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.


 
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There is no doubt that it is God’s will that we keep up a life-long effort quite deliberately to grow in holiness, to become more perfect.  Our Lord even told us that we were to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.  These are truths that we must certainly accept and we must take them very seriously.  Unfortunately it is quite possible to misunderstand what Jesus meant, and we may form an idea of perfection and of the way to achieve it which is not the right one.  There are people who go about seeking the perfection they imagine they should seek and do it with methods and mental attitude that they think are correct and yet become less and less perfect as time goes on.
           
The first thing to notice is that when we are told to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect, Our Lord does not mean that we as human beings are to seek to have the perfections that God has.  Obviously we cannot seek to have the fullness of God’s knowledge or power or glory.  We cannot become infinite in perfection in any way.  So that is not what Jesus meant. . .

We are not called to be perfect in the same way as God is perfect.  God is perfect God.  What we are called to become . . . are perfect human beings. . . The moral law we have received from God tells us what behavior is human and what is not, but there are some things that are perfectly human and good which some people seeking perfection wrongly tell us we must give up.  If we pursue the wrong ideal of perfection, then the more effort we put into our quest, the more damage we do to ourselves.  If we have good will about it and are not to blame for our mistaken idea about perfection, God may well bless us for our efforts, but they will not make us happy and peaceful and content as the path to true perfection will. . .

The fact is that your own perfection, if you achieve it with God’s help, will be the full realization as a child of God of the person God made you when He designed and created you. . .

So one thing to get rid of is the idea that in order to be perfect you have got to stop being yourself in some way.  No, you have got to try to become exactly what God wants you to become, and what God wants you to become is your true self, since that is what He loves. . .

The real you is God-given, and if you despise that true self, you are despising a gift from God, and that displeases Him very much.  We must accept ourselves and thank God for ourselves.  We must not accept our self-seeking and all the other things that deform and damage us, but the basic self is God-given and is loved by God because what He made is very good. . .

The path to God, life with God, living with Jesus, even in our present imperfect state, is something peaceful and calm and joyful.  The path to God . . . is a path of love and not a path of fear.  Our use of the confessional itself should be out of love and not out of fear.  Worry and fear in the spiritual life bring havoc to us.  We probably shall have fears of one kind or another in life; they come from the child in us.  But we must not have fear in our relationship with God.  We must have confidence that we belong to Him and that He is not, because of our failings, going to cast us out when we come to Him.

So let us accept and love God’s holy will in all things and confidently know that He will keep us safe because He loves us.  The only way to lose God’s love in your life is by turning deliberately away from Him, not just committing serious sin but by loving and choosing sin.

We are called to follow the peaceful and firm path towards perfection without any voluntary fear.  “Fear not,” says Our Lord, “for I am with you.”  And “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”