Chapter IX: Should Mental Prayer be made with Method or Without Method?

THE GENERIC expression “mental prayer” signifies, as we understand it, all communication of the soul with God, all elevation of the heart towards Him, that is free, personal and not restricted to any determined liturgical form. Thus understood, individual prayer has multifarious shades, degrees without number; but it must nevertheless obey fixed and unchanging laws based upon the relations that God has created between Himself and man.

Nowhere has the Creator established, nor can He establish anything without order: “Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight.”¹ Divine love itself, free from all outward constraint—for what is more free than love?—makes the soul acknowledge, when it has reached perfection, that its whole course has been regular and orderly. “He set in order charity in me.”² There is perfect harmony in the highest regions of the spiritual life, and there is an admirable method in the ways that lead to them. Hence the truth and meaning of these words of the Book of Esther: “So going in she passed through all the doors in order, and stood before the king, where he sat.”³

It is principally in the writings of the ancient masters of the spiritual life and the fathers that we find the description of this spiritual order; an order without the restraints of system; an order ruled by strong and unchangeable laws, which are not limits but rather the determining conditions of energy and the most supple activity. "Contemplation without preparation or without rules leads but to illusion. When we are imbued first of all with the principles of the fear of God, then cleansed, and as it were spiritualized, we may without peril raise ourselves to the heights. For where fear reigns, obedience to the law of God is found; and where there is obedience, there is the body mortified and brought low, so that it ceased to be as a heavy cloud, obscuring the light of the soul and preventing it from beholding clearly the splendour of the divine rays."⁴ "Let us note well," said Dom Gueranger in his familiar conversations, "that the science of the Christian life is a determined and definite science. Therefore we must not rest satisfied with repeating conventional phrases or with multiplying sentimental formulas; it is by labour, and not by dreaming and excitement, that we must learn the secrets of a science which has its axioms, its deductions and its certain rules. All must be drawn from divine sources, that this science may be truly that of the spiritual life in the Christian Church."

Order is the handmaid of the Holy Spirit; but order is no more a system than disorder is liberty, such liberty at least as Christianity acknowledges, and we know no other. Hence the relations of the soul with God in mental prayer are subservient to laws, which are at once both order and liberty.

If then by "method" we are to understand the rules and axioms of a man or of an epoch, we say with Dom Gueranger:

"God preserve us from men of system and ready-made ideas."⁵ If methods of prayers have been drawn up by Saints, and have been praised by the Church, or consecrated by Christian usage, they deserve our respect; criticism will be silent, and souls who for good reasons prefer not to follow these methods will carefully guard against putting aside, together with the methods themselves, those general principles which are the necessary conditions of prayer, founded on the universal teaching of the Church. For on these matters the Church has received a doctrinal deposit, which St. Denis called a secret and sacerdotal tradition—secret in his day because it was for the baptized only. This deposit, contained in the holy Scriptures and the writings of the fathers and holy doctors, is the method which we look upon as laid down for all.⁶ Monastic spirituality recommends no particular system. It is strongly bound to the traditional teaching of the Church, and to that alone. Thus with us absence of method can signify only freedom from human rules, and never disorder and the absence of intelligent culture. There is a just medium in this wise balance of liberty and rule, the keeping of which calls for something more than great prudence; it needs the guidance of the Spirit of God Himself.

Man, being a pilgrim on earth journeying towards his heavenly country, may not waste his time in idleness. Even in the state of innocence, when God first placed Adam in the beautiful garden of paradise, it was not merely that he might walk about and admire that glorious creation which had come forth all fresh, pure and well-ordered from the hand of the Creator, but that he might "dress it and keep it."⁷ There, however, work was but a delightful occupation, an intelligent cooperation with God's designs in creation, and as such it was honourable to man, whom God indeed freely created, but whom He will not reward without efforts of his own. In the mystic and well closed garden of the Canticle of Canticles, where dwells the regenerated human race, in the person of the sacred bride, we have again a picture of industry. From the earliest dawn of spring souls are on the watch for flowers; here they are catching the little foxes that destroy the vines, there they are gathering in the fruits and storing up the harvest; in a word the fertile earth is being turned to profit for the glory of the King of Peace.

But since the fall of our first parents the easy work of the earthly paradise has become changed into labour which is always hard and sometimes even bloodstained. The earth brings forth thorns and thistles; and the soil of man's heart is no exception to this law of punishment. The supersubstantial Bread of the divine Word is given to us only in the sweat of our brow; for it is the most dangerous of illusions to expect the soul of man to produce salutary fruits unless it is well tilled and cultivated with great pains. Of course the labourer will not pretend that he can give the germs a fruitfulness which only the Creator Spirit can impart; neither will he think that any artificial heat can supply for the rays of the Sun of Justice, or that a few drops of brackish water from the hollow of his hand can take the place of the dew from on high; but his work is wisely to till the soil, to sow in season that he may reap in due time, and to remove the parasitic weeds that stifle the good grain.

But it may perhaps be asked, if you dismiss with a stroke of the pen the accompanying help of methods ready to hand, are you not afraid of leaving the Christian soul to go at haphazard, and to pray as it were at random? Our answer in the first place is that all the children of the Church have the science of their Mother in the sacred liturgy, which contains the most perfect method of prayer, the most traditional, the best ordered, the most simple, and the one which leaves the greatest scope to the liberty of the Holy Spirit.

This is the reason why our fathers seem never to have thought of tracing out any human method for religious souls. They thought it sufficient to make use of the hierarchical and divinely-established mode according to which truth reaches us. "For," says St. Denis, "it is a general law established by infinite Wisdom that divine graces are given to inferior beings by the ministry of superior natures."⁸ Therefore every faithful soul aspiring to a life of prayer and union with God came and placed himself under the guidance of a master; the veterans only, now become masters, ever ventured to walk without a guide. The Rule of St. Benedict maintains this tradition when speaking of the novices: "And over him," it says, "let such senior be deputed as is skilful in gaining souls, who will watch over him with anxious care and attention . . . let him have told unto him all the hard and rough roads by which one goeth unto God."⁹

It is, therefore, indispensable to have a guide in the ways of God, and an enlightened guide. "It behoves him to be learned in the divine law."¹⁰ But this is not the teaching of St. Benedict only, it comes directly from the one great Master by excellence: "Let them alone," He says, "they are blind, and leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit."¹¹ St. Teresa's esteem of learning in directors of souls is well known; and if experience is joined to learning, there will result from these combined elements—namely, learning, God's action, the liturgical sense and the maturity of experience—a living method by means of which any ignorant and simple soul may be guided, even unknown to herself and without any danger, to the highest union with God, and this by a way as perfectly well-ordered as it is free from all human system.

Omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti (Sap., xi, 21). ↩
Ordinavit in me caritatem (Cant., ii, 4). ↩
Ingressa igitur cuncta per ordinem ostia, stetit contra regem, ubi ille residebat (Esth., xv, 9). ↩
Effrenata enim contemplatio in præcipitia quoque fortasse nos impulerit; verum ut timoris rudimentis imbuti et purgati, atque, ut hoc verbo utar, attenuati, in altum efferamur. Ubi enim timor est, illic quoque mandatorum observatio: ubi autem mandatorum observatio, illic etiam carnis, quæ nubis cujusdam instar, animæ lumen obscurat, nec divini radii splendorem pure intueri sinit, purgatio est (St. Gre. Naz., Or. In S. Lumina, cap. viii). ↩
Instit., lib. ii. p. 112. ↩
De Coel., Hier., cap. ii. ↩
Ut operaretur et custodiret illum (Gen., ii, 15). ↩
De coel., Hier., cap. viii. ↩
Et senior ei talis deputetur, qui aptus sit ad lucrandas animas, et qui super eum omnino curiose intendat et sollicitus sit. Prædicentur ei omnia dura et aspera, per quæ itur ad Deum (S. Reg. cap. lviii). ↩
Oportet eum esse doctum in lege divina (Ibid., cap. lxiv). ↩
Sinite illos: cæci sunt, et duces cæcorum: cæcus autem si cæco ducem præstet, ambo in foveam cadunt (Matth., xv, 14). ↩

Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter IX: Should Mental Prayer be made with Method or Without Method?

Footnotes