Mental Prayer (after Edward Leen)
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, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
We are told in Saint John, “I am the way… No man cometh to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Mental prayer is an ascent, an approach to the mind of God. It is nothing else but a communing of spirit with spirit, a communion of the created intelligence with the uncreated. To pray, therefore, it is necessary to be present with God. When we wish to enter into conversation with our friends on earth, we leave the place in which we are and transport ourselves to where they are, or make use of those means of communication invented by science.
No use of a medium of communication, or change of position on our part, would seem very necessary when it is a question of coming into the presence of God, since He is everywhere, and in Him we live and move and have our being. It is strange to say that, though we are surrounded by and, as it were, enveloped in God, still we can fail to have Him present to us. For the spirit makes other beings to be present to it, not by local movement, but by its acts.
The soul has present to it only those objects about which its faculties are engaged. We can be said to be present only there where our thoughts, affections, and imaginings are. It is in this very same way that we are present with God. We are in God's presence only during the time when the faculties of our soul are exercised about Him, or His attributes, or something that has a bearing on our relations with Him.
The meaning, therefore, of having placed ourselves in God's presence, of our mind having ascended to Him, is that God has become for us an object of loving, or at least interested, thought. This imports as its correlative aspect the withdrawal of our imagination and our senses, our will and our intellect, with the acts that flow from them, from all objects other than God.
We are in a real sense present where that object is which occupies our imagination, more truly present where it is than where we happen to be locally. A familiar illustration may be drawn from a too common experience in a teacher's life. The indifferent and distracted student is bodily present in the classroom, but his surroundings and his teacher's words make no impression on him, as he allows his thoughts and interests to wander to the joys of home or the excitement of the playing fields.
He is, in a human sense, more present where his thoughts and affections are than where he is in body. God is a pure spirit, and we are not. We cannot come into His presence as an angel can. All the acts of our intellect depend upon the senses and on the imagination. We must have some imaginative image of a thing in order to be able to think on it. It is difficult for us to form an image of the divinity, and therefore difficult for us to be present with God.
At least it would be very difficult for us, had not God in His kindness found a way by which our access to Him, by aid of the imagination, might be made easy for men. That way was the Incarnation. The divinity is made present visibly and tangibly to us in the humanity of Our Lord. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the word of life: For the life was manifested; and we have seen and do bear witness, and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father, and hath appeared to us” (1 John 1:1–2).
This may take place without our reflecting at all upon ourselves, but simply by our viewing these virtues in Jesus with esteem, admiration, respect, love, and complacency. Hence it is that our communion with God, the presence of our spirit with His, is accomplished through the sacred humanity. Therefore, the ordinary way of mental prayer, or meditation, is the reviewing in our imagination and in our intelligence of the life and words of Jesus. This, however, is only one part of prayer. It does not end with considerations or reflections, for prayer in its essence is not a mere reflection on a subject belonging to the order of divine things.
It is a supernatural attitude of the soul before its Creator, in which it directs itself towards God and unites itself with Him for the purpose of rendering Him what is due to Him from His creatures, receiving in turn His communications, and rendering itself pleasing in His sight. The considerations, that is, the meditations strictly so called, have an ultimate purpose. That purpose is to create in our minds a form or an ideal of life and action, an ideal which is presented by our intelligence to our will as our highest good. Our considerations, therefore, must tend to form, deepen, and strengthen the conviction that the life of the Man-God is the good life for us, that His way of acting and thinking is what is most deserving of our imitation.
Meditation has for its object to fill our minds with the conviction that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life; that is to say, to fill us with the conviction that our life is a false and vain one insofar as it does not conform to the spirit of His, that His values of human things are the only true values, that to attain the goal of existence we must follow the path He has traced and be guided by His principles, and finally, that it is only by making His modes of thought, affection, and action our own that we shall enjoy the life that is truly life. The will necessarily moves with love towards that which the intelligence presents to it as its good. The study of the attractiveness of Jesus creates in the will the desire of conformity with Him, and the practice of the virtues exemplified in His life.
There is only one humanity that is united of itself to the divinity. That is the humanity of Jesus, for it is united hypostatically. If we are to be united intimately with the divinity, it is necessary for us to prepare the way for that union by becoming assimilated to that humanity. How is this done? By assimilating ourselves to Jesus in thoughts, in affections, in principles, in ideals, by reproducing in our life the features of His human life. This paves the way for a vital union with the divinity that is in Jesus. This union with the divinity grows in proportion to the increase of sanctifying grace in the soul. The ordinary channel for the communication of this grace of Christ is the sacraments. These confer greater or lesser grace, as the dispositions of the soul resemble to a greater or lesser degree the dispositions of the soul of Jesus of Nazareth.
Therefore, our considerations in prayer are meant to set before our will, as an object to venerate, to admire, to love, and to imitate, the ideal of human life portrayed in the life of Jesus on earth. Our prayer must inspire us with the desire to shape our actions after the model set up by the Savior, as the means to union with God. We must be attracted to the loveliness of God by the loveliness of Jesus. God is the supreme and ultimate good, and everything else, even virtue, is good only inasmuch as it leads to the possession of Him. God reveals Himself to us in the works of creation, and from the contemplation of these we can acquire a certain knowledge of the greatness, of the power, of the beauty and perfection of God; and with the light of revelation to help, we could develop in ourselves a kind of personal regard for the author of all created things.
But this drawing towards God could with difficulty attain to the nature of love. It would remain strongly impregnated with fear and awe. Its most perfect expression would be reverence, the reverence of the creature devoted to its Creator. Hence it was that those who lived under the old dispensation scarcely knew God as a Father. For all created things are limited and imperfect, and therefore generate but a very imperfect notion of God. They tend to generate even a false one, on account of the weakness of will and intellect that followed on the fall. This was the reason why even the chosen people had such a proneness to idolatry, a thing which many find very difficult to understand. But in Our Lord's life, the attributes of God are reflected without the slightest shadow of imperfection, in all their loveliness.
His sacred humanity reveals God to us in the most attractive form, and makes it possible for us to love God and desire to be united with Him, this being the end of prayer, as it is of all our relations with God. There can be communion only between beings that are alike. To be united with God, we must be like Him, assimilated to Him, conformed in the passions and affections of our humanity to the passions and affections of that humanity which He made His own. That humanity is the bridge of union between Him and us. The function of mental prayer, then, as an act of our mind, is to study and contemplate the features of the life of Jesus Christ, with a view to reproducing the traits of that life in ourselves, and so disposing ourselves to grow in the divine life of grace.
When we have made progress in this contemplation, it is possible for us to fix our gaze on created things, on the world itself and the events that take place in it, without danger to ourselves. For the sacred humanity has rectified our ideas about all created things, and in its light we can study creatures without fear of being led astray by them. When the mind has attained the viewpoint of Jesus Christ, distraction in prayer does not normally turn the soul from God. For every object that comes before the mind, every work, every event, is instinctively reviewed in the relation in which it stands to Him, and all will therefore, though at times insensibly, lead the mind back to God.
So far there has been question only of the soul's acts of prayer. These, however, do not constitute the whole of this exercise. Prayer has been defined as a familiar intercourse or conversation with God. It is a being present with God and associated with Him, as we associate with those we love on earth. Two spirits cannot be present to each other, since such presence is by means of acts, without strongly influencing each other. In this intercourse, the activity is not all one-sided. It is not wholly on our side. The divine spirit is operative as well as the human. God incessantly plays His part, and this an active one. A conversation is not a speech delivered before a person. It involves an interchange of thought, and as our thought is directed towards God, so God's thought is directed towards us.
God is intensely operative, and if the soul has willed to draw near to God, He on His side tends to draw near to it. The effect of the contact of the two spirits is one of assimilation. One is made like the other. The soul by its activity cannot assimilate God to itself, for God cannot change. The activity of God, therefore, is directed towards assimilating the soul to Himself. God takes up the soul and assimilates it to Himself, and this in proportion as the soul, by its own acts helped by grace, abdicates itself and lives the life of God by acting habitually and intensely under a motive of faith and of charity.
When the soul attains to the point of practically always acting, not merely under a habitual or virtual, but an actual motive of faith, it has already arrived at an advanced stage in the life of ordinary prayer. For this conscious assumption of all its activities under a rule or principle of faith makes its prayer continuous, uninterrupted, and unceasing. The actuality and vividness of the faith clears the soul's activity of the influence of self, and accordingly God's influence enters in an ever higher degree into such activities. Persons who live this life of faith in a sustained manner carry about with them an air of the divine, easily perceptible by those with whom they come in contact. There is nothing which helps more to foster and develop this life of faith than the habit of seeing the will of God in all things, even the most insignificant: in the petty trials, disappointments, checks, and even in the pleasures and satisfactions that come our way.
Thus, habitual prayer demands a habitual sense of God's presence, or, which is more accurate, God being continually present to us. Now, there are different and varying degrees of presence of persons one with another. In a social gathering, many people are assembled in the same room within easy reach of one another. All are bodily present in the same place. As is often the case, those who are assembled together in great social gatherings come as strangers to one another. The vast majority of them meet perhaps for the first time. What happens is that each looks around in the assembly for the few with whom he is on terms of acquaintance or friendship, and engages in conversation with these.
For the group thus formed, the others are as if they were not there at all. The friends that meet and converse are present to one another. They are present to themselves, but not to the others. This presence deepens in the degree in which their conversation springs from a common interest, or causes a deepening of mutual understanding. The more their mutual interests and tastes lead to an active interchange of thoughts and views, and to a strengthening of the bonds that bind them together, the deeper grows the presence. If again one of the guests takes the lead in the conversation, and all the others, dominated by his personality, cease to speak and give themselves to the task of listening, the speaker becomes present to everybody in the room, but not everybody to him. Those only are present to him who have led him on to conversation, and interest in whom incites him to speak.
So it is in a manner in our relations with God. We have already seen that mere bodily presence before the Tabernacle, or the mere recitation of a formula, does not constitute God present to us. For that, it is needful that the powers of the soul be occupied with God and with the things of God. In prayer there is reciprocal action. Prayer is a conversation. It is an essential part of mental prayer, then, that God should address Himself to us, as that we should address ourselves to Him.
Saint Francis de Sales says, “Prayer is a colloquy, a discourse, or a conversation of the soul with God. By it we speak to God, and He again speaks to us. We aspire to Him and breathe in Him, and He reciprocally inspires us and breathes in us.” Saint Vincent de Paul says, “Prayer is a conversation of the soul with God, in which God teaches us in an interior way what it should know and do, and in which the soul says to God what He Himself teaches it to ask for.”
And Abbot Marmion, speaking of prayer, says, “In a conversation, one both listens and speaks. The soul gives itself up to God, and God communicates Himself to the soul.” He speaks to us through the deepening of our faith, through the illumination which He supplies to our intelligence, through the penetration into the mysteries of our religion that He grants us, and through the impulse to good that He gives to our wills. He speaks to us above all by the life and actions of Jesus Christ. These are His word to us, His own word.
Saint Paul says to the Hebrews, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke in times past to the fathers by the prophets, last of all, in these days hath spoken to us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the world. Who being the brightness of his glory, and the figure of his substance… sitteth on the right hand of the majesty on high” (Heb. 1:1–3). We become present with God by having present in thoughts, affections, and in imagination, the life of Jesus. We associate with and converse with God by associating and conversing in spirit with Jesus. He Himself said, “Philip, he that seeth me seeth the Father also” (John 14:9).
God on His side mingles familiarly with our life and its concerns, through and in the life of His Word on earth. He communicates His light and His life to us through Him. Jesus is the channel of the communication of divine grace. Prayer consists in living with and conversing with Jesus, with a view to becoming like Him. Prayer is literally the instrument of a transforming process, by which we leave our own form and put on the form of the Son of Man. The function of prayer consists in stripping us of earthly desires, “stripping yourselves of the old man with his deeds, and putting on the new, him who is renewed unto knowledge, according to the image of him that created him” (Col. 3:9–10).
Saint Teresa, in her biography, has some words that can form a fitting conclusion to this meditation. She says, “By thoughts, we can put ourselves in the presence of Christ, set ourselves gradually aflame by a great love for the sacred humanity, keep company with Him at all times, speak to Him, recommend our needs to Him, seek compassion from Him in our trials, rejoice with Him in our consolations, keep ourselves from forgetting Him in times of prosperity. This does not seek to make beautiful speeches to Him, but rather to speak simply, to express our desires and our wants. This is an excellent method, and makes us advance in a very short time. The person who studies how to live in this precious company, and draws therefrom a genuine love for the Master who has showered so many benefits upon us, that person, I assert, has gone forward in the way of prayer.”
“So that we must not grow disconsolate, as I have already said, if the feeling of devotion is lacking; let us rather give thanks to Our Lord, who, despite the imperfections in our works, keeps alive within us the desire of pleasing Him. This method of prayer, which consists in keeping oneself in the company of Our Lord, is profitable at every stage. It is a very certain means of progressing in the first degree of prayer, and of reaching the second in a short time. And in the last stages, it serves as a protection against the temptations of the devil.”
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, Saint 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