Chapter II: The Ascetic and Spiritual Preparation for Prayer

THE title of this chapter must not be regarded as implying that the practices and virtues named in it are to be acquired before we begin to pray. On the contrary, we shall never attain to them without prayer. Prayer is the first act to which the converted soul must turn, no matter what his life has been. ' Look that no man think it presumption, that he that is the wretchedest sinner of this life dare take upon him after the time that he have lawfully amended him . . . to proffer a meek stirring of love to his God . . . for not what thou art, nor what thou hast been, seeth God with His merciful eyes, but what thou wouldest be ' (Cloud of Unknowing, chaps. xvi., lxxv.).

If we want to turn a piece of waste, weed-choked land into a garden we begin by digging it up and destroying as many of the weeds as we can. But because we know that it will probably be a long time before they are all eradicated, we do not leave it bare and content ourselves with a continual warfare against them ; on the contrary, we sow our seeds and cultivate the soil ; knowing that only so shall we ever get a garden, and that with a little care the weeds will be got rid of in time. The same plan must be adopted in the spiritual life.

The purpose of this chapter is to show what are the necessary conditions for prayer, the dispositions which are required, the attitude of soul with which we must come to prayer. For, as Dom Lehodey writes, ' there will always be a rather strict proportion between holiness of life and the degree of mental prayer one has arrived at. These two things run parallel, and give each other mutual support ; they progress together or they fall away together ' (Lehodey, Les Voies de l'Oraison mentale, Pt. I., chap. iv.).

Père Desurmont lays down three necessary conditions of prayer – that it should be real, very simple, and adapted to our actual state ; we must come as we are. ' The greatest of sinners can and ought to pray ; the one thing necessary is that he should pray as a sinner. The man of evil will, can, and ought to pray ; but he must pray according to the state of his soul, speaking to God as he is, a man of evil will. The lukewarm must pray as he is, the just with the prayer of the just ; each one must come to God as he is in reality ' (Retour continuel à Dieu, p. 103).

The ascetical preparation for prayer consists of three fundamental and necessary practices :

(1) The renunciation of sin.

(2) The mortification of self.

(3) The purification of the heart.

I. The desire to pray implies the desire for God, however ignorant and weak that desire may be, and this, in turn, implies an entire renunciation of sin, for God and sin cannot co-exist in the soul. It is always from this point of view that the sinner should be directed. Conversion must be seen, not primarily as a turning away from sin, a giving up of this or that, but a turning of the desiring self to God. It is true that sometimes a conversion is the result of a profound disgust for sin, which makes renunciation easy ; but more often the soul, drawn by God to desire Him, is yet still drawn to sin, and an over-emphasis on the renunciation required may only cause the snapping of the fresh and tender link with God. It is this last which has to be strengthened and developed, for it is the thought of God, the desire for God alone, which supplies the motive power required to break with old-established habits of sin. Evil can only be cast out by good, an unworthy passion eliminated by a nobler and stronger one. And in the majority of cases this is not an instantaneous act, but a slow, uphill progress. 'We cannot become perfect in a day,' says St. Teresa. This fact needs emphasis and attention. Nothing is commoner than discouragement arising from repeated failures and slowness of progress. But, as St. François de Sales writes, 'The ordinary purgation and healing, whether of body or soul, is only brought about by little and little, by progressing from improvement to improvement, with effort and by slow degrees. . . . Let us not be troubled, then, because of our imperfections, for our perfection consists in fighting against them, and we cannot fight against them if we do not see them, nor conquer them unless we meet them' (Devout Life, Pt. I., chap. v.). The only remedy for our failures is humility, penitence, and to rise from them and go on again as if they had not been. What it is necessary to see first is what St. Ignatius calls the 'first mode of humility, that for love of God a man resolves to abase and humble himself in obedience to the law of God, so that for no thing whatever, even in order to gain any temporal good or to save his life, will he commit mortal sin. This 'mode of humility,' Fr. Rickaby says, 'does not consist in never committing mortal sin, but in a serious purpose never to commit mortal sin as a means to any advantage or a way out of any difficulty.' It 'is not an act, but an habitual purpose - a standing order, as it were, framed, glazed and hung up in the council chamber of the soul . . . standing orders get violated, and yet remain standing orders; they are 'not set aside by action to the contrary, but by a resolution rescinding the order emanating from the same authority which originally framed it' (Rickaby, Waters that go Softly, chap. viii. 57).

Thus after having, in all sincerity, made such a resolution, a man may fall into sin, but unless he remains in sin, and gives up his purpose of seeking God, he has not fallen from this mode of humility, nor must he cease his prayer. This is most important, for the common result of failure to keep such a resolution is discouragement, in which the soul is tempted to think the task hopeless and to give up his prayer from the mistaken idea either that God is now angry with him or that to go on praying would be hypocritical. Neither is true. 'I am not angry with My servants when they fall,' showed our Lord to Dame Julian. 'Lo, lo, my loved servant, what harm he hath taken in My service for My love, yea, and for his goodwill' (Revelations of Divine Love, chap. li.). 'Full preciously our Lord keepeth us when it seemeth to us that we are near forsaken and cast away for our sin, and because we have deserved it. . . . By contrition we are made clean, by compassion we are made ready, and by true longing toward God we are made worthy . . . our courteous Lord willeth not that His servants despair, for often nor for grievous falling; for our falling hindereth Him not from loving us' (ibid., chap. xxxix.) Nor, as St. François de Sales teaches, do falls, even into mortal sin, hinder our prayer, provided that we turn to our Lord in contrition when we perceive our state and renew our purpose of serving Him. The fact is that the weaker we are, the more prone to fall, the more we need to pray; our sinful state is never a barrier between our Lord and our souls. 'It is self-importance, not our misery, that gets in His way' (Fr. Considine, Delight in the Lord, p. 24).

But our renunciation of sin must be more than a bare keeping within a narrow margin of safety; it must extend to the second mode of humility so that 'not for all creation, nor for a threat to take my life, would I seriously contemplate the commission of a venial sin.'

St. François de Sales is the best commentator on these words of St. Ignatius: 'We must purify our souls from all affection to venial sins – that is to say, we must not deliberately harbour the will to continue and persevere in any kind of venial sin, for it would be too great a baseness to resolve, quite wittingly, to keep in our consciences a thing so displeasing to God, as is the willingness to displease Him' (Devout Life, Pt. I. cxxii.). Here again it is not a resolve never to commit venial sin which is expected, for, as St. François says, 'We can never be altogether free from venial sins,' but the resolve not 'to contemplate seriously' and 'harbour deliberately the will' to sin venially. For although venial sin does not deprive us of the grace of God, it does hinder the work of grace in our soul and 'hamper the powers of the soul with bad habits and inclinations' so that she cannot exercise 'that promptitude of charity in which devotion consists.'

And if the resolve to renounce all sin is a necessary condition of prayer, no less is it true that this resolution cannot be carried out without prayer, for 'inasmuch as prayer places our understanding in the clearness of Divine light, and exposes our will to the warmth of heavenly love, there is nothing which so purges our understanding of its ignorance and our will of its depraved inclinations' (Devout Life, Pt. II., chap. i.).

'For when a spiritually-minded person rises from deep devout prayer, then straightway all his good resolutions are renewed, together with fervour and determination to do well' (St. Pedro de Alcantara, On Prayer & Meditation, chap. i.).

II. The Mortification of Self. Under this head must be included all that is implied in the death to self of which the Apostle speaks, the conquest or redirection of the passions, detachment from creatures, the guard of the senses, the 'making ourselves indifferent' of St. Ignatius, and the constant warfare on our strongest enemy – self-will. ' Fight self,' said St. Catherine of Genoa, ' and you need fear no other foe.' ' The Christian life is nothing else but a continual cross and a continual prayer. The cross is necessary for the whole of man, and all his parts, since all are, through sin, diseased, and all need the operating-knife and remedy. . . . Without this cross all our prayers avail nothing, save to cause us to live lives of still deeper deception' (On Prayer & Meditation: Of Three Things, p. 179). Since in prayer we draw near to God in order to contemplate Him, to speak to and hear Him, and to possess Him, it is necessary that the soul should be at peace. Now ' peace is the tranquillity of order' (St. Augustine: De Civ. Dei, LXIX., chap. xiii.). And there can only be peace in this disunited nature of ours when our passions and inclinations, our desires and aims, have all been ' brought into captivity to the mind of Christ,' ' in sua voluntade é nostra pace ' – ' in whose will is our peace.'

All our attitude toward, and our practice of, mortification must keep in view the end to which it is only the means ; that is, not to cramp or mutilate our nature, but to free it from all which would hinder our search for God, to make us both pure and strong, as says Abbot Vonier. It is to detach ourselves from all inordinate affection for external things, to subdue our flesh to the spirit, to let the peace of God rule our hearts so that we may attain that ' certain privilege of a detached mind, ' which enables us to attend to ' heavenly things and amidst many cares pass on without care ' (Imitation iii. 26).

' There are,' writes Fr. Baker, ' two general impediments that nature lays in our way to hinder us from attending to God. The first is distracting images ; the second, unquiet passions. The remedy against the first is abstraction of life, a not engaging in business which belongs not to us ; the mortifying of the curiosity of knowing or hearing strange or new things not pertinent to our profession; the tempering of our tongues from vain and unprofitable conversations; the reducing our thoughts, as much as may be, from multiplicity to unity by fixing them continually on the Divine love... against the second, the mortification of all inordinate affection to creatures... especially of that most dangerous, because most intimate and spiritual, thirst of unnecessary knowledge, and of all ambition to get victory or glory by disputing, writing, etc., as likewise of all anger, impatience, melancholy, fear, scrupulosity, etc.; a studious care to help our souls in all the peace, tranquillity and cheerfulness possible... avoiding all violence and impetuous hastiness in performing our best and most necessary duties' (Holy Wisdom, Sect. II., chap. v.).

Mortification is not easy. Like St. Augustine in the hour of his conversion, we find how 'the very toys of toys and vanities of vanities, my ancient mistresses, still held me; they plucked the garment of my flesh, and whispered softly, "Dost thou cast us off?"' (Conf. VIII. xi.). But what so often makes it harder is that we look more upon what we deem we are losing than upon what we shall gain, upon what we give up rather than upon what shall be given to us.

All which I took from thee I did but take Not for thy harms But just that thou mightest seek it in my arms. All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home; Rise, clasp my hand and come.

To 'die to self' that we may live in and for Christ, to forsake the lower for the higher, the passing for the eternal, shadows for realities, self for God – this is the meaning of mortification. 'To count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord . . . that I may win Christ and be found in Him' (Phil. iii.).

' Would that I could persuade spiritual persons that the way of God consisteth not in the multiplicity of meditations, ways of devotion or sweetness, though these may be necessary for beginners, but in one necessary thing only, in knowing how to deny themselves in earnest, inwardly and outwardly. . . . And if he be deficient in this exercise, which is the sum and root of all virtue, all he may do will be but beating the air ; utterly profitless, notwithstanding great meditations and communications. There is no progress but in the following of Christ' (St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk. II., chap. vii. 7).

III. Purity of Heart. ' Keep thy heart with all diligence ; for out of it are the issues of life' (Prov. iv. 23). ' The primary means of attaining to perfection is purity of heart, which consists in not having anything in our heart the least contrary to God and the operation of His grace' (Lallemant, La Doctrine spirituelle, Prin. III., chap. i.). So St. John of the Cross teaches that ' we must not hinder God's work within us, nor resist His Majesty,' ' but give ourselves freely,' and ' content ourselves with God alone,' ' willing to be divinely filled with the spirit of God.' The Fathers of the desert made this the first and constant aim of the soul who would aspire to a life of prayer. ' The end of our profession,' says the Abbot Moses, ' consists in the Kingdom of God, it is true ; but our aim is purity of heart, without which it is impossible to attain that end' (Cassian, Conferences, I. i. 4). ' It is for this that we ought to seek solitude, to fast, watch, work, give ourselves to reading and the practice of other virtues, having no other intention than of guarding our heart securely from all evil passions, and to progress, step by step, toward the perfection of charity' (ibid. I. i. 7).

Upon the degree of purity of heart which we have attained will our prayer depend, for 'where our treasure is, there will our heart be also,' our Lord tells us. So far as our heart is divided between God and creatures, so far our prayer will be lacking in that purity of intention which seeks only His glory and His will. Slowly it may be, but yet surely and persistently, we must strive to purify our hearts, our affections, our inclinations, from all that is not of God; from venial sins and imperfections, from wayward thoughts, especially of vanity and curiosity, all attachment to useless occupations, of disquietude born of care of the opinions of men or of solicitude for our temporal interests, of pre-occupation with self, of seeking the gratification of self in our actions, of all that dims that singleness of vision by which God alone is seen. For it is 'the pure in heart that shall see God.'

Without constant introspection or nervous watching of ourselves – for all must be done quietly and peacefully in the spiritual life – we must seek to evict from our hearts and to prevent the return of all those memories, imaginations, vain and foolish thoughts, which seek to occupy so much of our waking hours and dissipate the grace of God in our souls. And we shall do this all the more easily by filling our minds with good thoughts than by a constant endeavour to avoid bad and useless ones. 'Set your affections on things above' – that is, have those things in mind, pay attention to them, so that you are ever occupied with things that matter. A great deal of the waste of our spiritual life comes from sheer laziness of mind, for, since we must ever be thinking of something, if our thoughts are not occupied with what is good and useful they will be occupied with what is vain and useless. Thus St. François de Sales's 'Spiritual Nosegay' is no mere pretty conceit, but an intensely valuable practice, since to keep in mind some leading thought of our morning prayer will again and again save us from occupying our minds with things of no value. ' Whilst you are at prayer or when you are recollected . . . your soul finds itself in a certain interior position before God ; it takes a certain direction. This interior attitude is always the same, as you will note if you carefully consider it ; and it is this attitude which is called a state of prayer . . . and it is this you should keep in all your actions during the day' (Libermann, Lettres, i. 401).

' We should hunger,' writes Baron von Hügel, ' not for the knowledge of things to avoid, but for the future revelation of realities to love ' (Letters to a Niece, p. 38). ' Holiness consists primarily not in the absence of faults, but in the presence of spiritual forces, in love creative, love triumphant – the soul becoming flame rather than snow, and dwelling upon what to do, give and be rather than upon what to shun' (The Mystical Element in Religion, ii. p. 238).

So he who would desire to pray well, to gain that knowledge which is eternal life, must not only erect fences and set guards to protect the house of his soul ; he must at the same time adorn that house with the virtues which make it the kind of dwelling God loves. Indeed, as I have already implied, this must be our chief concern, for the active desire for good is the most potent weapon against evil. What, then, are the principal virtues which conduce to good prayer ?

I. Humility. ' The prayer of the humble pierceth the clouds ' (Eccles. xxxv. 17). Humility, which consists in a true knowledge and acknowledgement of what one is, would seem to be the favourite virtue of God, for He not only commends it and is attracted by it – ' He hath regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden ' – but chose it as the most complete manifestation of Himself (Phil. ii), and bids us learn of Him, ' for I am meek and humble of heart.'

Nothing is more necessary to prayer than humility, as our Lord teaches in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. The latter had but one virtue – the knowledge that he was a sinner, totally unworthy of entering the Divine Presence. The whole virtue of our prayer consists in our coming to God as we are. It doesn't matter what we are, whether we be as David or Mary Magdalene, but it does matter that we pretend to be something we are not. For the one impossible state is that of the soul blind to itself, lacking that honesty, that truthfulness, which alone enables it to be made other than what it is.

Further, we come to prayer in order to seek and find God. But how shall we see God if we are looking at ourselves? Unless we are convinced that there is nothing in ourselves worth looking at, and that the only thing which is truly our own is the sin we avoid looking at. To find God we must go out of ourselves, regarding ourselves as that nothingness which we are, emptying ourselves of all self-regard and self-seeking in order that we may be filled with the Spirit of God. Only to the humble does God bestow His gifts, much more Himself; 'the rich He hath sent empty away.' Our only merit, our only claim upon Him, is that we are beggars who have nothing of our own.

There are two principal ways of gaining humility.

(1) We must look for it, look at it and seek it from Jesus Christ. No mere consideration of humility as an abstract virtue will make us humble; we must see it and seek it in the Sacred Heart, for, as St. John Eudes writes, our Lord 'communicates His own virtues to His members who are docile to His influence, for He is the vital principle Who implants in them the Divine seed of His grace, making them participate in His merits, so that the virtues of the faithful are nothing else but the continuation and extension in them of the virtues of Jesus Christ.'

'Now this same humility is to be exercised, not so much in considering thine own self, thy sinfulness and misery (though to do this at the first is very good and profitable), but rather in a quiet, loving sight of the infinite endless Being and goodness of Jesus; the which beholding of Jesus must be either through grace in a savorous feeling knowledge of Him, or at least in a full and firm faith in Him' (Baker, Holy Wisdom, Sect. I., chap. vi. 5).

'Remaining little means to recognise one's nothingness, to await everything from the goodness of God, to avoid being too much troubled at our faults, not to worry over amassing spiritual riches, nor to be solicitous about anything' (St. Thérèse of Lisieux, p. 227).

(2) By the acceptance of humiliations. I say the acceptance of humiliations rather than the practice of humility, because it is chiefly in the former that the latter consists. The surest and quickest way of becoming humble is to receive and welcome the humiliations which God sends to us. 'Observe that we gain more in a single day by trials which come to us from God and our neighbour than we would in ten thousand years by penances and exercises we take upon ourselves' (St. Teresa).

We know this is true, and it sounds simple enough, but it is actually one of the hardest lessons we have to learn. One of the commonest faults of the spiritual life is the attempt to go to God in our own way. It is one of the chief causes of our failures and our slow progress. We desire to be humble, but we want to pick and choose the means of becoming so for ourselves, which only means that our supposed humility is nothing else but self in a new disguise. The only sure way of becoming humble is the training of ourselves to say 'Deo gratias' for the daily inconveniences, difficulties, slights, unpleasant tasks, imperfections and failures, reproofs, etc., the acceptance of all those things which 'go against the grain' and which are the real test of whether we do know ourselves to be deserving of nothing before God. To seek humility in extraordinary ways is all contrary to the example of Jesus Christ, Who 'humbled Himself' by submitting to the common ways and conditions of human life, Who humbled Himself in His passion because He had humbled Himself in the womb of Mary, in the manger of Bethlehem, in the Hidden Life, in all His relationship with men.

II. Charity. There must be the intention and the desire to love God above all things; that is, to prefer God before all creatures, and to love our neighbour as ourselves, for God's sake. We must see that love of God is not any vague, sentimental feeling, aroused at particular moments, but a constant act of the will choosing God before anything else. There will be times when that love calls for emotional expression, and we must not be afraid of telling our Lord, 'Thou knowest that I love Thee.' For we are to love God 'with all our hearts,' and the repetition of acts of love and desire in our prayer is one of the best ways of increasing and deepening our love for God. But it is a greater act of love, because more an act of our whole nature as well as being more difficult when we resist and endure, if we cannot banish, some temptation from within or without, deliberately, in the face of all opposition, whatever it may be, preferring God to sin. So is it that martyrdom is the greatest act of love, as our Lord said (St. John xv. 13).

And our love of God must be a love of God Himself, not merely for His gifts or for what He is to us, but because He is Himself infinitely lovable and deserving of love. So often our spiritual life is impoverished and weakened because it lacks this love of God for Himself. True 'love loves not for its own gain, but because it perceives someone most lovable. Such love desires to give more than to receive, to forget and put self on one side for the sake of the beloved; it manifests itself in the desire to be with the one loved, to please, to give to, to make sacrifices for, to be utterly generous to, to be one with the beloved. These are aspirations and desires which should always bring us to, and animate, our prayers.

Nor must we ever forget that our Lord has made charity toward our neighbour one of the foremost conditions of prayer, that there are no limits to the exercise of this charity. "There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram. "There is," said Father Brown drily, "and that is the real difference between human and Divine charity."

Fundamentally, it means, and can only be produced by our looking at our neighbour ' as a subject enclosed within the Divine Providence for His glory, and as an hierarchy of heaven and earth . . . and since the misery of this world and our blindness does not raise our minds to these thoughts, we ought to elevate our spirits to such an estimation by the power of faith and consider each soul as a work of God hidden in earth, a great work, yet buried in a perishable body and in the peculiar imperfections of nature and sin which hide from us its value and worth, known to God and His angels ' (Bérulle, Direction Spirituelle, chap. iii.). For we come to our prayer, not as individuals, but ever as members of the Body of Christ, so that anything which hinders our perfect union with that Body, or any member of it, hinders that union with God sought in our prayer. St. Teresa is very emphatic in her teaching that no progress in, or favours received in, prayer are worth anything unless they deepen charity for others within us. ' If these effects are not found, and are not greatly increased by prayer, we must conclude that this was no Divine favour, but a delusion of the Devil sent to increase our self-esteem ' (Way of Perfection, chap. xxxvi. 9).

III. Simplicity. ' Except ye become as little children, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.' There has scarcely been an age when it was more difficult to attain simplicity of heart than our own, and it is probably one of the reasons why God raised up and gave to the world such a Saint as Sœur Thérèse of the Holy Child Jesus, the Little Flower, teacher of the 'way of spiritual childhood, the way of trust and absolute self-surrender.'

'To simplify things as much as possible is a great principle of the spiritual life; the more our conduct is simple and uniform, the more perfect is it and the more easily we persevere in it' (Libermann, Lettres I., lxxxvii. 419). 'Simplicity is the virtue of the perfect. It draws down upon us the greatest favours and lights from God, since he who possesses it, thinks not, wills not, loves not any but God, for God and in God's way' (ibid., Lettre xliii.).

How shall we gain simplicity? By having our will 'anchored in the will of God'; by a constant renewal of our intention to do all for God and in God's way; by a more and more complete forgetfulness of self. 'It is absolutely necessary to shun as the most pernicious vice the reflex action of the mind, the tendency to come back upon ourselves' (Maritain: Prayer and Intelligence). By a holy and quiet contempt for what the world thinks and says, by doing what we do calmly and as perfectly as possible, yet without any anxiety as to how we do it, or wanting to do things too perfectly; by learning to do one thing and one thing only at a time; by training ourselves to be slow – all hurry, impatience, over-anxiety destroy the spiritual life; by moderating our affections and desires; by much silence; by always humbly following our grace, not trying to do more than our Lord wills and enables us to do at the present moment; by living in the present moment, which is all we have and upon which our salvation depends; by an entire and generous abandonment of ourselves into the hand of God, 'casting all your care upon Him, for He careth for you,' content, as a blind man, to be led by His Spirit, for ' as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God'; living ever in the spirit of David: ' Delight thou in the Lord, and He shall give thee thy heart's desires.'

How many things are here, we might say, how shall we ever learn them all? Never, perhaps, if they were to be taken one by one as progressive lessons in some language or science. But all we need is to see, in a broad glance, as it were, the outstanding characteristics of simplicity, and then fix upon one or two which we perceive to be our most real need. For in the spiritual life virtues are never gained singly, but to have gained one is to have gained many. For indeed they are not won by our efforts, but by our placing ourselves in the position where our Lord is able to give them to us. We cannot, by observing rules, make ourselves simple; all we can do is to show our desire, to remove the hindrances in our Lord's way, to empty ourselves so that we may be filled with the simplicity which is in Christ Jesus.

IV. The life of prayer must be begun and permeated with a rich generosity, the spirit of the Sacred Heart ' Who loved me and gave Himself for me'; the spirit of the Suscipe of St. Ignatius, of that glad giving which has marked all the Saints. ' Give, and it shall be given you,' and one of the chief reasons of the poverty of our spiritual life is that we are for ever ' keeping back part of the price.' ' We pass entire years and often all our life,' says Père Rigoluec, reproducing the teaching of his beloved master, Lallemant, ' hesitating as to whether we shall give ourselves entirely to God. We cannot persuade ourselves to make an entire sacrifice. We reserve to ourselves many affections, desires, plans, hopes, pretensions, of which we are unwilling to deprive ourselves, in order to gain that perfect nakedness of spirit which disposes us to be fully possessed by God . . .

encumbered by self-love, ashamed of our ignorance, held by false fears, we do not dare to take the step, and from fear of being miserable are always miserable' (La Doctrine Spirituelle du P. Louis Lallemant, pp. 65, 66).

'We think so much of ourselves, and are so dilatory in giving ourselves wholly to God, that, as His Majesty will not let us have the fruition of that which is so precious but at a great cost, so neither do we prepare ourselves perfectly for it... we think we are giving all to God, but, in reality, we are offering only the rent or produce, while we retain the fee simple of the land in our possession... a pleasant way this of seeking the love of God!' (St. Teresa, Life, chap. xi.).

It is this lack of entire generosity which makes it impossible for God to give us His best gifts - 'Open thy mouth wide and I will fill it'; which prevents the freedom and facility of our prayer; which holds us back from the attainment of that peace which is so essential to the interior life, which binds our soul to creatures, and so prevents the clear vision of the Creator. 'Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.' 'Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.' Blessed is he who, having found the pearl of good price, sells all that he has in order to possess it. 'Give and it shall be given you.'

It must not be forgotten that the price is not paid once for all, but by instalments. We pay it in will and intention at our conversion, and that will is accepted, but the actual payment has to be made as our Lord demands it day by day, just as the cross has to be borne, not as a whole in one single glorious act, but piecemeal, bit by bit, and each so small, so common and ordinary, that faith and love alone discern in them veritable relics of the true Cross. Only by a constant generosity, a giving of what is asked when it is asked and in the way it is asked, do we keep our souls open to the receiving of God's gifts.

V. Courage. St. Teresa tells us how, in her early life, she required all the courage she had to force herself to prayer, but that 'when I had done this violence to myself, I found greater peace and joy than I sometimes had when I felt a desire to pray' (Life, chap. viii.). 'His Majesty seeks and loves courageous souls, but they must be humble in their ways, and have no confidence in themselves' (ibid., chap. xiii. 3).

To enter upon a life of prayer and, much more, to persevere in it, demands a firm determination, a resolute will and a great confidence in God. For whilst a life of prayer brings enduring joy, yet it has not the attraction or the reward which active works give to nature and self-love. Here, all is hidden, slow, contrary to nature, so that, as St. John of the Cross teaches in The Spiritual Canticle, the soul needs 'a firm resolution not to gather flowers by the way, courage not to fear the wild beasts, and strength to pass by the mighty and the frontiers.' To gather flowers by the way may be taken to mean the resting on the enjoyment of consolation and delights in prayer, 'amusing ourselves,' taking for our own pleasure a satisfaction that is meant to lead us to God; not to fear the wild beasts; to resist manfully, yet confidently and quietly, all the attacks which the Devil, self and the world make upon us; strength to pass the mighty and the frontiers, to persevere in overcoming all the obstacles which we meet with, in a deliberate and sustained faith in God, to Whom 'all things are possible.'

If we consider the lives of the Saints, and ask what was the secret of that indomitable courage by which they persevered unto the end, a courage always accompanied with a deep and solid joy, we shall find it in the singleness of their aim and the constant thought of their eternal reward – two things conspicuously absent in the lives of most Christians of to-day. 'They endured, as seeing Him Who is invisible.' God Himself was the one object of their whole life; all their energies were directed into a single channel, toward a single end. It was for this they had been created, called, endowed with grace, for this that all around them existed. What compared with this were all the difficulties, temptations, trials of the journey? Were they not pilgrims – the world but a night in an inn – life but a journey in which the one necessary thing was a courageous perseverance? It was God they sought, Him alone, and He would not fail them. Inspired by this conviction, they 'reckoned that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory which shall be revealed in us.' Heaven, which was to them pre-eminently the sight and possession of God, not a mere going on of life under superior conditions – heaven was a reality of which they had already received a foretaste in their prayer. To be with God, one with God, to 'see the King in His beauty' and to 'wake up after His likeness,' to enjoy God in the dear company of Mary and the Saints – who would not be full of courage in pressing on to such an end?

Thus in our day, all enwrapt as we are in the actual present, Shakespeareans¹ rather than Christians, what we need in order to inspire a real courage within us is more thought of and seeking of God Himself – God as All-Adorable, All-Lovable, All-Desirable in Himself. We are too content with the means, too intent on the way, too occupied with the seen, and so, when the means do not afford us sensible comfort, when the way becomes difficult and the seen is found to be so empty, our courage has nothing solid upon which to rest.

And since we do not habitually so think of and seek God, we think little of Heaven and thus lose the attracting force which would do so much to reinforce our failing courage. A 'glory for me' religion will never create a thirst for the living God, that desire to be one with Him which, the stronger it grows, the more it accentuates the pain of separation from Him and intensifies the generous courage of the soul which seeks Heaven only because Heaven is naught else but the seen, known, loved and enjoyed Presence of God. No one, as a matter of fact, desires Heaven for itself, and, unless we have learnt and tasted in our own experience 'that the Lord is gracious,' we shall have but little courage to follow the narrow path which leads thereto. So if indeed courage is needed to begin a life of prayer, much more will our prayer aid our courage as we go on, learning more and more of our own weakness, and leaning more and more on 'the strength which God supplies.'

VI. Patience. 'In humility,' said Blessed Giles, 'the mind is set at rest and peace; patience is her daughter.' Every spiritual writer insists that all eagerness, impatience, anxiety, haste, impetuousness, are destructive of prayer and the spiritual life. St. François de Sales calls impatience 'the mother imperfection of all imperfections' – 'we must possess our hearts in longanimity; great designs are not effected save by virtue of patience and duration of time' (Letters to Persons in Religion, vi.). 'We must in all things and everywhere live peacefully. If trouble, exterior or interior, come upon us, we must receive it peacefully. If joy come, we must receive it peacefully and without throbbings of heart. Have we to avoid evil? We must do so peacefully, without disquieting ourselves; for otherwise we may fall as we run away, and give time to our enemy to kill us. Is there some good to be done? We must do it peacefully; otherwise we should commit many faults in our hurry.

Even our repentance must itself be made peacefully: Behold in peace is my bitterness most bitter, said the penitent' (Letter viii.). Impatience dissipates our life, wastes our energy, displays a lack of faith and confidence in God, leads us to act at the wrong time and in the wrong way, provokes us to say things that we do not really mean, prevents our seeing clearly, exaggerates things out of all proportion, throws us off our balance, all of which is implied in our Lord's words, 'In your patience ye shall possess your souls,' and in the fact that in nearly all languages the word for impatience means 'to be beside oneself.' 'Woe unto you that have lost patience,' for it is the way to moral, spiritual, and, not infrequently, physical suicide. No good ever comes of an impatient thought, word or act, only, at the least, a multitude of venial sins, and always a general lowering of the spiritual temperature, depression, disgust and a distaste for holy things. As to prayer, how indeed shall we pray if we come to God in a spirit of dissatisfaction and impatience with Him and His ways, forgetting ourselves and our place in petulance, sulkiness and irritability, daring, in manner at least, to blame Him for the way He acts, or, more often, because, as we foolishly imagine, He doesn't act?

We have to learn patience with ourselves, with others and with God, lessons only learnt by continual repetition and practice. 'We cannot become perfect in a day.' With ourselves, our ignorance, our slowness, our broken resolutions, our mistakes and failures, all impatience with which is only the result of our natural vanity and self-love, wounded and hurt by the sight of our imperfection. 'I am convinced,' writes Fr. Doyle, 'from a pretty big experience, that perfection is only won by repeated failures,' and St. Jane Frances de Chantal tells us that 'the best practice of the virtue of patience is bearing with oneself in failure and feebleness of will.'

Impatience with others, which in beginners in the spiritual life often excites an indiscreet zeal for their reformation, is fraught with danger to the soul. The only way of reforming others is to begin with ourselves. ' For their sakes I sanctify myself.' Our impatient zeal is too often no more than the product of self-love, which is hurt because others do not go by our way or come up to our standard.

The Devil, says St. Teresa, works like a file, and one of his wiles is to turn our zeal for perfection into a watch upon others, with the result not only that we become blind to our own shortcomings, but vitiate and harm those who resent our behaviour (The Interior Castle, M. I., chap. ii. 20, 21).

It would seem almost impossible that we should be impatient with God, yet it is very common. We get tired of walking by faith ; ' impatience for vision,' says Coventry Patmore, ' is one of the last faults to be cured ' ; we complain because our prayers are not answered to the minute, or that our finely woven schemes do not attain their purpose ; we lapse into despondency because God acts so slowly, and seems so often to take little notice of our feverish activity, except to reveal its sterility.

No virtue is more necessary both to our interior life and to our exterior activity than patience, and we shall only gain it from much dwelling in the quietness of the presence of the ' God of Patience.' ' Rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him.' ' For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the last it shall speak and not lie ; though it tarry, wait for it.' Nature is all for seeing, doing, accomplishing, but ' My ways are not your ways ' is one of the first necessary lessons of the spiritual life, and ' he that believeth shall not make haste ' ; ' they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.' Impatience is ever a shirking of the real thing, a getting out of tune with the purposes of

God, a missing of the beat, which all comes, as says Plotinus, 'from not looking at the Conductor in the midst and keeping time with Him,' for 'He shall keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee.'

VII. Desire. 'Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled.' 'Open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.' Nothing is more necessary to good prayer than humble, confident, loving desire for God. 'As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, my God.' A spiritual writer says, 'God's free gifts are generally proportioned to our desires. We get what we really desire in our spiritual life.' 'Prayer,' says St. Thomas, 'is the interpreter of a desire' (Summa Theol. II. ii., q. clxxxiii., a. 1, ad. 1). The more we desire the better will our prayer be, and the more we pray with desire the more our desire will grow. So writes St. Augustine to Proba: 'We pray always by continually desiring in faith, hope and charity. . . . And since the care of temporal things cools our desire, at certain hours we put them on one side in order to attend especially to prayer, so that by the words we pronounce we admonish ourselves of that which we desire, and by repeated desires prevent the flame from being extinguished within us' (Ep. cxxx. 18).

The desire for God is indeed His gift, and a great sign of our predestination to be cultivated to the utmost. It is the desire, the vehement thirst of the Sacred Heart for us which enkindles a responsive desire in us, and this will grow as we yield ourselves to it. There are times when we feel acutely our coldness and lack of progress, and our hearts go out in strong beseeching: 'Hear my prayer, O Lord, and consider my desire,' and yet there seems to be no reply. But that very desire burning in our hearts is the reply: 'Thou wouldst not have sought Me hadst thou not already found Me.' 'Your ardent desire to love God,' says Fr. Doyle, 'is the best proof of a real love for Him.'

It is both true psychology and true spirituality to cultivate our highest desires and aspirations by expressing them in acts of the will, for by this means we root them in our innermost self. Any desire which is kept in mind, frequently reverted to and expressed is, says Baudouin, a command, a prophecy, which will probably manifest itself in full vigour. Timid souls are sometimes afraid of such expression, fearing to give voice to what seems to be, and is, so far above their actual practice. But without such expression we shall make little progress, for whilst on the one hand we must not be content with the gulf between our desires and our accomplishment never becoming narrower, on the other, we must not be content with desires which are matched by execution, for this will be to remain in mediocrity. If it be hard at times to keep going at all, what shall it be if we cease to desire? Our only safety lies in fervour, in a continual reaching forward to what appears to be far beyond our reach; 'our Lord does not ask for success, but for infinite desire,' and there will be little real endeavour where there is little desire. Who tries to obtain what he does not desire?

'Is this pure love really in my heart? Are not my boundless desires but dreams - but foolishness? If this be so, I beseech Thee to enlighten me; Thou knowest I seek but the truth. If my desires be rash, then deliver me from them, and from this most grievous of all martyrdoms. And yet I confess, if I reach not those heights to which my soul aspires, this very martyrdom, this foolishness, will have been sweeter to me than eternal bliss will be, unless by a miracle Thou shouldst take from me all memory of the hopes I entertained on earth. Jesus, Jesus, if the mere desire of Thy love awakens such delight, what will it be to possess it, to enjoy it for ever !' (St. Thérèse de Lisieux, chap. xi.).

The masters of the Oratorian school of spirituality insist very strongly on the fact that our acquisition of the virtues depends less upon our own efforts than upon gently yielding ourselves to the action of Divine grace within our souls, and this will be found to be true for all, but especially for those whose temperament and character are such that their efforts are too often rendered sterile by their very violence and activity. Bérulle constantly speaks of the need of exposing ourselves to the influence of Jesus. We should ' present ourselves before His humility, His charity, His benignity, and open our hearts that they may imprint themselves there ' (Œuvres, 1393).

' All the mysteries of Jesus Christ,' writes P. Bourgoing, ' His words, thoughts, desires, movements, and all His holy operations, interior and exterior, are as rays having their influence upon us . . . and imprint their virtues upon us without other effort on our part and without acts of virtue formally produced . . . we have but to look at them simply and fixedly with all humility and respect, waiting their influence upon us . . . I do not say this in order to abolish the exercise and practice of interior acts and the seeking and asking for virtues . . . but . . . to introduce souls into a way of interior prayer, by manner of regard, exposition, esteem, honour, reverence, admiration and adoration of Jesus ' (Les Vérités, Avis xii.). Like the Saints, we are ' to attempt an humble, creaturely imitation of the Eternal, Spaceless Creator, under the deliberately accepted conditions of time and space,' and this has been made possible to us by the fact that the Divine Life itself has actually been lived under those conditions, so that we may, as St. Dominic used to bid his companions, ' think a little of our Lord Jesus Christ, ' and, ' looking unto Jesus, ' catch the spirit of His Heart.

Footnotes

1. Shakespeare 'has not got that sense – not merely of life's mystery, etc., but of the supernatural, of the other life, of God, our Thirst and our Home . . . no dying figure in Shakespeare looks forward; they all look backward; none thirst for the otherness of God, they all enjoy, or suffer in, and with, and for, the visible, or at least the immanent, alone' (Von Hügel, Letters to a Niece, p. 36). ↩