Guillerand Augustin - The prayer of the presence of God

  

PART I True Prayer

1

Movement Towards

Him Who Is

St. JOHN DAMASCENE’s definition of prayer is well known. “Prayer,” he says, “is asking God for what 1s fitting.” We must probe this thought thoroughly, draw from the words their substance, separate its parts and, having done so, restore them to the deep life of this substance which sustains them and gives them life.

This definition of prayer falls, then, into two parts which are, as it were, its matter and form.

Prayer is an asking, but an asking of God, and consequently bears the impress of him to whom it

is addressed. 

We can ask God only for what he wants us to ask of him, and he can will only what is conformable to his will. Now since God is one of the ‘terms’ of prayer—that is, we pray to him—and since he is infinite Order, prayer is a request essennally “ordered,” in other words consonant with the order of God himself. What is that order? It is what he is—Being himself: that Being from whom, by whom, and for whom all things are." He is our Beginning and our End.* He is the light of our mind and the strength of our will. He is Truth, Goodness and Beauty unalloyed, the source of all joy and the ocean of all life. 

What is “fitting,” therefore—what we must ask God for—is himself; to be united with him, to be transformed in him: to possess him and to be possessed by him. We should ask to enter, by grace,

into such intimate relations with him as unite us to him; to become his sons by a communication as

complete as possible of his Spirit of Love; to share in that joy and in that life which is his joy and his

life: in short, to share in Joy itself and Life itself.

The Scriptures are full of this prayer, which is constantly bubbling up like water-springs on a