L'oraison, prière intérieure

To treat this subject I used the text of Father Marie Eugene of the Child Jesus on ‘union of the will’ taken from his book “I want to see God.”
Next we will comment on this presentation to determine a practical approach to loving one’s neighbor before diving into the last chapter of the book, entitled ‘the Total Christ’ which presents the love of neighbor as a gift from God. Finally we discover the origin of these ideas in reading the Gospels.
This successive look will lead us to a progressive and concrete deepening of our study of interior prayer, placing it in an evangelical and messianic perspective which is that of the Church.

1/ The Exercise of Love

Father Marie Eugene, in the chapter ’Until the Union of the Will’, underlines the importance of the exercise of love in interior prayer to profoundly unite us to the will of God. Through detachment, this exercise represents ‘the part of the soul’ on this path which will drive it to receive from God an infusion of love through the Holy Spirit.
Father Marie Eugene reminds us that in the Interior Castle in the 3rd chapter of the 5th Mansions, Saint Teresa of Avila clearly points out  that the path to reach union with the Lord is not about standing still in order not miss any of the happiness of discovering within oneself the presence of God. It is important also to do ‘works’ which take priority even over the practice of devotions and therefore over the exercise of interior prayer.

“When I see people so focused on examining their prayer time and so concentrated when in prayer, they don’t even dare to move to not disrupt their thought, for fear of losing any consolation or taste of God, and when I see them thinking that this is perfection, I realize how little they know about the path that leads to union. No, my Sisters, no; that isn’t the path. It is the works that the Lord asks of us. If for example you see a sick person that you can help, don’t worry about letting go of your devotions to assist that person and show her a bit of compassion; if she is suffering, share her pain; if you have to fast so that she has the necessary food, do it, not so much for love for her but for love of God, who wants it, as you know. This is the true union to His will.” (St. Teresa d’Avila, 5th Mansions, Chapter 3; Cited by Fr. Marie Eugene in I want to See God—The love of God in prayer, leads to the love of one’s brothers)
Here we have a concrete element which completes the formal practice of interior prayer (as an isolated exercise) to develop it in a life of prayer (which allows us to remain in the love of God in all that we do, beginning with the love of neighbor.
According to Father Marie-Eugene (I want to see God), this exercise of love doesn’t only consists of specific works. The example of St. Therese of the Child Jesus, is mainly carried out in a ‘conscious fervor’  that the person who seeks God applies to ordinary life activities to ‘develop an attentive loyalty in order to purify his motive and to add to his actions this little nothing which assures its perfection” in order to do ‘good and intense’ actions (end of the chapter on ‘Union of the Will’ see St Therese of the Child Jesus and her ‘Little Way” applied to the details of ordinary life).

2/ Love and Detachment

As we have just seen, right from the beginning of the life of prayer no form of love for God can be manifested without the love of neighbor and specifically ‘brothers’, in other words, those who live out the love of God (Mark 3: 33-34…Here is my mother and my brothers, whoever does the will of God….). In fact if you don’t love the brother you can see, you can’t love God who you can’t see” (1 John 4:20).
The practice of loving your neighbor and brothers obliges us to detach from our selfish leanings which hold up our relationship with God. We have to give Him everything so that He is ‘all in everything’ (1 Col. 15:28): Give Him not only our thoughts (which leads to silence in prayer) but also the availability of our being, our actions, our will which has to become the Father’s and even our body that has to be molded towards eternal life. This doesn’t happen without withdrawal which happens in the ‘nights’ (night of the senses, night of the spirit) written about by the mystics, and which is sometimes spoken of as dying to oneself. The most poignant witness is that of the martyrs bringing about the conversion of their brothers by the gift of their life.
So the love of one’s brother, as difficult as it is, shows in the end how this fountain of youth, this oil and this dew of which Psalm 133 speaks:
“Look! It is good; it is pleasant to live as brothers all together!
It is an excellent oil for the head, which drips onto the beard,
Which drips on the beard of Aaron, onto the collars of his tunics.
It is the dew of Hermon, which falls on the heights of Sion;
There God wanted the blessing, life forever.”

3/ Immersion in Christ

The practice of interior prayer progressively leads from personal action (the practice of the love of one’s neighbor) to the welcoming of the Spirit in the most intimate union with Christ expressed by the complete offering of the self.
This is why Fr. Marie-Eugene sees in active charity, which leads to the salvations of souls, an essential sign of fulfillment in interior prayer. It comes about through the gift of self to the heart of the mission that God gives to each one and of which perfect acceptance leads to intimacy with Him.
So the saint participates, according to his personality, in the becoming the total Christ. This accomplishment continues to its completion in glory and the end of time (we can think about the parable of the Samaritan woman which talks about the water that Jesus gives to drink as becoming within us ‘a gushing spring of eternal life’).

4/ Evangelical Approach

Let’s place this entire idea in light of the Gospels: Mark 12:28-34 offers us a particularly deep presentation on the words of Jesus on the love of neighbor: “A scribe asks Him: What is the first of all of the Commandments? Jesus answered: The first is : Listen the Lord our God is the unique Lord; you will love the Lord your God with all your Heart, with all you soul, will all your mind and with all your strength. Here is the second: You will love your neighbor as yourself. There is not a commandment greater than these.”
Notice that Jesus goes beyond the Scribe’s question indicating to him the second commandment as in Matt 22: 34-40 which present the words of Jesus according to which the 2nd Commandment is as important as the  or equal to the first (according to the translations). As far as Luke 10: 25-28, He puts the answer in the mouth of the scribe and completely links the two commandments that are to be practiced to have life.
We can assume then that the love of God is the first and we know that it particularly corresponds to the practice of interior prayer. We can say that it is the pure love of God. But it is plain to see that this dimension can’t be separated from the love of neighbor in such a way that it isn’t possible to separate them nor to see one without the other in the plan of salvation.
Moreover, aside from the love of God, the greater importance of the second commandment over all the others is consistent throughout the Gospels, such that we are able to present it as the determining criteria of what God expects from us:

-love of neighbor, such as a wounded person on the side of the road (Good Samaritan Luke 10:29-37)
-love of the smallest, children, that Jesus identifies for the day of judgment (Matt 25; 31-46)
-love our enemies (Matt 5:44), which makes us perfect (Matt 5:48) and which the Our Father that He teaches makes reference to (Matt 6:12) forgive us as we forgive those who did us harm.
-love our brothers, the family of Jesus
-love of brotherly communion which unites the Church in the intimacy of Christ and indicates belonging: ‘By this you will recognize my disciples: by the love you have one for the other’ (John 13:35)
-and beyond all the commandments, there is a call to deep love of Peter in light of the behavior of the church (John 21: 15-17
-Or again the pure love of John, the perfect friend of Christ (‘the disciple that Jesus loved”
John 21:20)

And it is John that the Gospel completely distinguishes on this point: He never referenced anything on the first commandment, doesn’t broach the subject of who our ‘neighbor’ is, doesn’t bring up the Good Samaritan, doesn’t address anything on love which is the underlying theme all the way up to the last conversation before the Passion;
He only instructs us in the ‘new commandment’ which the other three Gospel writers don’t address:
‘As I have loved you, Love one another” (John 13:34). Where the two commandments on the love of God and one’s neighbor summarize ‘the law of the prophets’ (Matt. 22: 40), the new Commandment anchors itself in the gift that Christ made of His life, thus ushering in Messianic Times: “as He loved us,” in other words by the complete gift of Himself, of humility in the washing of the feet up until His death on the Cross in an absolute union initiated at the Last Supper.
And Jesus concluded this ultimate conversation by insisting on the deep sense of the gift: “I gave them the glory that You gave Me so that they are one as We are One, Me in them, as You are in Me, so that they achieve perfect unity and thus the world will know that You sent Me and that You loved them as You loved Me.” John 17: 22-23
So the New Commandment is situated in a different perspective from the Greatest Commandment which is the absolute love of God and the love of one’s neighbor as oneself. Where the Greatest Commandment asks us to love our neighbor as the result of the love that we must have for God; John however places the New Commandment in the love that God has for us (love that the Father has for the Son and for the disciples or his ‘Brothers’).

There is a type of inversion which doesn’t go from our love towards God and then to the love of neighbor, but from the love received from God to the love of our brothers. This is exactly the inversion that can be lived out in interior prayer:  the love that we receive from God in prayer brings about the love of neighbor which is the manifestation of prayer or if you will the unfolding of it. So interior prayer makes us participants in the love of God for our brothers; God brings us even further than His love for the world, causing us to burn with His desire to attract all men to Him to the point of uniting us to the absolute gift of Himself. This reading of the Gospel brings us back to the original sense of the last chapter of ‘I want to see God’ on the ‘Total Christ’.

Benedict XVI expresses these ideas in a very interesting way in his encyclical ‘God is love’. Here is a passage from it:
‘Only my willingness to meet my brother, to show him love, makes me good before God. Only in service to my brothers are my eyes opened to what God has done for me and His way of loving me. The Saints, let’s take Mother Teresa for example, drew into their meeting with Our Lord in the Eucharist, their capacity to always love their neighbor in new way. And, reciprocally, this meeting acquired its reality and depth precisely thanks to their service to others. Love of God and neighbor are inseparable; it is one commandment. Both live from a love coming from God who loved us first. So, it isn’t a question of a love coming from without, presenting us with an impossible task from without, but rather an experience of love, given from within, a love who’s nature is to share it with others. Love grows through love. Love is divine because it comes from God and unites us to God, and through this process of unification, it transforms us into one ‘We’ which overcomes our divisions and allows us to become one, until in the end, God is all in all (1 Col. 15:28).
Benedict XVI God is Love #18 12/25/05.

Practical Conclusion

If the love of our brothers and all men comes from the Spirit and is therefore received from God, especially in the heights of interior prayer, should we wait to get to these heights to love our peers as we should? 
Well, wouldn’t that be ignoring the exercise of love, in which participates in an indispensable way, the effort of man in his love for God.
Without this exercise of love, our prayer would remain sterile. It wouldn’t reach a reality that permits us to meet Christ in the humanity of our peers, while at the same time seeking His presence within. Only through perseverance, does He come gradually Himself to live out in us the expression of His love for our brothers, or any man who accepts to answer the call of this love.
Isaiah 25:6 brings up a Messianic festival on the mountain of Sion. We can imagine it as a high mountain where a succulent meal is waiting for us at its summit. The mountain however is so high that it will take us several days and many obstacles to overcome in order to reach the top. So we have to bring along our own provisions to get there, while eating can goods and fruit to be able to tolerate the ascent and benefit, after a long walk up, from the divine meal of ‘fatted meat and delicious wines’. (Isaiah 25:6).
So we have to practice the love of our brother right from the start to complete our prayer, to satisfy the two great commandments and transform our practice of prayer into a life of prayer, or an exterior life which fulfills our inner attachment to God. We will then be able to receive into ourselves the overflow of infinite love which responds to the ‘new commandment’ in the Gospel of John to build the communion of saints.