And while we are fain to draw nigh with all lowliness and modesty, with minds sincere and simple, let our hearts burn with great desires, with ardour and heartfelt longings. And so let us supplicate our God, and lay before Him with entire confidence the perils which menace us on every side. Let us freely, unhesitatingly, and in all simplicity, confide ourselves to Him, and offer Him our whole being, even to the last fibre, for are we not in truth absolutely His?
Let us keep nothing for ourselves, and then will be fulfilled in us the saying of Blessed Isaac, one of the Fathers of the Desert, who, speaking of this kind of prayer, said: "We shall be one being with God, and He will be all in all to us, when that perfect charity by which He loved us first has entered into our inmost hearts."[68]
This will be accomplished when God alone becomes the object of all our love, our desires, our striving, of all our efforts and thoughts, of all that we behold, speak of, hope for; when that union which exists between the Father and the Son, and between the Son and the Father shall be found also in our mind and soul.
Since His love for us is so pure, sincere, and unchanging, ought not we in return to give Him a love constant and uninterrupted?
So intimate should be our union with Him that our hopes, thoughts, prayers breathe only God.[69] The truly spiritual man should set before him, as the goal of all his efforts and desires, the possession even in a mortal body, of an image of the happiness to come, and the enjoyment even here below of some foretaste of the delights, the life, and glory of Heaven.
This, I say, is the end of all perfection—that the soul may become so purified from every earthly longing, and so raised to spiritual things, that at last the whole life and the desires of the heart form one unbroken prayer.
When the soul has thus shaken off the dust of earth and aspires unto her God, to Whom the true religious ever directs his intention, dreading the least separation from Him as a most cruel death; when peace reigns within and she is delivered from the bondage of her passions and cleaves with firmest purpose to the one Sovereign Good, then will be fulfilled in her the words of the Apostle: "Pray without ceasing,"[70] and "in every place, lifting up pure hands, without anger and contention."[71]
When once this purity of soul has gained the victory over man's natural inclination for the things of sense, when all earthly longings are quenched and the soul is, as it were, transformed into the likeness of pure spirits or Angels, then all she receives, all she undertakes, all she does, will be a pure and true prayer.
Only persevere faithfully in thy efforts and, as I have shown from the beginning, it will become as simple and easy for thee to contemplate God and rejoice in Him in thy recollection as to live a purely natural life.