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.

God loves you. That is a dogmatic truth. To deny it is to deny the faith itself, but most of us do not really accept it. We do not feel that it is true. We feel that it could not be true, seeing what we are like. . . We feel that God does not really love us because, we think, He cannot be pleased with us. We are not pleased with ourselves, and ought not to be, and so we think God is not pleased with us. And if He is not pleased with us, we think, therefore He does not really love us. We put Him off every time He looks at us. Such thoughts and feelings as these are very harmful. Of course God is not pleased with us when we let Him down, but does that mean He loves us less? Does a good mother love her child less because he falls down sometimes? Does she love him less when, like the child he is, he is occasionally disobedient? She loves him all the more because he needs her help more, and she tries to train him.

God is love, and although He is omnipotent, He cannot possibly be anything but love. The only way God can look at you is with love. He may not love your conduct, but He loves you. If you fail from time to time, if you even commit sins from time to time, it does not cause God to stop loving you. He dislikes your conduct because it harms you, but His love is still there. When you fail God in some way, you should not feel tense or estranged from Him in any way. You should be sorry, very sorry, but not uneasy. . .

I think we need to remember that we have to love ourselves. We should love ourselves because God loves us. We should not love our bad conduct, but we should not hate ourselves because of it. As with others, so with ourselves, we must make a distinction between the sin and the sinner. In ourselves we are what God made and what God loves. At any moment, and certainly at this moment, God is looking at you with love. Supposing at this moment you were praying or doing something else and felt that you were not doing it very well. If that were your situation, you ought to feel that God loves you as much as ever. Whatever criticism your conduct calls for, do not let it color your idea as to how much God loves and accepts you.

Some people go through a devout life always feeling that they are not doing enough and that if only they did more they would please God and feel that He really loved them. Well, some people ought to do more, no doubt, but we ought not to do it in order to earn God’s love but in order to return what is already there for us. While we should want to become saints gradually, we ought not to feel uneasy in our contact with God in the meantime. God never frowns. He is light and life and joy and beauty and ecstasy, and this God loves you hear and now more than you can conceive. If only you would realize how great and genuine and deep and unrestrained that love is, you would be a different person. You would have a peace you never imagined before, peace that passes all understanding. You would wonder how you could ever be depressed again. . .

The beginning of the Good News is that God loves us, but it goes on to tell us that He not only loves us but that He saves us, that our failures and faults and sins do not any longer have to separate us from God’s love for us.

In our younger days, we were taught to make acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition. These acts were short formulae or prayers that we knew by heart. We used to say them very often, and it did us a lot of good. If you make acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition, these virtues themselves grow within you. At least they do if you really mean what you say as you pray these acts. You have to put some punch into them if they are really to have their effect. They need to be said with firm inner conviction. . .

At this moment, if you can say to God, and you ought to be able to do so, “My God, I firmly believe that you love me,” then any spiritual uneasiness that you may have should disappear. And if you repeat this act whenever you begin to feel uneasy spiritually, whenever you feel that you are not quite acceptable to God, then you will put things right. With reasonably devout people, the great barrier to spiritual growth is not their faults and failings and sins, although these exist and must always be fought against, but their feeling of uneasiness with God. They do not really feel that they are children of the Father who loves them, even when they say the Our Father.

Let us very often make this simple act of faith in God’s love for us: “My God, I firmly believe you love me.” If we do this, as it becomes a habit, it enters our heart, and no longer does God’s love for us reside in our heard as a bit of knowledge, but it enters our hearts as fire. This makes us love God much more, and out of love for Him, we find we want to make greater efforts to become more perfect. We make efforts, then, out of love and not out of uneasiness, and we live in a state of peace and tranquility, not tension. Our efforts to serve God better are real efforts but they do not make us tense, and our failings do not make us uneasy. They make us humble, and they make us peacefully sorry. We know we are accepted by God, and nothing can snatch us from His hands. We are in Jesus’ hands where God put us, and Jesus is God, and God is love. We are loved, and nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.