The Perfection of Prayer

This, this is the formula the mind should cling to without ceasing. It should cling to it until, strengthened by constant use of it and by continual meditation, it casts off and rejects the rich and plentiful material of thoughts of every kind and limits itself to the poverty of this one verse. In this way it arrives with ready ease at that blessing of the gospel which holds the first place among the other Beatitudes. For he says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” And so whoever becomes nobly poor by a poverty of this kind will fulfill this saying of the prophet: “The poor and needy will praise the name of the Lord.” And indeed, what greater or holier poverty can there be than that of a man who knows that he has no defense and no strength of his own, and asks for daily help from another’s generosity? He is aware that at every single moment his life and his substance depend on God’s help. So, not without reason, he calls himself the Lord’s beggar, and cries to him daily in prayer: “But I am poor and needy; the Lord helps me.” [a]

And so, by the light of God himself, he climbs to that many-sided knowledge of him, and from then on begins to be fed on loftier and still more sacred mysteries, as these words of the prophet say: “The high hills are a refuge for the stags, the rocks for the hedgehogs.” This is quite fairly applied in the sense we have given. For whoever continues in simplicity and innocence harms or offends no one. Content with his own simple condition, he tries only to defend himself from being plundered by his foes. He becomes a kind of spiritual hedgehog, and is protected by the constant shield of that rock of the gospel. That is, he is sheltered by the remembrance of the Lord’s passion, and by ceaseless meditation on the verse given above he escapes the snares of the enemies who oppose him. Of these spiritual hedgehogs we read in Proverbs as follows: “And the hedgehogs are a feeble people, who have made their homes in the rocks.” And indeed, what is feebler than a Christian? What is weaker than a monk? He is not only allowed no revenge for wrongs done to him, but is not even allowed to let a slight and silent feeling of irritation spring up inside him. But whoever advances from this condition, and not only secures the simplicity of innocence but is also shielded by the virtue of discernment, becomes a destroyer of deadly serpents and has Satan crushed beneath his feet, and by his quickness of mind answers to the figure of the stag, a stag endowed with reason. This man will feed on the mountains of the prophets and apostles, that is, on their highest and loftiest mysteries.

Thriving on this pasture continually, he will take into himself all the thoughts of the Psalms. He will begin to sing them in such a way that he utters them with the deepest feeling of heart, not as if they were the compositions of the psalmist, but as if they were his own words and his very own prayer. He will certainly take them as aimed at himself, and will recognize that their words were not only fulfilled long ago by the prophet or in his person, but are being fulfilled and carried out every day in his own case. For it is then that the Holy Scriptures lie open to us more clearly, and, as it were, their very veins and marrow are laid bare: when our experience not only perceives their meaning but actually gets there ahead of it, and the sense of the words is revealed to us not by an explanation of them but by proof in practice. For if we have experienced the very state of mind in which each Psalm was sung and written, we become like their authors, and we reach the meaning before we are led to it. That is, we grasp the force of the words before we really know them. When the thoughts of them come over us, we remember what has happened to us and what is happening in our daily struggles. While we sing them, we call to mind all that our carelessness has brought on us, or our earnestness has won, or God’s providence has granted, or the promptings of the enemy have robbed us of, or slippery and subtle forgetfulness has carried off, or human weakness has brought about, or thoughtless ignorance has cheated us of. For we find all these feelings expressed in the Psalms. So, seeing whatever happens as in a very clear mirror, we understand it better. Taught by our own feelings as our teachers, we lay hold of it as something not merely heard but actually seen. It is as though it were not committed to memory but planted in the very nature of things, and it moves us from the very bottom of the heart. In this way we reach its meaning not by reading the text but because our experience has gone ahead of it.

And so our mind will reach that incorruptible prayer to which, in our former treatise, the plan of our Conference climbed, as far as the Lord was pleased to grant. This prayer is not only not occupied with gazing on any image, but is marked by the use of no words or utterances at all. With the mind’s purpose all on fire, it is brought forth through ecstasy of heart by some indescribable keenness of spirit. The mind, moved in this way without the help of the senses or of anything visible, pours it out to God with groanings and sighs that cannot be uttered.