctors of the church.
Trials such as these should remind the soul that the virtues are still in their tenderest growth, and constant watchfulness is necessary to prevent this growth from being checked or destroyed. But the great danger of the soul comes from the temptation which is peculiar to the state in which it finds itself.
The devil suggested to Our Lord that he should do something striking in the eyes of men, insinuating that they would thereby be more ready to be swayed by his words and be persuaded to follow his teaching. “And he brought him to Jerusalem and he set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and he said to him, ‘If you be the Son of God, cast yourself down from here. For it is written that he has given his angels charge over you, that they keep you, and that in their hands they shall bear you up, lest perhaps you dash your foot against a stone’” (Luke 4:9–11).
The reasoning implicit in this suggestion is very specious. You are unknown and obscure, as such, you will get no hearing with the people and your enterprise will meet with no success. Do something striking, show yourself to be somebody, and the people will acknowledge you as the Messiah. The reply of Jesus was simple. “You shall not tempt the Lord your God” (Luke 4:12). That is to say, I leave the manifestation of what I am to God, to be made according to his good pleasure and at the time and in the circumstances he determines.
Christ refuses to anticipate the time and the action of God by putting himself forward of his own accord. So, too, must we be disposed to remain hidden, obscure, and unknown to men, if God so wills it. If he chooses to manifest his power through us, he must be left his own time to do so.
God fulfills himself in many ways, and we can never know whether he shall realize his purpose in us through keeping us hidden or bringing us into the light. The soul that seeks to be perfect must consent to be nothing, that is, to be held as a nobody. It is wrong to seek to do remarkable things in God’s service for the sake of attracting others to that service. Self would be sure to recover itself in that. This temptation can be extraordinarily subtle, and it must be the sharpest one in the devil’s armory, for it is the only one of the three that he renews with Our Lord.
“And his brethren said to him, ‘Pass from here and go into Judea, that your disciples may also see your works which you do, for there is no man that does anything in secret, and he himself seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, manifest yourself to the world’” (John 7:3–4).
“For neither did his brethren believe in him” (John 7:5). They could not see with his eyes. They saw only through the eyes of the world, the world which judges self-advertisement to be a necessary means to success. With a strange persistency, the devil returned once more with the same suggestion during Our Lord’s last moments.
This time, it came through the scribes and the ancients of the people. Mocking, they said, “If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him” (Matt. 27:42). By an appeal to the divine power that was his in virtue of the hypostatic union, Jesus could detach himself from the cross. If he made such an appeal and did come down, perhaps the incredulity of his enemies would be overcome.
Such was the temptation. Jesus paid no heed to the tempter. He consented to appear there before the whole world completely helpless, wholly powerless, and an abject failure. He consented to appear there on the cross as the “most abject of men” (Isa. 53:3), as a very nothing from the points of human dignity and worth.
His attitude was the complete negation of that tendency in man to be something. “There is no beauty in him, whereupon we esteemed him not” (Isa. 53:2–3). He is “a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people” (Ps. 22:6), we’re told in the psalm. And yet, it was this utter annihilation in all human estimation that wrought the redemption of mankind. There was no failure like Christ’s, and yet it was the world’s salvation. So too, from the bruised and crushed human soul, God can draw an immense flood of spiritual energy for the regeneration of mankind, provided that the soul does not allow itself to break and lose heart and courage under its cruel suffering.
When the soul in its earnest pursuit of God has allowed this last citadel in it to yield to grace, the citadel of that pride by which a man obstinately resists being nothing in the eyes of men, when it has attained this degree of humility, then it is perfectly prepared for that direct divine action on it, which prepares the way for close, intimate, and habitual union with God. Union with God is effected by the action of the three faculties of understanding, memory, and will, operating through the divine infused virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
It is the activity of those virtues that attaches the soul to its creator as its final end. In the degree in which this activity is intense and unintermittent, the union is intimate and unbroken. The obstacle to the free action of the infused virtues of faith, hope, and charity in the soul is the activity of the three concupiscences, the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life.
The sad heritage of original sin. By these concupiscences, man is attached to himself, to his bodily pleasures, to what gratifies his imagination, and to what flatters his intellect and will. Attached to himself by the activities of these concupiscences, he is necessarily detached from God. In the preceding chapters has been sketched the series of efforts the soul has to make to vanquish its sensuality, its affections, and its pride, and by these victories to paralyze the activities of the concupiscences.
When these enemies are overcome, the soul finds itself unhampered and unimpeded in the exercise of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. This free and unfettered action of the infused virtues is called the perfect spiritual life. It is called spiritual, writes one author, because in it the soul detaches itself and withdraws from every material object to apply itself to God alone and to spiritual things. It makes of this its whole life. It no longer allows itself to be dominated or impressed by sensible objects, but by God alone, with whom it is in intimate relation. It no longer lives save to serve God in spirit and in truth.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate Mother, St. Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW
Based on Progress Through Mental Prayer, “The Third Stage in the Transformation,” by Edward Leen, C.S.Sp.