How to Grow in Mental Prayer

Mental Prayer, Trunk of the Tree of the Whole Spiritual Life

The whole Christian life hangs by a thread: the living relationship with God. And that relationship, like every friendship, is nourished by presence and by time spent together. Remove mental prayer, and faith dries up into ideas, charity into activism, morality into strained effort. Saint Teresa of Avila, doctor of prayer, made it the root of everything: whoever perseveres in mental prayer always ends by reaching harbor; whoever abandons it almost infallibly loses his way. Mental prayer is the trunk of which the virtues are the branches.

That is why the first motive for growing in mental prayer is not spiritual comfort, but life itself: we grow in nothing that we do not frequent. “When people are in love, they want to be together” — the logic of love is to seek the presence of the beloved. The soul that wants to love God more has no other way than to spend time with Him.

“He Who Prays Is Saved”: Mental Prayer Touches on Salvation

Catholic tradition goes further: prayer is not an ornament of the devout life; it is morally necessary for the salvation of the adult. Without grace we are not saved; and ordinary grace, God gives to whoever asks for it. Saint Alphonsus Liguori made this the thesis of a whole treatise, which he sums up in a lapidary formula:

“He who prays is saved; he who does not pray is damned.” — Saint Alphonsus Liguori, The Great Means of Prayer^[1]

The formula is deliberately blunt, to wake us up: it does not say that mechanical prayer saves magically, but that the soul that ceases to pray cuts itself off from the channel through which grace comes. Mental prayer, prolonged prayer of the heart, is precisely the school where we learn to “pray always” (Lk 18:1^[2]; 1 Thess 5:17^[3]). To grow in mental prayer is to widen within oneself that channel of grace.

A Thirst That Nothing Else Quenches

There is finally a more intimate motive. The heart of man was made for God, and it remains restless until it rests in Him. Saint Augustine said that restlessness once and for all:

“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” — Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book I, 1^[4]

Mental prayer is the place where that thirst finds its source. We do not grow in mental prayer to “succeed” in our spiritual life as one succeeds at an exercise: we grow in it because the soul hungers for God, and no activity, however good, replaces the silent face-to-face in which God gives Himself.

Mental Prayer: An Intimate Sharing of Friendship

Before seeking to grow in mental prayer, we must know what it is. The surest definition is the one given by a woman who was a master of it: Saint Teresa of Avila. The Catechism takes it up word for word:

“Mental prayer in my opinion is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.” — Saint Teresa of Avila, Life, ch. 8, cited in Catechism § 2709^[5]

Everything lies in that sentence. Friendship: it is a reciprocal relationship, not a cold duty. Intimate: it takes place within, in the secret of the heart. Frequently: it is a regular frequentation, not a flash of brilliance. Alone with Him: it is a heart-to-heart, not a crowd of words. And above all: “him who we know loves us” — mental prayer does not begin with our effort, but with the certainty of being already loved first.

Rolande Lefebvre, known as “Madame R.,” gives a simple image of it in her journal: after holding her granddaughter, who remained long nestled in silence in her arms, she writes that mental prayer is above all “an exchange of love between God and us,” in which one throws oneself into Him and remains there, tenderly, in silence^[6].

Mental prayer is thus distinguished from the other forms of prayer without opposing them. Vocal prayer lends God words (the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the psalms); meditation sets the intelligence to work on a mystery in order to move the will; mental prayer properly so called is simpler still — a gaze, a presence, a loving rest beneath God’s gaze. The three do not compete: vocal prayer and meditation lead to mental prayer, as steps lead to the threshold.

Growing Means Passing from Words to Gaze

Growing in mental prayer, then, is not saying more prayers, but entering into a prayer that is simpler and more loving. The normal movement of growth goes from the abundance of words toward the economy of gaze: at first we speak much to God, then we learn to be silent before Him. The Catechism names that summit accessible to all:

“Mental prayer is the simplest form of the mystery of prayer. […] Mental prayer is silence.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2717^[7]

That growth cannot be forced, and it is not measured in sensations. For the detail of the degrees — recollection, prayer of simplicity, quiet, union — see the dossier The Path of Mental Prayer. What must be retained here: to grow is to simplify. The soul that progresses needs fewer words and more presence.

What “Growing in Mental Prayer” Does Not Mean

Three misunderstandings stop growth dead. Naming them is already progress; they are treated in depth in Frequent Errors Concerning Mental Prayer — here we give only the principle.

First, growing does not mean feeling more. Sensible fervor — tears, sweetness, impulses — is a gift God gives and withdraws as He pleases; it is neither the measure nor the goal of mental prayer. One can make an excellent mental prayer in the most complete dryness, and a mediocre one amid consolations.

Next, growing does not mean mastering a technique. Methods are ladders, useful for climbing; but the ladder is not the roof. The day the method hinders the heart-to-heart, we set it down.

Finally, growing does not mean seeking the extraordinary — visions, interior words, phenomena. Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross are formal: these graces are not asked for, we do not linger over them, and their absence proves nothing. “Mental prayer is a gift, a grace”, the Catechism recalls; “it can be accepted only in humility”^[8]. The only progress that counts is that of humble and faithful love.

Mental prayer is a gift; but the gift supposes dispositions, as rain supposes soil that does not repel it. Four conditions prepare growth.

Fidelity to a Fixed Time

This is the first and most decisive, where everything begins or everything fails. A friendship that meets only when time happens to allow dies; mental prayer “when I have time” is never born. The Catechism settles it in a sentence to be made one’s own:

“We do not pray when we have time: we take the time to be for the Lord, with the firm resolution not to take it back along the way, whatever the trials and dryness of the encounter.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2710^[9]

Concretely: a set moment (preferably in the morning, before the day breaks over us), a length decided in advance (fifteen minutes kept every day is better than an hour improvised once a week), and a stable place. And above all: no cutting short on the pretext of aridity. Saint Mary of the Incarnation (Marie Guyart), the great missionary mystic, made this an absolute rule: whatever the aridity or temptation, never leave mental prayer, nor shorten the fixed time^[10].

Recollection and the Presence of God All Day Long

Morning prayer does not hold if the rest of the day contradicts it. One does not enter in an instant into a silence one has fled for twelve hours. Growth in mental prayer therefore supposes a habitual recollection: returning to God through short prayers (ejaculations), keeping the remembrance of His presence amid work. Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a humble Carmelite cook, left on this point a little book that has become a classic: The Practice of the Presence of God. His discovery holds in few words: one can make one’s whole day a continual prayer simply by remaining, unceasingly, in the presence of God, in the kitchen as in the chapel^[11]. The formal time of prayer and the diffuse presence of God nourish each other: without the first, the second evaporates; without the second, the first remains a foreign islet in a dissipated life.

Humility: Receiving a Gift, Not Conquering a Summit

Nothing closes mental prayer like spiritual pride: wanting to “succeed” at one’s prayer, judging one’s progress, comparing oneself. Mental prayer is first of all a reception. Marthe Robin, who spent decades in prayer and the Passion, said it plainly:

“For mental prayer, the Lord wants souls that are very docile and very faithful and very supple, trusting not at all, in no way, in themselves.” — Venerable Marthe Robin, Journal^[12]

And she added that the surest fruit of a good prayer is not a feeling of success, but humility: “The soul must take care to come out of mental prayer very humble”^[13]. The sign of prayer that grows is not that we feel holy in it, but that we come out of it smaller, gentler, more dependent on God.

A Coherent Life: Silence, Mortification, Order

Finally, mental prayer grows in prepared soil. A heart cluttered with noise, images, attachments and agitation has no room for God’s silence. This is not about waiting to be perfect before praying — we pray in order to become better — but about not sabotaging the morning by the evening. Sobriety of the senses (what we watch, listen to, consume), a certain mortification, a taste for interior silence: all this hollows out in the soul the capacity to listen. “Mental prayer is silence, the symbol of the world to come”, says the Catechism^[14]: we reap that silence only if we sow it through the whole day.

Many would like to pray mentally and do not know how to go about it. The answer is not a complicated technique, but a few simple landmarks, tested by centuries of tradition. The most accessible remains Saint Francis de Sales’ method, written for people in the world in the Introduction to the Devout Life.

Saint Francis de Sales’ Method

Francis de Sales breaks meditation down into a few easy-to-remember moments^[15]:

1. The preparation: placing oneself in God’s presence (recalling that He is there, that He looks at me) and asking for His help.
2. The consideration: taking a mystery — a Gospel scene, a truth of faith — and looking at it gently, letting the intelligence roam over it.
3. The affections and resolutions: this is the heart of mental prayer. Not stopping at ideas, but letting the movements of the heart rise — love, contrition, thanksgiving, desire — and taking a concrete resolution for the day.
4. The conclusion: giving thanks, offering, asking; then gathering a “spiritual bouquet” — a thought, a word retained from the prayer, to breathe all day long.

The image of the bouquet says the whole spirit of the method: as one carries away from a garden a few flowers to keep their scent, one carries away from prayer a word, a resolution, that will perfume the hours of work. The method is not an end: it is a stake that holds up the young plant, and is removed when the heart knows how to stand alone before God.

Leaning on Scripture: Nourishing Prayer with the Word

One cannot converse with a friend without knowing who he is. Mental prayer is therefore nourished by Scripture, where God reveals Himself. The prayerful reading of the Word — lectio divina — is the surest fuel of mental prayer: we read a passage slowly, stop on a word, ruminate on it, answer it. “Seek in reading, and you will find in meditation; knock in prayer, and it will be opened to you in contemplation”, the monastic tradition summed it up^[16]. For the detailed practice, see How to Grow in Lectio Divina; here we retain the principle: prayer without Scripture soon runs empty, while a single well-ruminated verse can nourish an hour of heart-to-heart.

Speaking to God as to a Friend: Affective Prayer

As we advance, considerations grow shorter and affections longer: we reason less, we love more. This is affective prayer, then prayer of simplicity — a simple and gentle gaze upon God present. Christ Himself placed prayer under the sign of friendship: “I no longer call you servants… but I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15^[17]). So we can tell Him everything, simply: our joys, our sorrows, our faults, our desires. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux gave of this prayer of the heart the purest formula:

“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.” — Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, Autobiographical Manuscripts, cited in Catechism § 2558^[18]

When Words Cease: Standing Beneath His Gaze

There comes a day when we have nothing left to say, and this is not a breakdown but progress: the soul simply stands there, beneath God’s gaze, and lets God look at it. This is the threshold of contemplation, which the Catechism illustrates with the word, now famous, of a peasant of Ars:

“Contemplative prayer is a gaze of faith fixed on Jesus. ‘I look at him and he looks at me,’ said, in the time of his holy curé, the peasant of Ars at prayer before the tabernacle.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2715^[19]

The whole art, at this point, is to force nothing: not to feverishly take up considerations again out of fear of “doing nothing”. Standing there, poor and loving, is the highest prayer. Father Jean Lafrance advised: “In mental prayer, stand poor and naked before the burning bush”^[20], offering to the fire “the whole denuded surface of [one’s] being”, and letting God do the rest.

No one grows in mental prayer without passing through battle. It is even the sign that we are advancing: the enemy does not rage against what does not threaten him. The Catechism does not hide it:

“Prayer is a battle. Against whom? Against ourselves and against the wiles of the tempter who does all he can to turn man away from prayer.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2725^[21]

Distractions

The most universal difficulty is distraction: no sooner do we begin than the mind flies off toward a thousand worries. The Catechism gives here a liberating counsel: not to go “hunting” after distractions, which plunges us back into them, but to return gently to God. And it adds a light: “a distraction reveals to us what we are attached to”^[22]; bringing that attachment back to God is worth more than growing irritated with oneself. Suffered distraction, refused by the heart and patiently straightened out, does not interrupt prayer: it even becomes an act of humility within it.

Dryness: Never Deserting One’s Post

More trying still is dryness: those periods — sometimes long — when prayer brings no taste, when God seems absent, when we feel we are wasting our time. The Catechism names it among the trials of prayer^[23]. Saint Teresa of Avila crossed it, she says, for nearly eighteen years. The rule of the saints is unanimous and holds in one word: we never leave prayer because of dryness — it is precisely there that prayer becomes pure and gratuitous. Henri-Marie Boudon (1624–1702), great archdeacon of Évreux and master of the French school of spirituality, expresses it for all: we must never abandon the pious exercise of mental prayer, even if we found in it nothing but dryness and suffering — for it is often thereby that God tests how far we have embraced the Cross^[24].

For aridity is not failure: it is often the deepest work of grace, weaning the soul from consolations to attach it to God alone. For the detail of those “nights” — night of the senses, night of the spirit — described by Saint John of the Cross, see The Path of Mental Prayer. What must be held here: fidelity in aridity is worth a thousand consolations; it is love no longer paid in sensations, finally become gratuitous.

The Great Temptation: Giving Up

At bottom, the only true danger is neither distraction nor dryness: it is letting go. The devil readily lets us begin, knowing that beginning costs nothing; what he lies in wait for is weariness. Jesus reproached Saint Gemma Galgani with it when her fervor fell away:

“During the days when you enjoy my presence, you are full of fervor and it costs you little effort to pray. Now, on the other hand, prayer bores you… How long will you wait before making a firm resolution about it?” — Jesus to Saint Gemma Galgani, Intimate Journal^[25]

The counter is simple and formidably effective: perseverance. Beginning again each day, not measuring progress, keeping the decided time even when everything invites us to shorten it. Saint Louise de Marillac reduced her whole strategy to this: “If we are sometimes afflicted with little anxieties and weaknesses, for God’s sake, let us have recourse to mental prayer”^[26]. We do not come out of the battle of prayer by ceasing to pray: we come out of it by praying more.

By what do we recognize that prayer is truly growing? Not by the sensations felt during prayer, but by what it produces in life. The tree is judged by its fruits.

The first fruit is a slow transformation of gaze and heart. By dint of looking at Christ, we come to resemble Him. The Catechism says it of the contemplative gaze: “This attention to Him is renunciation of the ‘self.’ His gaze purifies the heart”^[27]. Faithful prayer softens character, expands charity, pacifies judgments: without feeling it, we become more patient, gentler, more capable of loving those we loved badly.

The second fruit is peace — not the absence of trials, but a stability in the depths of the soul that remains beneath storms. The third is strength for duty: prayer does not turn us away from action; it makes action possible and just, for it draws from the source. That is why the greatest men and women of action in the history of the Church — missionaries, founders, reformers — were first contemplatives.

The ultimate fruit, finally, is union with God: that prayer, at first a punctual exercise, gradually becomes the habitual state of a soul that “prays without ceasing”, carrying God in its depths through all its occupations. This is the term toward which all growth in prayer leads.

There is a way of praying that raises prayer to its highest fruitfulness: praying in the Divine Will. All Christian prayer is already ordered to this, for the prayer Christ taught us has at its heart the petition: “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10^[28]). Making prayer, at bottom, is learning to say that “Fiat” with our whole being, until God’s will becomes our breath.

In the writings of Luisa Piccarreta, Christ teaches her that the soul established in His Will no longer prays alone nor with its poor strength: it hears within itself “the echo” of its own prayer — “Do you not see how I pray, love, adore and make reparation for all? And you, echoing my prayer, feel as if you had all persons and all things in your power […]. Do you think you do this by your own strength? Ah! no, no! It is I who am in you”^[29]. Prayer then acquires a scope infinitely beyond the measure of the creature. Prayer then ceases to be an effort painfully climbing toward Heaven: it becomes the divine Will praying in us, which we let pray. This is the summit toward which all growth in prayer secretly tends — no longer only “I pray to God”, but “may Thy will be done in me”, until we are one with it. Here we rejoin the spirit of abandonment: the highest prayer is the one in which we reserve nothing for ourselves.

Like every virtue, prayer has a face before it is a definition. It is contemplated first in Christ, then in His Mother.

Jesus is the absolute pray-er. The Gospel shows Him constantly withdrawing apart to pray, and spending whole nights in prayer: “He went out to the mountain to pray, and he spent the whole night praying to God” (Lk 6:12^[30]). Before every great decision, before His Passion, He prays. And at Gethsemane, His prayer reaches its summit in the “Fiat”: “Father, not my will, but Thine” (Lk 22:42^[31]). All Christian prayer is but a participation in that prayer of the Son to the Father. Learning to pray is letting Christ pray in us.

Mary is the perfect reflection of that prayer. The Gospel lends her almost no words, but it shows her in the very attitude of prayer: she “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Lk 2:19; 2:51^[32]). Keeping and ruminating the Word in the heart: this is the very definition of contemplative prayer. And after the Ascension, it is still she who remains in the Upper Room, “devoted to prayer” with the Apostles, awaiting the Spirit (Acts 1:14^[33]). Mother of the interior life, she is the one who teaches us to “keep in our heart” — and it is to her that we ask to obtain for us fidelity in prayer.

At the end of this journey, growth in prayer can be summed up in a few simple convictions, to be kept before us like a compass.

First, begin small, but begin. Better a quarter of an hour kept each day than a grand plan never carried out. The fidelity of a life of prayer is made only of one-day fidelities, added together.

Next, take the time; do not wait for it. Decide a moment, a length, a place, and do not take them back from God along the way, even in dryness. “We do not pray when we have time: we take the time.”

Then, start from the Word and end with the heart: enter through a word of Scripture, let the intelligence look at it, then the heart love it, and gather a “spiritual bouquet” to breathe all day long. And when words cease, simply stand beneath His gaze — “I look at him and he looks at me” — forcing nothing.

Above all, never desert your post. Return gently from distractions without irritation; hold on in aridity without shortening, for “fidelity in the night is worth a thousand consolations”; and begin again each day, without measuring progress. Prayer is not succeeded at; it is received: we come out of it humbler, not more pleased with ourselves.

Finally, entrust everything to God. Prayer is a gift; the first act of whoever wants to grow in it is to ask for it, humbly, each day, through Mary’s hands. “Let us bind ourselves so closely to Him that we may have the great happiness of never being separated from Him”^[34]: in this, prayer, school of friendship, finally becomes the secret of all holiness — not one more exercise, but the beloved presence that transforms a life.

• The Path of Mental Prayer: Going Deep to Encounter the Triune God — the complete map of the ascent: the four waters, the seven mansions, infused contemplation and the nights, according to Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross.
• What Do the Saints Say About Mental Prayer? — the anthology of the great masters of interior prayer.
• Frequent Errors Concerning Mental Prayer — the misunderstandings that stop growth: seeking sensations, fleeing dryness, confusing method and goal.
• How to Grow in Interior Silence — silencing the noise within, a condition for listening to God.
• How to Grow in Lectio Divina — the prayerful reading of Scripture that nourishes mental prayer.
• How to Grow in Perseverance — holding on in faithful duration, the decisive weapon against the temptation to abandon prayer.
• How to Grow in Abandonment to God and How to Grow in Trust — the filial attitude that sustains prayer and keeps it from hardening into strained effort.
• How to Grow in Spiritual Direction — for sure guidance in discerning the states of prayer.