The Priest at Prayer for August 4, Purity of Intention

The Third Part - Vices and Virtues

Purity of Intention

First Meditation - Its Importance

I. Good works, by themselves, are valueless in the eyes of God. What imparts real value to them, supernatural value, is our right intention informed by divine grace. Therefore, the soul of every virtue is the intention. The divinest act with a perfect intention will be most pure; with an indifferent intention, indifferent; with a wicked intention, abominable.

For example, a kiss imprinted on Christ's brow. When the lips were those of His Mother Mary, burning with motherly and divine love, it was the sublimest act of religion and devotion, the blending and fusing of all the highests acts of human love into the aaoration of the Son of God; when the kiss came from the lips of some woman in the Nazareth neighbourhood who, not know­ing who Jesus was, kissed Him simply because He was a comely and winsome child, the act was morally an indifferent one; from the lips of Judas in the Garden, it was the most monstrous crime that ever defiled the race of Adam.

Yet in all three kisses only one thing changed: the intention.

This doctrine is applicable to every free-willed act of my life. Scrutinising my deepest intention, God judges me accordingly.

II. Let us meditate on the profound utterance of our Lord when He compares our inward intention to our bodily eyesight:

"Thy body has the eye for its lamp; and if thy eye is clear, the whole of thy body will be lit up; when it is diseased, the whole of thy body will be in darkness."

"Take good care, then, that this principle of light which is in thee is light, not darkness; then, if thy whole body is in the light, with no part of it darkness, it will all be lit up as if by a bright lamp enlightening thee." (Luke xi, 34-36)

The lamp which lights up your good works, rendering them visible and either acceptable or displeasing to God, is your intention; so, if your intention is resplendent with clarity, rectitude, and holiness, all your works bask in splendour; if your intention is crooked, obscure, and evil, your works are darkness itself, because the very principle of light, your good intention, is extinguished.

III.By my priestly office I am obliged to perform, during the greater part of my life, works that are not merely good but eminently holy and divine; and yet, have I not miserably forfeited the merit attaching to most of them because they lacked that very simple and practical quality, right intention?

Either I try to please people for the sake of pleasing them, or I perform my duties for the stipend, just to avoid comment, to satisfy my own vanity, or simply to indulge my natural impulse for an active occupation. How often, dear Lord, have I ful­filled my duties for Thee alone? How often to win eternal life myself and to save the souls of others?

What a tremendous pity! After death, when I shall have left everything behind me, including the idols before whose altar I sacrificed so many of my illustrious actions, I shall be taken before that inexorable Court of Justice from which there is no appeal; I shall have no other credit or defence than the good works which were holy in appearance but which, when lit up by Jesus Christ in the light of eternity, will stand revealed in all their hollowness, like artificial fruit models; or else they will exhibit an inner core of corruption: white sepulchres concealing the carrion flesh of puny abortive creatures that were delivered stillborn within the pan­theon of my heart.

Resolutions
The natural products of my actions: human prestige, emoluments, and so forth, are not the fruit, specifically, of any intention or thought of mine; in other words, I shall get the same stipend for a sermon or a Mass whether I think of the stipend or not. On the other hand, there is another kind of fruit, the most valuable kind; namely, grace and eternal life; and this I obtain only through my purity of intention. Therefore, I am not going to be so stupid as to worry about what comes to me independently of any intention of mine, and at the same time pay little or no heed to the one thing that demands it.

I shall henceforth purify my intention, offering all my works to God each morning; and I shall ratify my in­tention every time I am prompted to seek in my actions interests that are unworthy of a priest or fall short of priestly perfection.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

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