St. Francis de Sales educates us about another key facet of our Lenten experience, that of prayer. He meets us where we are, even though he lived 400 years ago!
This is how he begins to instruct us: “But what is prayer and meditation? It seems that these words have come from another planet since so few people want to understand them. What is meditation or contemplation? In a word, it is prayer. To make prayer is to pray. To pray with attention is to have a lively, vigilant, attentive faith. This is accompanied by virtues: confidence, perseverance, patience and humility.
How few people understand in what perseverance consists! They cannot persevere in prayer except by sweetness and delight. If they experience some distaste in payer or God takes away the sweetness or usual facility they have in it, they complain and are afflicted.
What do we want? Ecstasies, ravishments, sweetness and consolations. If God does not give us promptly what we ask, or does not indicate that He hears us, we lose courage, we cannot persevere in prayer, we quit it completely, then and there.
Oh how happy we would be if we accompany prayer with perseverance. When we have repugnance and dryness in it, when the sweetness of prayer is taken away from us, we should persevere in prayer without growing weary, neither complaining nor seeking to be delivered from it, contenting ourselves in all that with crying out unceasingly, “Lord Son of David have pity on me.”
St. Francis de Sales, Sermon for the Thursday after the First Sunday of Lent, 1622
Reflection:
How does my experience of prayer relate to this excerpt from St Francis de Sales?
What are my expectations and how do I find myself persevering?