The Prayerful Soul

What is the experience of a soul, once practiced in the art of prayer?

The prayerful soul, taken up into the spirit of a higher aspiration, gently ascends, as if through deepest space, toward the great hierophany of God. Silent, expectant, reverent, triumphant, and overcome with awe for what is holy, she relinquishes, imperceptibly, her long attachment to the vestiges of lower nature.

Replacing every coarse element of her being with the tenderest lineaments of light, all her qualities newly bathed in warm, ineffable luminescence, she draws to herself, and draws into herself, the wondrous substances of divine life. Softly transformed, she commends herself entirely to the singular experience of Christ.

This love, whose perfection she never could have anticipated or even quite imagined, has become, for her, the secret wellspring of all things tender, blessed, glorious, and good; a beacon of incomparable majesty, in whose presence she flutters, angelic, imbued with all the wisdom of simplicity; partaking of that blissful communion which is the sustenance of saints.

Now she herself has become as a particle of God's love, almost inseparable from the rest, golden and white, half-lost in the effulgence of His most glorious emanation; joyous to discover herself a darling of the godhead; beloved and cherished beyond all human comprehension; a lustre in the infinitely opulent penumbra of cosmic light.

Who can imagine the fullness of love, which waits, attendant, upon the prayers of a willing soul? Who can perceive, in the hidden depths of an inward life, such heavenly elevations?

The snow-capped mountains, which tower over man, and over-awe the capacities of mortal imaginations, are less than specks of dust, swept back into distant space, immaterial before the presence of His love; the one takes your breath away, the other takes your heart. While souls, which seemed so meager, so unfit to behold this brilliance, are suddenly revealed to be the dearest twinkles in the eye, -- the bluest eye, -- of Christ.

My brothers, my sisters, how dearly we must cherish the slightest devotional stirrings, which beckon to us from deep within, as echos of angelic choirs; as a summons to be honored before the throne of the King of Angels.