Fr. John Keep: Thoughts on Spiritual Reading

The Garden of the Soul
(continued from a June 4, 1972 conference)

Let us make, or let us renew our firm intention to be men and women of prayer. Nothing can stop us if we really want to be, above all else, dedicated to glorifying God, drawing down blessings on the world, and purifying ourselves by prayer. Perhaps the biggest step to take is that of making a really effective resolution to give a definite minimum amount of time to prayer, and to nothing else. This resolution should be so firm that even if we feel completely unable to pray or concentrate or do anything prayerful, we will still keep that period of time empty of anything else. Neither anxiety nor boredom nor restlessness nor anything else must make us violate that time set aside for God. One can adore God by keeping at prayer even if it is a prayer of boredom or anxiety or restlessness. If you do keep it up, the time comes when boredom gives way to peace, and anxiety becomes dissolved in an unexpected experience of trust and confidence, and restlessness changes into regret that you cannot go on praying forever.

Giving God the time and one’s undivided attention is, then, the most important effort we should make in becoming really absorbed by the desire to pray. When God responds to our persistence, we shall no longer have any difficulty in praying a great deal, but shall regret that we cannot be at it a great deal more.

Having fixed the external framework for progress in prayer and in peace and in finding God more intimately by making resolutions about the quantity of time for prayer, we then try to learn how to improve the quality of our prayer, to spend the time at better prayer. The whole of one’s daily life is the background to prayer, and a fussy, noisy life, full of gossip and curiosity is not a good remote preparation for quiet and loving, undistracted prayer with God. In fact, as one’s use of prayer time is improved, so the distinction between prayer time and the rest of the day becomes less. There grows a quietness of spirit and a kind of calmness and warmth through all one’s daily activities. One ceases to be over-involved in the temporal affairs of life, although they are still looked after as conscientiously as ever. One begins almost unconsciously to see everything in God; one sees everything under the eyes of eternity. A really prayerful life will give us not only an immense reverence for the lovely majesty of God, but a reverence for all created things too, for they the works of His hands, and He made them lovingly and with a wonderful purpose. By persevering prayer we come to give glory to God for all creation and to find a harmony between all things. The peace of God, which does pass all understanding, brings with it as well a kind of peace we can understand, a harmony with all that is. All creation was made for prayer. . . .

If only we could realize what it is to be in the presence of our loving Father, paying attention to Him alone. If we realized what He does to us at such moments, whether we feel it or not, we should at least double our times of prayer and regard the loss of them as a greater loss than almost anything else. “Awake, north wind, come, wind of the south! Breathe over my garden to spread its fragrance around. Let my Beloved come into his garden; let him taste its rarest fruits.” Let us cultivate the garden of our soul; let us keep its rarest fruits for Him.

People sometimes ask for a definition of prayer. They want to know exactly what it is, but there are so many definitions of prayer that no single formula really covers all kinds of prayer. St. Teresa of Avila gives us a helpful definition of what mental prayer is, and the most intimate meeting we have with God is the one we have during mental prayer, which is the prayer of the heart. St. Teresa’s description of mental prayer is helpful because it contains a phrase which is not found in many other definitions. She says that mental prayer “is nothing but friendly intercourse and frequent solitary converse with Him Whom we know loves us.” Those last few words, “with Him Whom we know loves us” are very important. For mental prayer you need confidence and the knowledge that God enjoys it, even with you. We know that God loves us. We need to be as vividly aware of that as possible when we are having our meetings with Him in mental prayer. It is a meeting that seems to be called by ourselves, but in fact God has arranged it, and He wants it because He loves us. It is not because He gets anything from us but because He can give us His love that God delights to find us engaged in mental prayer. It is an activity never to be given up on any pretext.

Although God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, we can speak about getting closer to Him. This is a metaphor to describe growth in our union with God. As far as prayer is concerned, we get nearer to God by finding Him more and more deeply in our own hearts. The process of getting deeper and deeper into our own hearts in prayer depends on God’s grace, of course, but we can help it by clearing away obstacles. In particular, we need to get rid of those things that prevent us from having interior peace. God dwells in peace, and when we are not peaceful we are not capable of listening to Him, not capable of feeling His presence within us, although He is there all the time. . .

True peace only comes when in us there is conformity with the will of God, and being at peace with one another is one requirement of God’s will for us. The second need, if we are to have interior peace, is detachment from the things of this world. One of the greatest obstacles to peace of soul is dependence on the things of this world for our satisfaction. If we live for temporal things and look to them for pleasure all the time, we shall never be a peace. Not only can the things of this world not give us true satisfaction, but they are not dependable and do not last. So being attached to temporal things is a bar to true peace of heart. As a matter of fact, it is not the possession of many things that destroys our peace or blocks our meeting with God, but the desire for them. It is our desires that tie us in knots and cause our frustrations and lack of peace. We ought to want those things that are needed if we are to live the lives God wants us to lead, but we should not want things for any other reason. We should not love them in themselves. We should not see them as part of our personal make-up and identity. We should be detached from the things of this world so that if God did remove some of them from us we should not be shattered. Our attachment should be to God and the things of God. Other realities should be loved because of their place in God’s scheme of things and not for themselves. So we need to be at peace with all men and to be detached from created things, to have a certain independence with regard to them.

The third requirement for peace of heart in which to meet God is humility. The fact is that to be with God, to meet Him in peace, we have to be looking for Him; we have to be looking at Him in our hearts, and we cannot look at God if we are always watching ourselves. Self-regarding is an obstacle to seeing God. If we are always watching ourselves during our prayer, we shall not see God even though He is there, and if we are not humble in general, we shall be watching ourselves at prayer because we are always watching our own interests at other times too. Turn away from yourself; look at God; see yourself as the nothing you are before God. But remember that nothing has been loved by God into yourself. It is not you who make yourself any good. It is God. Be humble. God is real, and we are real only if we are rightly related to Him. If in our hearts we feel self-important, independent, self-confident, and self-existent, we have not seen our real dependence on God; we have not seen the truth about ourselves. Humility is truth. You will not see God if you are standing on a pedestal before yourself or other people.

In our journey to meet God, then, we do not have to go far, for God is with us. We do not have to persuade Him to let us meet Him, for He has invited us. We do not have to persuade ourselves that we are attractive or pleasant in order to feel that God is waiting; He is knocking at the door. All we have to do is to ask Him to come in. We have to make room for Him in our hearts. If our hearts are full of rancor against someone else, or if we are attached to created things so that our hearts are set on them, or if we are proud and our hearts are set on ourselves, then we crowd God out. No wonder that in such cases we do not find that peace and joy in prayer that the spiritual writers promise us if we truly engage in mental prayer.

When I was quoting St. Teresa’s definition of mental prayer earlier on, I pointed out that we need to know that God loves us. We know that He loves us so much that He sent His infinite Son to become a mere man and then to die on the Cross for us. He loved us while we were still sinners, says St. Paul. How much more must He love us when we turn to Him and seek Him with whatever love we have in our hearts? To pray deliberately, and especially to pray mentally, is something very great. The desire to pray well is itself a great grace from God. It is God making His invitation felt. We know that we are invited to pray whenever we will. When we actually do so we are doing something of eternal significance, unlike so many of the things we do during the course of our day. We are in the conscious presence of the God we love and by Whom we know that we are loved. We should therefore enter our state of prayer with great humility and even with awe because of the greatness of God. We should enter it with great joy because of the beauty and goodness of God. And we should enter it with great confidence because God loves us with God’s love, not ours.

“Mental prayer is nothing but loving intercourse, frequent conversation in solitude, with Him Whom we know loves us.”