TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning, Jeff here with some insights for the week. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this holy hour and all the things that Christopher’s been sharing with us about mental prayer and spending that time every day- first thing in our day- showing God that we want to give Him those first minutes of our day, the very best that we can, before our minds are cluttered with everything else in the world.
And it occurred to me that this holy hour, this time of mental prayer that we do every day is really us opening up our souls to allow Christ to fill them with the fire of His divine love and grace. And whenever we stray away from that, if we take the day off for a so-called ‘vacation’ from our prayers and if we make it a habit of delaying our prayers or abandoning them all together, it’s kind of like when we stray away from the bonfire. You know, you’re at a great bonfire in the fall and it’s cold outside and you stay close to that fire to stay warm, and the further you get away, the colder you become. And to the extent that this analogy applies to our spiritual life, what we’re really talking about is that the more often we stray from that fire of mental prayer in the holy hour, the less we resemble the saint that God created us to be, the less of the divine life that He’s given us we have within us to the point where we get completely cold. We’re totally unrecognizable to God when we abandon these things.
I hope this analogy has proven fruitful to you. We need to think in terms of our prayer and our fasting being as important to us as our sleep is, as our food is; most of us probably never go a day without sleep or without food. We need to have that same approach to prayer. I hope this meditation has been helpful. This insight has been helpful to you. I look forward to your feedback.