Wednesday of Holy Week

LIFT YOUR HEART TO GOD

From the writing of Franҫois Fénelon 4

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The whole Christian life is only one long and continual aspiration of our heart towards that eternal righteousness for which we long here on earth. Our whole happiness is to be always thirsting for this. Now, this thirst is a prayer: long unceasingly for this righteousness, and you will never cease to pray. Do not imagine that you have to utter a long string of words and to have a great struggle before beseeching God. To pray is to ask that God’s will may be done, is to form some good resolution, to lift the heart to God, to long for the good things God promises, to groan at the sight of our misery.

This prayer needs neither knowledge, method, nor reasoning; we do not have to bother our head; it only needs a moment of time and a good impulse of the heart. We can pray without any precise thought; we only need to return to our heart for a moment; and this moment can be spent doing something else at the same time; God’s condescension to our feebleness is so great that God lets us share this need of the moment between God and creatures. Yes, in this moment go on with your work: it is enough if you offer to God the most ordinary things that you are occupied in doing.

This is the constant prayer which St. Paul postulates. It is a prayer that many good people imagine to be , but it is easy to practise for anyone who knows that the best prayer of all is that of acting with purity of intention, of frequently renewing the desire to do everything in God and for God.

Is there anything tiresome or burdensome in this law of prayer, when it reduces everything to the habit of acting freely in an ordinary way in order to attain your salvation and please your sovereign Lord?

Is it asking too much of ourselves to want to make us ask God often for the things we cannot obtain by ourselves? Is there anything better than never to depart from the state of living our life in dependence on God and of knowing our own feebleness at every moment and our need for God’s help?…It is for this that the Holy Spirit, who makes saints, is praying in the saints and for them “with sighs too deep for words”; it is for this that, possessing as we do the first fruits of the Spirit, we long for the plenitude of this Spirit and groan as we await the perfect fulfillment of the divine adoption.

4 Entretien sur la Prière, première partie. Oeuvres de Fénelon, tome XVII, A. Lebel, Paris 1823, p.323-325. [Orval, Fiche U3]..