What is prayer?
St. John Damascene is often cited for saying that prayer is lifting the mind (or “the mind and heart”) to God. De Fide Orthodoxa, Bk III, Ch 24. But if this beautifully focused description is extracted from its Catholic context, it can become misleading. There are legions of well-intentioned people in our world who are wandering far from what matters, in search of a more uplifted mind. They pursue emptiness, or centering, or inner peace when they should be searching only for God. We do need a kind of emptiness. But the person who pursues emptiness without God is like a person who buys a valuable musical instrument, only to hang it on the wall as a decoration. That’s not what it is for.
The Damascene’s definition applies more specifically to what many saints and spiritual writers call mental prayer. St. Theresa of Avila describes this as “an intimate sharing between friends … taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.” Life, Ch 8, sec 5. St. John of the Cross distinguishes between meditation, which involves the active use of the intellect and imagination, and prayer that goes beyond one’s personal activity:
When spiritual persons cannot meditate, they should learn to remain in God’s presence with a loving attention and a tranquil intellect, even though they seem to themselves to be idle. For little by little and very soon the divine calm and peace with a wondrous, sublime knowledge of God, enveloped in divine love, will be infused into their souls.
Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk II, Ch 15 sec 5. He is describing something that is literally extraordinary because it is supernatural: God Himself begins to act directly on the soul that is recollected in loving attention to Him.
Advancing in prayer is not like learning to play the violin. In music, you start poorly, playing only very simple tunes that are difficult to master and impossible to listen to. Gradually you get better. Progress is incremental. If you stick with it, the tunes become harder to play and easier to enjoy. You eventually will reach a point where further progress is halted by the limitations of your talent. Whether you are a virtuoso, an accomplished amateur, or an unknown mediocrity, you will go no further. And throughout it all, you are dependent entirely on your own ability. This process resembles prayer in only one respect: the person who doesn’t stick with it does not advance.
St. Teresa of Avila is one of the Church’s greatest saints when it comes to prayer. But prayer did not come to her easily or quickly. As a child, she did not enjoy the kinds of mystical graces received by Padre Pio, or the exemplary virtues shown by St. John of the Cross. She was a pious child, but this fervor diminished as she entered young womanhood. She struggled with the question of a religious vocation and at length decided to enter the Carmelite order. Her fervor initially returned, until she was overtaken by a serious illness that left her an invalid, partially paralyzed. She eventually recovered her health, but her prayer life was in a shambles. She had to muster all her courage just to attend the prayer hours required in the convent. And sometimes she only pretended to be praying, thinking that humility required her, miserable sinner that she was, to keep her distance from God. She persisted in this sad state for 18 years. But she persisted.
Everyone who struggles to pray–and that is almost everyone–should find a source of confidence here. We must be patient with heaven, and stubborn with hell. When temptation appears, we must dig in our heels with mulish determination, and turn back to holy thoughts. With heavenly matters, we must sometimes wait patiently, for years, until God chooses, in His own perfect timing, to act.
We must be patient with heaven, and stubborn with hell.
Teresa’s heart eventually was changed, but it was only after many years when she began to recognize the “wretched habits” she had formed, which were interfering with progress in prayer. Life, Ch 9, sec 1.
Dr. Anthony Lilles has observed that people first trying to practice mental prayer don’t initially get better, they get worse. Distractions increase; inner peace gets disrupted; past sins loom up in the memory. People are troubled by the realization, which they see with a sudden clarity, that they are broken. It is at this point that so many people turn back, thinking that they are doing something wrong. But this is often the sign that something good is happening. The habit of self-reliance that governs so many of our projects and efforts is starting to break down. The soul is starting to be led in prayer by God.
St. John of the Cross explains that this is the meaning of these lines in his poem “The Dark Night”:
In darkness and secure
By the secret ladder, disguised,
– ah, the sheer grace! –
In darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.
This is not a soothing and serene experience. The poem is referencing the saint’s own desperate and miraculous escape from imprisonment in Toledo. He slipped away from his captors in the dead of night, while they slept, and clambered down the sheer wall of the monastery by a flimsy, makeshift rope. The simple fact is that prayer is a perilous undertaking. Thus he speaks of “the greater hardship involved in quieting the house that is one’s spiritual nature and entering this interior darkness.” Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk II, Ch. 1, sec 1.
Why do we go on? The only reason is love. The soul in love with Jesus will follow Him anywhere.
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