A Prayer for Light on Hidden Faults

As for these passions: just as their causes are recognized by everyone as soon as the teaching of the elders lays them open, so before they are revealed nobody knows them, although we are all overcome by them and they exist in everyone. But we trust that we will be able to explain them to some degree, if through your prayers that word of the Lord announced by Isaiah may apply to us as well: “I will go before you and bring low the mighty ones of the land; I will break the gates of bronze and cut apart the iron bars; and I will open to you concealed treasures and hidden secrets.” [a]

So may the word of the Lord go before us too. May it first bring low the mighty ones of our land, that is, these very evil passions we want to overcome, which claim for themselves dominion and a most horrible tyranny in our mortal body. May it make them yield to our investigation and explanation, and so, breaking the gates of our ignorance and cutting apart the bars of the vices that shut us out from true knowledge, may it lead us to the hidden things of our secrets. And may it reveal to us, once we have been enlightened, “the hidden things of darkness,” as the apostle says, “and make manifest the counsels of the hearts.” Then, piercing with pure eyes of the mind into the foul darkness of the vices, we may be able to uncover them and drag them out into the light, and succeed in explaining their causes and natures both to those who are free of them and to those still tied and bound by them. And so, passing, as the prophet says, through the fire of the vices that so terribly inflame our minds, we may be able at once to pass also, unharmed, through the water of the virtues that put them out, and, refreshed as with dew by spiritual remedies, may be found worthy to be brought in purity of heart to the consolations of perfection.