Some Final Sunday Thoughts About Prayer of the Heart

These last few Sundays we've followed Fr. Grou's dissertation about "Prayer of the Heart." The reason we've posted Father's thoughts remains treating Sunday as a special time for prayer - over and above our attendance at Holy Mass. Sunday is the Lord's Day. In addition to His expectation that we will honor Him with our worship at Mass, He provides respite for us to rest, to break from the regular grind of our work and domestic obligations. That respite affords us "extra" time we might not have during the week to pray more than our usual dose, especially if that dose is especially spartan.

Whatever our Sunday plans, let's try to take at least a generous slice of that extra time for prayer.

Fr. Grou's teaching about "Prayer of the Heart" isn't complicated. Anyone can read and grasp his points. Of course, we have to slow ourselves down and read thoughtfully. And we have to think about what we're reading. Do that and the rewards are great.

So let's do that now, one last round-up Prayer of the Heart:

"The voice of the heart is love. Love God and your heart will always be speaking to Him; it will always be praying to Him. The germ of love is the germ of prayer; the development and the perfection of love are the development and perfection of prayer. If you do not understand this, you have never loved and never prayed. Ask God to open your heart, and to kindle in it a spark of His love; then you will begin to understand what praying means. …

“If it is the heart that prays, it is evident that sometimes, and even habitually, it can pray by itself, with no assistance from words either expressed or mental. This is a fact that few people realize, and many absolutely reject. They insist on the necessity of definite, formal acts, interior if not external, which must be distinctly perceptible, and of which the soul must be conscious: apart from such acts they recognize no prayer. They are mistaken, and God has not yet taught them how the heart prays. It prays as the mind thinks. Now thought is formed in the mind before it is clothed in words. The proof of this fact is that we often search for the right word, and reject one after the other till we find one which expresses our thought precisely. We need words to make us intelligible to others; but they are of no use to us in our minds, and if we were pure spirit we should use no language, either to formulate or to communicate our thoughts. It is the same in the case of the heart and its feelings. The heart conceives feelings, adopts them, and puts them in practice without any need of resorting to words, unless it wishes to express them outwardly or make them manifest to itself. But God reads the secrets of the heart; he perceives its most intimate sentiments, even those that are neither formulated in the mind nor perceived by the soul...

“People treat with God as they do with men, thinking they are not understood unless they go into detailed explanations of the things they require. They carefully get ready their intention, they have express forms for each and every act, they name separately each person they wish to pray for, and if the least detail escapes their memory they do not think that God can supply it. Souls of little faith, and who know not God, your intentions are present to Him before you open your mouth! He sees them as soon as they are formed in your heart; what need have you to torment yourselves in explaining them to Him? 

“Be simple in your piety. Do not rely upon your mind, nor on the subtlety and depth of your reasoning. Solid piety is not founded on thoughts, but on the affections. And do not use many books, exercises, and methods. Look into your heart for what you wish to say to God and say it to Him simply, without being too particular about the words. It is absurd to aim at eloquence when you are speaking to Him, and to confine yourself to well-composed prayers instead of using those that are more natural to you. Simplicity is the characteristic of all real prayer, and nothing is more pleasing to God. He does not desire so much formality in His service: the reduction of devotion to an art and the use of so much method has had a very injurious effect. After all, everything depends on the Holy Spirit. He alone teaches the true way of conversing with God, and we see that when He takes possession of a soul the first thing He does is to withdraw it from all the methods devised by man."

Happy Sunday!