How To Pray

You ask me what this voice of the heart is. It is love which is the voice of the heart. Love God and you will always be speaking to Him. The seed of love is growth in prayer. If you do not understand that, then you have neither loved or prayed. Ask God to open your heart and kindle in it a spark of His love and then you will begin to understand what praying means.

If it is the heart that prays, it is evident that sometimes, and even continuously, it can pray by itself without any help from words, spoken or conceived. Here is something in which few people understand and which some even entirely deny. They insist that there must be definite and formal acts. They are mistaken, and God has not yet taught them how the heart prays. It is true that the thoughts are formed in the mind before they are clothed in words. The proof of this, is that we often search for the right word and reject one after another until we find the right one which expresses our thoughts accurately. We need words to make ourselves intelligible to other people, but not to the Spirit. It is the same with the feelings of the heart. The heart conceives feelings and adopts them without any need of resorting to words, unless it wishes to communicate to others or to make them clear to itself.

For God reads the secrets of the heart. God reads it's most intimate feelings, even those which we are not aware of. It is not necessary to make use of formal acts to make ourselves heard by God. If we do not make use of them in prayer, it is not so much for God's sake as our own, in that they keep our attention fixed on Him in His presence.

Imagine a soul so closely united to God that it has no need for outward acts to remain attentive to the inward prayer. In these moments of silence and peace, when it pays no heed to what is happening within itself, it prays and prays excellently with a simple and direct prayer that God will understand perfectly by the action of grace. The heart will be full of aspirations towards God without any other clear expression. Though they may elude our own consciousness, it will not escape the consciousness of God.

This prayer, so empty of all images and perceptions...apparently so passive and yet so active, is as far as the limitations of this life allow-pure adoration in spirit and in truth. It is adoration fully and worthy of God in which the soul is united to Him as it's ground, the created intelligence to the uncreated, without anything but very simple attention to the mind and as equally simple application of the will. This is what is called the prayer of silence, or of quiet, or bare faith.



Written by: Jean Nicholas Grou - "How To Pray"