Of Other Means of Keeping Up Attention and Reverence at Meditation

THE blessed St. Basil asks how one can keep one’s heart firm, attentive, and undistracted in prayer, and says that the most efficacious means is to consider that one is in the presence of God, and that He is looking to see how one prays. Here on earth, in the presence of a sovereign, conversing with him, one stands with great respect and reverence, paying great attention to what he does and to the manner and style of doing it. We should take for great discourtesy to turn our back on his majesty and bring in a medley of remarks not to the point. What shall he do who shall attentively consider that he is in the presence of the majesty of God, that God is looking at him, not only at his outer man that is visible exteriorly, but into the innermost recesses of his heart! Who is there that shall dare to take off his eyes and his thought from what he is doing, to turn his back on God and go thinking of other irrelevant things? The great monk James, as Theodoret relates, made use of this consideration to show what a great piece of rudeness that is. St. Augustine also says the same. If I were the domestic servant, he says, of a man of the same nature as myself, and at the time that I ought to be serving him I omitted bringing him his meat and drink to go talking with another servant, he would have just reason to rebuke and chastise me. And if I went before a judge to complain of someone who had done me wrong, and then left him in the midst of the proceedings and stayed chatting with some one of the lookers-on in court, think you not that the judge would take me for an ill-mannered man and bid such as ill-bred suitor be off from his tribunal where he was sitting in judgment? But this is what they do who go to prayer to speak with God and then give way to distractions, thinking of other things quite out of place there. Our Father also sets down this means in one of the “additions,” or notices, which he gives for meditation, where he says that, a little before starting the meditation, for the space of one Our Father we should raise up our heart to heaven and consider that God is there present and is looking at us, and so with great reverence and humility we should enter on the meditation. And we must take care that this presence of God is not to be lost sight of all the time of the meditation, according to the saying of the prophet: The meditation of my heart is in thy sight always (Psalm xviii. 15).

St. Chrysostom says: When you go to prayer, reckon that you are entering the heavenly court, where the King of Glory is seated under a starry canopy, surrounded with innumerable angels and saints, and that they are all looking at you, according to that saying of St. Paul: We area spectacle to God, and to the angels and to men (I Cor. iv. 9). St. Bernard advises us what we ought to do in such surroundings: “When you enter the church to betake yourself to prayer, put your hand on your mouth and say: ‘Stay ye here at the door, ye evil thoughts and desires, and do thou, my soul, enter into the joy of thy Lord, that thou mayest see and do His holy will’ ”’—Veniens ad ecclesiam pone manum tuam super os tuum et dic: Expectate hic, cogitationes malae, intentiones et affectus cordis et appetitus carnis: tu autem, anima mea, intra in gaudium Domini Det tui. St. John Climacus says: Let him who prays consider that he is really before God; let him be like a firm and steady pillar that moves not. And he relates how once, seeing a religious more attentive than the others at the chanting of the psalms, and especially at the beginning of the hymns, with his mien and look quite changed, as though he were speaking to someone, he asked him afterwards to tell him what it meant. The monk replied: “At the beginning of the divine office it is my practice with great care to gather together my heart and thoughts, and call them before me and say: Come let us adore, and fall down, and weep before the Lord that made us, because he is the Lord our God, and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand (Psalm xciv. 6-7). All these are very good and profitable considerations for securing attention and reverence at prayer.

Others give for a remedy to meditate in presence of the Blessed Sacrament, if we are in a place where we can do so; or to look towards the nearest place where the Blessed Sacrament is kept, and fix our heart there: also to look at pictures and images. Others again aid themselves by looking up to heaven. It is also a good means to enliven oneself under distractions and dryness at meditation to say some ejaculatory prayers and speak orally to God, representing our weakness and asking a remedy for it. Lord, I suffer violence, answer thou for me (Isaias xxxviii. 14). That blind man in the Gospel, when Christ our Redeemer seemed to take no notice of him and was passing him by, and the company were bidding him hold his peace, still ceased not to cry out, lifting up his voice higher and higher, saying, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me (Mark x. 47). So we should do when the Lord makes as though He did not hear us and seems to pass us by without attending to us; and though the crowd and rout of thoughts and temptations impels us to be silent, not for that should we be silent, but cry out louder and louder: Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Strengthen me, O Lord God, in this hour (Judith xiii. 9), that I may be able to think of Thee and be firm and constant in prayer. A holy woman used to say: If you cannot speak to God with your heart, cease not to speak to Him by word of mouth repeatedly; for what is thus said over and over again, readily communicates heat and fervor to the heart. And this same saint confessed that sometimes, for not having used these vocal prayers, she had lost her mental prayer, weighed down and hampered by sloth and sleep. And this sometimes befalls us; it comes to pass that we neglect to use our voices at meditation out of sloth and weakness and being half asleep; whereas, if we did speak, we should be awakened and roused to meditation.

Gerson also says that it is a good remedy against distractions to bring the exercise well prepared, and have several points fixed as matter for meditation, because thereby, when we are distracted and notice the same, we have ready our fixed and determined point to have recourse to; and if we make no way with that, we pass on to another point of those which we have ready prepared, and so recover more easily the thread of our meditation. And we ourselves find, when we examine ourselves, that oftentimes the cause of our distractions and mind-wandering was our not having brought well prepared and known the points on which we were to meditate, nor having had any definite and fixed resolves to bring ourselves to. Besides, this admonition and the one that follows it are necessary for us to come well prepared to meditation; accordingly our Father commends them to help us in these emphatic words: “It will be a great help, before starting meditation, to call to mind the points that are to be meditated on, and have marked out a definite number of them.” And we read of him that not only at the beginning of his conversion, but afterwards also, when he was old, he would read and prepare his exercise at nightfall and retire to rest with that on his mind; so that none may think that this is a business for novices. And though you know the exercise very well from having meditated several times before, yet it is an excellent thing to prepare it afresh; especially since, as these are the words of Holy Scripture, dictated by the Holy Ghost, the reading of them with a little quiet and repose arouses new attention and devotion to meditate and profit by them better.

It will also help us very much to this purpose, immediately on awakening, not to give place to other thoughts, but think of the exercise we have to make and prepare ourselves for our meditation by some consideration adapted to the matter thereof. Cassian, St. Bonaventure, and St. John Climacus hold this admonition to be of great importance. They say that thereon depends the guidance of the meditation and, consequently, the good order of the whole day. St. John Climacus observes that the devil, seeing this to be so important, keeps a sharp watch for our first waking, to the end that he may at once seize upon the lodging and thus gather the first-fruits of the whole day. He says, also, that among the wicked spirits there is one they call Precursor, whose charge it is to assail us by night at the time that we awake out of sleep; or, even before we are quite awake or come perfectly to ourselves, to put before us foul and filthy fancies or, at least, idle ones, and thereby take possession of us for the whole day, figuring to himself that all will be his who first occupies the heart. Wherefore it is important that we also be greatly on the alert to give no place to this, but immediately on our awakening, when we have scarcely opened our eyes, there should be already planted in our heart the memory of our Lord before any strange thought comes to occupy the lodging. Our Father also gives us the same recommendation, and adds that the same practice should be kept up, in such manner as is possible, when meditation is made at another hour. We should in that case pull ourselves together beforehand, thinking, “Where am I going? And before whom am I to appear?” So we should briefly call to mind the matter of the meditation, as one tunes a violin before playing. And generally our Father used to say that on the observance of these and other like directions, which he calls “additions,” depend in great measure the success of the meditation and the fruit to be drawn from it. And it is our ordinary experience that, when we go well prepared and observe well these directions, things go well with us at meditation, and badly when we do not.

The Holy Ghost says by the Wise Man: Before prayer prepare thy soul, and be not as a man who tempteth God (Ecclus. xviii. 23). St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure observe on these words that to go to prayer without preparation is in a manner to tempt God because to tempt God, as theologians and saints say, is to seek to gain an end without taking the ordinary and necessary means thereto, as if one were to say: “I will not eat, because God can easily sustain me without eating; He will sustain me.” That would be tempting God and asking for a miracle without necessity. When the devil carried Christ our Redeemer to the pinnacle of the Temple, and tried to persuade Him to cast Himself headlong, since God would command His angels to receive Him and bear Him up in their hands, He answered: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God (Matt. iv. 7). “I can come down by the stairs; that other way would be to tempt God to work a miracle without necessity.” Now preparation is so principal and necessary a means to meditation that the Wise Man says that to seek to make meditation without preparation is to tempt God and want Him to work a miracle on your behalf. Our Lord certainly wishes us to make a good meditation, with great attention and reverence, but by the ordinary means, that is to say, by disposing and preparing ourselves for it in the manner we have said.