The Voice of the Heart

 

 

Search me, O God, and know my heart:

try me, and know my thoughts

(Psa 139:23)

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, you have never yet either 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 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 them to others or to make them clear to itself.

For God reads the secrets of the heart. God reads its most intimate feelings, even those that we are not aware of. It is not necessary to make use of formal acts to make ourselves heard by God. If we do 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 in His presence.

The Prayer of Silence
Imagine a soul so closely united to God that it has no need of 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 as aspirations towards God without any clear expression. Though they may elude our own consciousness, they 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 worthy of God in which the soul is united to Him as its ground, the created intelligence to the uncreated, without anything but a very simple attention of the mind and as equally simple application of the will.

 

This is what is called the prayer of silence, or quiet, or of bare faith.

 

Excerpted from the book "HOW TO PRAY" by Jean Nicholas Grou (1730-1803) who lived in Holland and France and was a Jesuit priest. He entered into a deeper life with God on a retreat in 1767, where he learned to live his life in the spirit of prayer and complete abandonment to God's will.