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.

The true riches you have in yourself, and that you can give to God with love, and please Him exceedingly are these: Humility, Confidence, Surrender, and Hope. . . They are the offerings of the poor, of people who know they possess nothing before God. These four riches, which you can certainly give God all the time, make it possible to have great peace of soul despite your faults and failings, assuming you do not love those faults and failings.

The first offering you can give God is not success or greatness or strength or zeal or a fiery devotion. It is humility. I do not mean that you think to yourself, “I have a great deal of the virtue of humility. I am a very humble person.” Not at all. Probably you are proud and, therefore, not virtuous at all. No, the humility you can offer God is your littleness, your spiritual poverty, your acknowledgment that you are lacking in all sorts of good things you ought to have. Be poor in spirit. See how unsatisfactory you are and admit it. God loves humility. Not the humility of a very virtuous man who says “I am a great sinner.” We are not virtuous men. We are failures before God. It is our poverty, our neediness that attracts God’s mercy and love to us. . . It is something that draws God into our souls most intimately and powerfully. Why should you not offer your humility, your lowliness, your nothingness to God? Why should you not realize that this is exactly what God wants from you? It is all you have to give. . . “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” At least all our faults and humiliating qualities and failures and mistakes and perplexities can increase your humility; so the worse sort of person you are, the easier it is for you to be humble and poor in spirit. . .

The second of the riches we can also give God is a child’s gift of confidence. Like humility this can be given to Him by anyone who wants to, because confidence is entirely in Him and not in ourselves or our virtues at all. You trust God’s providence in all things. When you have something to do or endure that is God’s will, whether it is a small or a great thing, you simply commit the outcome to Him and refuse to worry. God is, of course, absolutely worthy of trust, and Our Lord told us not to worry because we are worth a great deal to God, and He has care for us. We shall not have this confidence if we are still dependent on ourselves spiritually, because then our weaknesses and faults will undermine our confidence. But trust in God Who is all powerful and infinite love and mercy should not be shaken by anything at all. So, like humility, this virtue of confidence can be given to God by even the most abject failure in the spiritual life. We can all be humble and we can all trust God. We may not always feel as if we trust God, and may have involuntary fears, but knowing something is God’s will, we can all go ahead and do it with the intention of trusting God. Trust in God depends on His goodness, not our merit. Confidence in God grows with practice and is a very important factor in our spiritual life. . .

The third of the riches we all have and can quite easily give to God is surrender.
. . . We can all surrender ourselves to God. We do so each day in our morning offering, I hope, and we certainly do so whenever we take part in Holy Mass. We then offer ourselves with Jesus to the Father in complete self-giving. We put ourselves in God’s hands for better or for worse. We intend to accept all that He wills. We surrender ourselves to all that happens to us under God’s all-embracing providence, and we surrender ourselves to all the demands of God’s holy will concerning what we should do or not do. Surrender to God does not depend on great holiness. We can all do God’s will and accept it. If anything is beyond us because of our littleness, it is not God’s will for us. So our absolute surrender to God goes with our poverty or humility and with our confidence. They all fit together, and none of them depends on our being strong or successful or spiritually self-possessed. They are all attachments to God, which we can make by an act of determination. They do not depend on our being rich but on our being poor and being conscious of it and even being glad of it because it makes us blessed.

The fourth of the riches we can give God is hope. We have not yet received the full possession of the Kingdom of God. We are not fully united with God yet. We are still living on earth and the things of God are partly hidden by the veil of faith, but it is quite within our power to hope for the reward of heaven, for the possession of God, and for eternal happiness and fulfillment. God wants us to look forward to these wonderful realities. In fact, without hope we cannot have faith or charity.

If you really look at the things we give God of ourselves—humility, confidence, surrender, and hope—you will find that they will lead us to holiness, and to great holiness. . .

Think of all the thoughts and ideas and faults and failings and upsets you have in your relationship with God, all the things that seem to you to keep God away from you to some extent. You will find they all stop being obstacles, although you will not stop trying to overcome them out of love for God, if you say the Our Father, meaning every word, and in an attitude of humility, confidence, surrender, and hope.