All of us, when we are alone, begin an interior conversation with ourselves. At first, this conversation turns around what we will have for lunch, or whether a colleague will beat us to the next promotion, and so on.
As we mature, our interior dialogue widens to the needs of our family and how we might provide for them, or to the suffering around us which goes unaddressed. These things begin to trouble us, and we feel our own inadequacy and the need for God. It is important to hold to this interior direction.
Often, we fall back into worldly preoccupations: into carelessness toward our neighbour, into long-held patterns of selfishness, at times to such an extent that inward glances become uncomfortable and we flee from them into a kaleidoscope of sensations and distractions. Yet in our hours of solitude this interior conversation begins again, despite all our efforts to stifle it.
We try to interrupt it, but it has a flow of its own and this, of course, is our natural river to God. He has made us for himself, as St Augustine reminds us, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him. The interior speaker seeks a companion to its monologue – an answerer to its questions, someone to confirm, console and correct. And as we learn to listen in the stillness, another voice speaks.
Prayer is the movement from the interior conversation one has with oneself to the interior conversation one has with God. Its progress from one to the other occurs through attention to the spiritual part of the soul. Such attention leads to the revelation of God to the soul: one begins to notice what God asks and what he desires to give.
Prayer is a lifting up of the soul to God by which we come into contact with the Blessed Trinity living within us. This touch of God transforms our character, making it more like his own. It is an intimate encounter called, by the spiritual masters, mental prayer: “Mental prayer is nothing else, in my opinion, but being on terms of friendship with God, frequently conversing in secret with him who, as we know, loves us” (St Teresa of Avila, Life, ch. 8).
While this is a spontaneous process, intimate and specific to each soul, there are tried and true principles discovered by the saints that help us along this road to God. First, prayer should proceed from our love of God and end in him; it should move us beyond ourselves. In loving God we seek to think of him, and contemplation of his beauty and goodness increases our love so that we seek him more urgently.
Second, prayer must be prepared for through humility. This humility normally prompts acts of repentance and adoration. These remove pride and pour down grace to aid our prayer. From there we make an act of faith in some fundamental truth – whatever draws us: Christ’s kindness, his courage, his humility, the mysteries of his life, our vocation, our last end, and so on.
This gaze of faith upon the truth and goodness of God gives rise to acts of hope, which in turn inspire acts of love. Such love should become more real as prayer deepens, eliciting desires for conformity of our will to his, for heroic fidelity to his designs for our life, and for a strong urge to break from whatever separates us from him.
It is often good, at the end of prayer, to resolve to address some area of character that is not yet what it should be. Prayer made in this way makes us more and more like Christ, for it is natural for a person to emulate – often without knowing it – those whom one loves; and the deeper the love, the closer the resemblance to the beloved.
As the soul develops in prayer, these acts of humility, faith, hope and love tend to fuse into a single gaze of ardent love. Prayer becomes a time of rest in God, almost a foretaste of heaven.
Trusting and confident fidelity to mental prayer is the most effective way to heaven. Let St Thérèse of Lisieux have the last word. Reflecting on her fidelity to prayer within Carmel and the suffering she had endured, she exclaimed to her sister Céline about the progress they were now making: “We no longer walked – we ran, we flew along the path of perfection” (Story of a Soul, ch. 7).
