The Priest at Prayer, May 29

Second Part
The Priestly Ministry

The First Ministerial Duty

Third Meditation - Mental Prayer

I.
If in my soul, illuminated by faith, there remains the tiniest spark of affection for supernatural good, or of hatred for sin and sin's necessary consequences, the love behind this affection or hatred will from time to time evoke an idea or a sentiment pertaining to its object. Meditation, therefore, in the sense of frequent and affec­tionate remembrance or reflection, is the obbligato accompaniment to the melody of love. Hence the Psalmist:

Concupivi salutare tuum, Domine, et lex tua meditatio mea est.
Meditabar in mandatis tuis, quae dilexi.
Quomodo dilexi legem tuam, Domine; tota die meditatio mea est.
(Ps. cxviii)

"Weary it is, Lord, waiting for deliverance, but thy law is my comfort. Fain would I have all my study in the law I love. My delight is in thy bidding; ever my thoughts return to it."

The only way to recapture this love, if we should have the immense misfortune to be without it, would be to meditate assiduously and systematically on God's Goodness and promises. In the light of this Goodness the supernatural treasures will stand revealed, they do not shun the light of day. And why do we not passion­ately desire them? Simply because we have not relished the knowledge of them, an experimental knowledge that only affectionate and sustained reflection will yield.

Grant me, O Lord, to bring my parched and thirsting soul to those pure abundant waters where the seraphim slake their thirst, and where legions of saintly souls have drunk deep.

II.
It is not enough to believe; it is not good enough to keep the soul-stirring divine truths stored away like books of no practical use on the most recondite shelves of the mind; these truths will be energy, impulse, and fire, to the will and the other working faculties only when they shed their light upon the intellect, arouse the memory with their sublime evocations, inflame the will with longing or inspire with dread; only when we transform these truths by meditation into the daily sustenance of our spiritual organism.

Why do I remain stone-cold in the presence of the truths of our holy Faith? Is it not, radically, because of my aloofness from the exercise of meditation?

Moreover, the priestly virtues, so delicate as they are, in vessels so brittle, amid the inclemencies of that harsh climate called the world, will germinate and reach maturity only if they are kept in their native warmth, like hothouse plants, in the grace of God and in an atmosphere of supernatural motivation. Such an environ­ment is the product of chaste representations in the imagination, of pious reminiscences in the memory, of reasoning about holy things in the mind, and of spiritual yearnings in the will; that is to say, meditation.

And yet we wonder why our passions never seem to bend to control, why our virtues are lifeless or grow up so weak and rickety. Can't we see that the icy wind of a worldly and dissipated life is enough to nip them in the bud? Is there in my soul, open to all the gales of unruly desire, even the smallest plot of land sheltered by the warmth of piety where those virtues can ger­minate as in a nursery and come to maturity?

III.
In the confessional, in the pulpit, in our everyday dealings, we are obliged to speak a thousand times about the truths of our Faith and about Christian morals, in order to teach, convert, and consolidate the good begun.

If we try to impart all this to the faithful without having first made it part and parcel of our inmost being, both affectively and intellectually, by means of assiduous meditation, we shall closely resemble a man describing scenes only from hearsay, with the same inexactitude, conventionalism, and lack of feeling.

Let us bestow loving attention day in and day out upon what we have to expound to the faithful, and then, how different our speech will be! It will flow with the convincing and captivating tones of one who has con­templated a beautiful landscape and been wholly capti­vated by it.

There must be no mistake about it: only from fre­quent meditation shall we extract, by the grace of God, that overwhelming power of persuasion inherent in divine Truth, that evangelical unction, which is the soul of all fruitful apostolate.

Resolution
I frankly confess before God that I have flippantly underestimated the practice of mental prayer, notwith­standing the high esteem in which the Church has always held it. I see now, as clear as daylight, that this underrating has been the source of not a few of my spiritual misfortunes and of the fruitlessness of my ministry. By my undevout life, estranged from the atmosphere of the spirit of faith, I have been what St. Jude would call

"a cloud with no water, driven before the winds; an autumn tree that bears no fruit, given over anew to death, plucked up by the roots." (Jude, 12)

Grant me, O God, steadfastness in carrying out for the remainder of my days this salutary resolution which in Thy Presence I now engrave on my heart; namely, never to omit for a single day the exercise of medita­tion; if it cannot be done in the morning, I shall make it in the evening or at any other hour. I am resolved to keep the law laid down in Canon Law:

"All clerics shall devote some time to mental prayer every day." (Can. 125, ii) [1917 Code]

_________________________
Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

###
Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!