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AFFAIRS OF THE HEARTLearning to pray heart to heart“I love you.” If you were the one to utter these three words, surely you would hold your breath as you wait for the response. You would wait expectantly, hoping that the other person would reply with I love you too. In many ways, this is the starting point for understanding prayer from a Salesian perspective. God is always the one who is addressing our heart with love and, in a way, is holding his breath as he awaits our response: “Behold, I stand at the door (of your heart) and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in.” If we accept this heart invitation and respond to this personal address with “I love you too”, then, heart speaks to heart. Prayer is born. The starting point for the person who prays, therefore, is always a response to the God who loves us first, we always begin from “I love you too.” As the relationship between the heart of God and the human heart deepens, the need for words decreases. This mutual delight in each other’s company intensifies so that we begin to draw God’s heart into our own. Like a magnet, we are drawn by God our “tire-coeur”. Just as a piece of metal becomes magnetised by the magnet that draws it, so too, we are aimantisé by God. If we allow ourselves to be ‘touched’ by God, we will become divinised by sharing in God’s qualities. We can see this even in the young Francis de Sales who, as a student in Padua, develops the contemplative practice of resting near the divine heart. He writes: “As the Body needs sleep to refresh and soothe its tired limbs, so does the soul need time to sleep and rest in the arms of its heavenly spouse to restore the strength and vigour of its spiritual powers that become exhausted and tired. Therefore, I will allot a certain time each day for this sacred sleep so that my soul, in imitation of the beloved disciple [John 13:23-24], will repose with complete confidence on the lovable breast, actually in the loving heart, of the Loving Saviour.” It is through this ‘reposing’ in the heart of Jesus that we learn to “listen to the heartbeat of God” and discover that Christ is already praying within us. Our call is to tune into this ceaseless prayer of Christ already flowing within us due to the Spirit of Love who has been poured into our hearts. Before we can adopt this practice of ‘reposing’ in the heart of Jesus, then, it is incumbent on us to understand first what we mean by the human heart.The Human HeartSt Francis defines the person in terms of ‘heart’ which underscores our relational nature with others and the Other. The desires of the human heart revolve around love and even the experience of dissatisfaction reveals the infinite desires of the human heart for love. We are created with a capacity to love the infinite and this is why, as St Augustine noted, nothing else other than God will satisfy the deepest hungers of the human heart. Accordingly, the heart is at rest when it rejoices in the good, but is restless when the good is absent precisely, because as St Francis de Sales re-iterates, it desires the good. If we had all that was good for us, we would be without desire and without movement, but not being in possession of all our good, we search for it: “Our heart is anxious”; Francis de Sales starts from this anxiety. In sum, “God having created the human person in his image desires that like in Him everything in us be ordained by love and for love.” This Salesian archaeological and teleological understanding of the human person, as a being originating from and destined towards love, has strong affinities with the spirituality of St Catherine of Genoa. For her, “the goal of the spiritual journey is defined by its beginning. We have been formed by love, in love and for love. The truest ‘port’ of the human heart is the Pure Love in which it was first created.” God who made our “heart even before it was made in the world seeing it only in his divine plan” that it “would be forever united to His, for whom it was created.”The human heart is good because it is created by God who is good. This explains the Salesian insistence that at the core, or heart, of every person is goodness. Although we have been wounded by sin, human nature has not been corrupted. It retains its essential orientation to love and this natural inclination to love God becomes an effective ‘crook by which God can gently hold us and draw us to himself.’ This is possible because God’s love is breathed into us at creation. In his earliest book, Meditations on the Church, St Francis writes that Adam only becomes human whenever God inspires him (that is, breathes his life into him). This ‘mass of earth’ becomes human only after receiving the breath of love. As Pocetto reminds us, “thus love enters into the very make-up of the human person, into the innermost structure of our being ... For this reason, human life is to be considered essentially as a life of freedom in love.” In us all things must be set in order by love and for love: “Just as weight gives movement to the moveable parts of a clock, so love gives to the soul whatever movement it has.” This, then, is our universal calling to holiness, everyone is called to love. It is in and through our love of God and neighbour that we give glory to the God who is creating us now.At a very natural level, that is, at the level of nature, we have been created in such a way so as to be able to receive God’s communication because the human heart is not only oriented to the good, but created to love the infinite good. St Francis remarks that “God has planted in the human heart not only a special, natural inclination to love the good in general, but to love in particular and above all things his divine goodness.” As André Ravier points out, “the heart of God has made the human heart.” So, we can say with the psalmist, “He made us, we belong to Him.” If we were to attempt to translate what St Francis is saying into more contemporary language we could say that we are ‘hard-wired’ for God. Our ‘natural inclination’ to God is borne out of our natural desire for God and this means that we have an intrinsic God-ward orientation or an orientation to God. We have a fundamental basic attraction for God. Our attraction towards other human beings rests on this principle that we are drawn towards what we perceive to be good, beautiful and true. People are signposts on the journey since their beauty, truth and goodness points us to the supreme Beauty, Truth and Goodness that is God.The Wounded HeartIn every great love story there is an element of tragedy. This is also true of the love story between God and humanity. God is our God and our heart is His home. Although the human heart is created by God with a potential to love God and others, the journey towards true love is often short-circuited. This is because instead of transcending ourselves and becoming a gift in love, we seek self-gratification and our love becomes self-centered through sin, disordered desires, and self-love. It follows that the human heart is ‘arrhythmic’ that is, it beats out of rhythm with the heart of God. When we are no longer in relation to the true and living God, we will quite quickly seek compensations and the false gods of addiction become more attractive. It is a small step to become absorbed with the things God has created rather than recognizing them as gifts from God. As St Francis teaches, however, we become homeless in this absorption, no longer living from our heart when something other than God possesses our heart. We are ripe for addiction. Such addiction reveals to us that our restless heart longs for the infinite God, but we get seduced by a ‘downward transcendence’ when we substitute the living God for some thing or some one. Such “desiring love, settling on an object extrinsic to the self, makes, admittedly, a movement outwards and indeed reaches its object, but this rootedness in the self draws it ineluctably back, to complete a circle (as amor recurvus) and finish where it began.” Accordingly, as Lavelle remarks, “the proper work of the will is in the ordering of our love; for the will dictates the consent or the refusal we give to love …the will regulates the course of love and must be vigilant to keep its flame alive and prevent it from being diverted to objects which may allure but can never satisfy it. Such objects are worthy of being loved only in the light of the Infinite Love which sustains the will itself and in which, once found, it reaches fulfilment.” This emphasis on our free consent to love brings us to the threshold of the mystical life because it presupposes God’s prevenient grace already at work within us. In Salesian terminology this is the role of inspirations. Divine inspirations St Francis teaches us that as well as refusing to make choices which lead us away from our deepest self and the path of love, we also need to be vigilant in monitoring the good desires of our heart, to foster these desires and help to bring them to fruition. In a letter to Jane de Chantal, St Francis de Sales writes: “I shall never stop praying God to perfect His work in you, that is, to further your excellent desire and plan to attain the fullness of Christian life, a desire which you should cherish and nurture tenderly in your heart. Consider this to be a work of the Holy Spirit and a spark of His divine flame.” What is at play here is the ability to recognize God’s Spirit at work in our good desires which in Salesian spirituality is simply called, ‘inspirations’. Often we are more familiar with the role of temptations than its counterpart, inspirations. God, as our supreme good, is able to draw us to himself through the attraction of his inspirations. This is the particular mission of the Holy Spirit who pours into our hearts the first rays and perceptions of his light and vital heat. Inspiration, then, is to the human person what the light and warmth of the Sun is to the earth. In this instance the inspirations, through which God reveals his will, are presented through the metaphor of light and heat. They are described ‘psychologically’ in the manner in which they affect our conscience. It is consequent on our free will whether we choose to resist or respond to this divine awakening. However, it must be noted that we do not awaken ourselves, it is the prerogative of these inspirations to bring about our awakening. As St Francis notes:”I cannot awaken, nor can I move myself unless you move me. But when you have moved, then, O beloved spouse of my soul, ‘we run,’ we two. You run before me, ever drawing me forward, and for my part I will follow in your path by consenting to your call.” Here we come face to face with the essence of Salesian prayer, the human heart being drawn through these interior movements of divine inspirations into the very Heart of God. This, in turn, is allowing ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit because inspirations are always God’s initiative. Of course, although the divine goodness draws and attracts us, we are left free to respond: “In spite of the all-powerful strength of God’s merciful hand, which touches, enfolds and bends the soul with so many inspirations ... grace has the power not to overpower, but to entice our heart.”The essence of inspiration is the way in which God addresses us intimately and reveals his will to us personally. As St Francis expresses it, “His vital breath is called inspiration because by it supreme goodness breathes upon us and, therefore, inspires in us the desires and intentions of his heart.” Inspiration allows for mutual friendship between God and us because Jesus reveals the ‘intentions of his heart’ and speaks to our hearts. As André Brix comments: “The Salesian method is situated at the level of freedom and personal inspiration. Inspiration reveals that God would like to act in an absolutely original and authentic manner in each freedom, so as to change the world and create it. It is not a question of forming a regiment of obedient robots. Inspiration is to do with my acting in a concrete situation where no-one else can take my place. We must let the exterior be born from the interior.”Whilst inspirations remain always the initiative of God’s grace, nevertheless, we can foster an interior disposition that makes us vigilant and ready to respond as the occasion arises. The cultivation of such an interior disposition allows us to respond to these inspirations ‘carefully, frequently, and promptly’ while ‘leading an ordinary life to all outward appearances.’ This inculcates “the virtue of devotion” which”‘is nothing other than a general inclination readiness of the soul to do what it knows to be agreeable to God. It is that enlargement of heart of which David said ‘ I have run the way of your Commandments, when You did enlarge my heart.’” St Francis, therefore, “invites us ‘to do everything by love’ because he knows that love broadens the heart while at the same time keeping it simple and master of itself.” Indeed, St Francis argues that if we only “accepted God’s inspirations to the full extent of their power in how short a time would we make great progress in holiness.”Praying heart to heartPrayer, for Francis, is ‘heart speaking to heart.’ It is a movement of love between hearts in which the devout heart is united to God and transformed. Francis describes the various degrees of prayer in terms of the heart's response to God's love. He follows closely the degrees of prayer as outlined by St. Teresa of Avila:1. Vocal prayer is "an overflowing of the heart in words".2. Mental prayer is a "prayer of the heart" that enables us to ruminate on the various aspects of the divine heart.3. Contemplative prayer allows "the heart to drink" liquid nourishment which finds its source in the divine heart.4. Prayer of Quiet in which the devout heart rests on the divine heart as exemplified by John the evangelist resting on the breast of Our Lord at the last Supper.Whilst acknowledging that prayer is above all a gift of God, there are things we can do to make ourselves more open to receiving God's gift of prayer. Francis compares us humorously to a clock that "no matter how good it may be, it needs resetting and rewinding twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening."It is through prayer that we best dispose ourselves for the work of God in our lives. The dialogue of prayer begins in the Heart of God who communicates to us through his inspirations. These inspirations, the gift of the Holy Spirit, enlighten our mind and move our will to respond to God’s goodness. It follows, then, that prayer is the inverse movement of the inspirations that God communicates to our heart. Our souls move, and are moved, by these inspirations so that we can lift our mind and heart to God in prayer. St Francis writes: “we are in continual communication with him and he never ceases to speak to our hearts by his inspirations, allurements, and sacred movements … He has openly revealed all his secrets to us as to his closest friends ... as for ourselves, we have freedom to speak to him in devout prayer whenever we wish, for we have all our life, movement and being not only with him but in him and by him.” Deeply influenced by Gilbert Génébrard’s commentary on the Song of Songs, which reveals the unfolding of the love story between God and humanity, prayer is accordingly understood not as something we do, but as a response to God, who draws us continually. It is God who takes the initiative. We are invited to respond in love to God who has first loved us into being. As St Therese of Lisieux expresses it, “prayer is not primarily an activity but a way of being with God. Prayer has to do with where our heart is at every moment of our life, the trials as well as the joys.” In short, prayer is allowing ourselves to be possessed by the love of God who wants to enter into a deep mutual friendship with us. As well as the time we set aside for praying St Francis de Sales advises that we make short spontaneous prayers throughout the day. In this way, in the midst of our busyness, we withdraw to God already present in our heart. In The Introduction, he advises us to imitate the halcyon birds that “make their nests like the closed palm of the hand and leave only a small opening from the top. They put them on the seashore and yet they remain so strong and impenetrable that, even when washed by the waves, water never enters them. Thus always floating, they remain in the midst of the sea, on the sea and masters of the sea. Your heart, Philothea, is to be like that, open only to heaven, impenetrable to riches and perishable things.” We must learn to return to our hearts in the midst of daily occupations, just as “birds have nests in the trees where they can seek refuge” or “deers hide, seek shelter and find the coolness of the shade in summer in thickets and bushes. Similarly, Philothea, our hearts must find and choose some place each day, to be near him. There we must seek refuge at every opportunity.” In short, St Francis is encouraging us to become more aware of, and practice living in, the presence of God.Prayer as friendship with ChristFollowing in the tradition of St Teresa of Avila, St Francis sees prayer very much as friendship with Christ, for God is the ‘friend of the human heart.’ To create this friendship we need not only time for prayer, but also, an awareness that certain lifestyles either facilitate or hinder prayer. The Salesian tradition of spiritual guidance highly recommends Scripture as a privileged means through which we encounter the person of Jesus. This Teresian focus on the person of Jesus, proposed by St Francis, requires “often turning your eyes on him in meditation [so that] you will learn his ways and form your actions after the pattern of his.” Devasia writes, “Salesian meditation is a regular, systematic training of the attention to turn inward and dwell continuously on a single focus, Jesus. The aim is to become so absorbed with the person of Jesus that after many years of meditation and contemplation we totally forget ourselves.” The role of delight or complacence is essential to this understanding of meditation that we are learning to rejoice in the mystery that is Christ. St Francis de Sales often speaks of delig ht as the way in which the mind releases itself to be caught up in the mystery.Guidelines for meditating heart to heartInfluenced by his own experience of the Spiritual Exercises, St Francis de Sales offers some suggested structures and formats for the practice of meditation and prayer. These meditations are for the most part variants of the Spiritual Exercises, which in an Ignatian-like method bring the five senses to bear on the foregoing contemplation. Some of these meditations in the Devout Life may appear rather antiquated to the modern reader, however, all the abilities of the person praying are engaged: the intellect, will, imagination and emotions. Through the use of the imagination the person meditating is engaged affectively and stimulated to respond accordingly. The good intentions that are engendered through mediation, nonetheless, must be put into action otherwise they will not bear fruit. This explains why St Francis, like Ignatius, encourages resolutions at the end of the meditative practice so as to translate prayer into life. Bearing in mind, that both St Jane Frances de Chantal and Francis de Sales advocate a ‘methodless method’ because prayer is not arrived at through a technique but requires ‘liberty of spirit’ where the person is led by the Holy Spirit, nevertheless, it is useful to offer the following guidelines for beginners in prayer. Six steps as a guide to moving through a time of prayer. 1. Place yourself in the presence of God. Remember that God is near, not far away. He is in the very depth of your heart, your spirit. ‘Begin all your prayers, whether mental or vocal, in the presence of God. Keep to this rule without any exception and you will quickly see how helpful it will be.’ A helpful way of guiding people in placing themselves in God’s presence is to begin with the mantra: ‘I love you too’. These words immediately conjure up the sense of already being loved by God and that I am responding to this love. The heart is already warmed in the truth of God’s love for us. No matter how much anyone loves us, their love comes to us from outside, they speak to our heart. Yet, only God is able to speak to us from within our heart. He dwells within us. He speaks to our heart from within. At the same time, we dwell in God who carries us in his heart and opens up his chamber of love to us.2. In accord with St Teresa of Avila, St Francis believes that most of our difficulties in prayer lie with the misconception that God is distant. As we place ourselves in God’s presence, he advises us to ask Him to help us pay attention to Him, to open ourselves up to His Word and his presence. “All our difficulties in prayer are heart problems. Our heart is not in it, we make excuses. We don’t come to it with longing, desire, enthusiasm, but begrudgingly… Two people who love each other deeply can hardly have problems thinking of how to spend their time together. It is enough to be together as often as they can! Unfortunately, we have not reached this point because our love for God is weak. We fail to engage our heart.” It is for this reason that St Francis counsels us, in our preparation for prayer, to place ourselves in the presence of God:Our Lord is not distant but very near to us.God is not only near to us, but he is dwelling within us. God is dwelling in our heart. “Just as God created this world to be our paradise, so too, has he created your heart to be his paradise.” We do not contain God, we are dwelling within God.3. St Francis counsels us to meditate on Scripture, above all, because we are not simply thinking about ideas but encountering God in his Word. He writes: “In Holy Scripture the word meditation is ordinarily applied to the attention we pay to the things of God in order to arouse ourselves to love them… When we think upon the things of God, not to learn but rather to acquire affection for them, the act is called meditating and the exercise is mediation. Meditation is simply attentive thought voluntarily repeated or entertained in the mind in order to arouse the will to holy and salutary affections and resolutions.” Choose a passage from Scripture, select a scene from the Gospel, a mystery of the Faith, or a passage from some spiritual reading. If the subject matter lends itself to it, imagine yourself in the same place as the action or event that is happening. For example, picture yourself in the midst of the scene near Jesus or with the disciples. Some people find using the imagination very helpful in prayer whereas others, even at the very beginning, have problems with discursive meditation. St Teresa of Avila complained that “God did not give her talent for discursive thought” or “profitable use of the imagination.” Her way of prayer was to recollect herself and be attentive to Christ’s presence whom she knew by faith dwelt within her. Just like “a blind person in a room who know that someone is present but cannot see them with their eyes.” If our mind begins to wander, we gently bring it back through a passage from Scripture, a picture, or an act of faith and love in the presence of Jesus within us. For St Francis we must not become preoccupied with distractions, but begin again, each time we start again is pleasing to the Lord.4. Meditation for St Francis is not so much for study or to gain knowledge but to increase our love for God and enter more fully into discipleship. Again, like St Teresa, prayer is not about thinking much, but loving much, being present to Christ whom we know loves us.5. If good affections should rise up – gratitude for God’s mercy, awe at His majesty, sorrow for sin, desire to be more faithful, for example – yield to them.6. We see clearly in the Introduction to the Devout Life, how St Francis is anxious to transform Philothea's simple desire to live the gospel into a firm resolve to do so. This is why he underlines the necessity of resolutions that arise from the affections experienced in meditation. For example, resolve to be more faithful in prayer, or more ready to forgive, more eager to share the faith with others, or more determined to resist sin, in as practical and concrete a way as you can determine. “Most of all, after you rise from meditation you must remember the resolutions and decisions you have made and carefully put them into effect on that very day. This is the great fruit of meditation and without it meditation is often not only useless but even harmful. Virtues meditated on but not practiced sometimes inflate our minds and courage and we think that we are really such as we have thought and resolved to be.” St Francis recommends that we end the time of meditation-prayer firstly with expressions of gratitude to God for the light and affections he has given us in our time of prayer; then, an offering of ourselves to the Lord in union with the offering of Jesus; and thirdly, a time of intercession for our self and others.When the well runs dryThe experience of aridity or spiritual dryness in prayer is the inevitable experience of those who have become accustomed to praying regularly. Often, the lack of feeling in prayer may be misinterpreted as a sign that we are no longer praying or we may be even tempted to give up prayer. St Francis writes: “Don’t waste time during prayer trying to understand exactly what you are doing or how you are praying; for the best prayer is that which keeps us so occupied with God that we don’t think about ourselves or about what we are doing ... don’t be like the bride who entertains herself by looking at her engagement ring without even seeing the husband who gave it to her.” Yet, it needs to be explained to the person praying that this dryness is a normal phenomenon in the journey of prayer. It is calling for a deeper reliance on faith that God is working away in the darkness and the lack of feeling is not to be taken as the gauge of prayer. It is a movement from the senses to the spirit where the sensory part of the person (sensory gratification) is starting to dry up and the soul’s riches are being transferred to the spirit. Rather than being an indication of diminishing prayer, this experience is an indication that God is becoming more the agent and the person more the receiver. It indicates a greater purity of prayer because our prayer is no longer dictated by what we get out of it as we seek “the God of consolations and not the consolations of God.” St Francis’s description of St Jane’s experience of aridity in prayer through his parable of the deaf musician is a good example. He reminds her that she is like a deaf musician who has been hired to play music for the King. The musician takes delight when seeing how the king enjoys her music, but when the king is absent she is required to continue playing although she cannot hear it herself nor see the king’s reactions. This moves the person praying deeper along the journey towards Pure Love. What is required at this point of transition as the person’s praying becomes more passive, and God’s action works away in the darkness, is the inculcation of interior attitudes and dispositions of heart that can help us to receive the gift of prayer: namely, faith, trust, fidelity and perseverance. Commenting on the necessity of perseverance, René Voillaume observes that the only recommendation that Jesus makes regarding prayer is ‘perseverance’. Our focus must not be on what we are feeling or not feeling, on our experience during prayer because if so we have stopped praying and become caught up in ourselves. “If we seek our own satisfaction, we will abandon prayer as soon as it becomes too difficult, or when we feel dryness or discontent … we must believe that we shall be heard, but it is only very seldom that we can have evidence of this.” Love profits from feelings as well as dryness, from inspirations as well as aridity, from virtue as well as sin. As St Francis de Sales reminds us, even when we feel nothing and are in a state of aridity we can still exclaim: “Lord, I am no more than a dry log, set me afire.” We often complain that God does not hear us or we may mistakenly believe that we are talking to ourselves! Yet, the truth of the matter is that the problem lies not with God, but with us. “Too often our hearts are set for transmission only, and incoming calls are not received.”Prayer and LifeFor St Francis, prayer and life are one, much like how breathing out follows on breathing in. We breathe in the love of God through prayer (affective love) and breathe out love in serving our neighbor (effective love). Genuine prayer quite naturally leads to selfless service, igniting a love that is true charity. Just like any human relationship, through prayer, we are transformed and shaped by God whom we are communicating with. “Prayer stretches us beyond our limits of loving? and, in so doing, transforms us ever more into the likeness of Jesus, by uniting us with him.” This explains why prayer is essential on the Salesian spiritual journey of letting ‘Jesus live’ in us. Through prayer we are transformed in God through love, assuming the heart of Christ so that we can respond to life situations with the love and compassion of Christ. In Salesian terminology this ecstatic movement out of ourselves in love of others is called, the ecstasy of action. A Communion of HeartsThe call to prayer draws us into the Heart of God in communion with others because God is the ‘great Uniter.’ Writing to his anam chara, Jane de Chantal, he declares, “It is true, my dear daughter, our unity is utterly consecrated to the highest unity and each day I sense more vividly the truth of our sincere connection which will not let me ever forget you even long, long after I have forgotten myself in order to better attach myself to the Cross.” In the Salesian view of Trinitarian love, it appears that it is the role of “the Spirit of Love, uniter of hearts” to draw us into communion with God and each other. The vision is almost Balthasarian in its expression, as through the mediation of the Heart of Christ our hearts are returned together to the Father: “For my work must be perfected in you and it will be brought to term only when my Heart beats in yours, only when all hearts, now submissive and docile, beat for the Father together in my Heart.”It is in the sacraments, in particular, that we are graced with this encounter with the heart of Christ who draws us into unity. However, “without a prayer life, the sacraments would have a limited effect. The sacraments confer grace but their effects are stunted because they do not find ‘good soil’ in which to take root.” Like prayer, the sacraments, from a Salesian perspective, are to be understood in terms of an interaction of hearts. Influenced by Génébrard, the sacraments are not to be understood merely as external rites devoid of all warmth and feeling. On the contrary, as Pocetto points out, St Francis “conceives of them as the dynamic and affectionate actions of Christ in his Church. He compares them to a loving embrace that Christ gives to his spouse when interpreting verse 2:6 of the Canticle: his left arm is under my head and his right embraces me.” If we return to our mantra of ‘I love you too,’ we could understand baptism as God pouring his love into our hearts. Through the gift of the Spirit, God is not only saying ‘I love you,’ but sharing his very life, his love, his Spirit with us, so that we can participate in his Son’s life and become his beloved child. So baptism is God saying ‘I love you’, and also our response, it is our acknowledgment of what God is doing. In short, by receiving the gift of baptism we are responding to God, saying, ‘I love you too’. Is it not the same with the Eucharist? In this most blessed Sacrament Christ not only says ‘I love you’, but shows the depth of this love by giving himself to us as our spiritual nourishment. He enters into communion with us and invites us to respond with our ‘amen.’ By so doing, are we not also saying “I love you too”? Just as God gives Himself to us, so too, we give ourselves to God. As St John Paul II reminds us, ‘we can say not only that each of us receives Christ, but also that Christ receives each of us. He enters into friendship with us: “You are my friends” (Jn 15:14).Yet again, in the sacrament of Reconciliation, the Lord washes us clean, reconciles us with his Father, and brings us into the Father’s embrace, saying, “I love you”. Our response in confession is to accept this forgiving love, saying ‘I love you too.’ It is a recognition of our dependency on God’s grace to be faithful, always remembering that we are saying this from the position of being embraced by the Father. Let us conclude our exploration with the irenic words of St Francis who recapitulates our understanding of prayer as follows: ‘To sum up, the pleasure we take in anything is a precursor that places in the lover’s heart the qualities of the thing that pleases. Hence holy complacence transforms us into God, whom we love, and the greater the complacence, the more perfect the transformation. Thus having great love, the saints are very quickly and perfectly transformed, since love transports and translates the manners and dispositions of one heart into another.”The idea of transformation into Christ, therefore, while being uniquely personal is also radically communitarian. St Francis highlights this communitarian dimension for since each person is made in the image and likeness of God, “together we represent one same portrait which is God.” Here, we enter into what Lajeunie describes as Salesian ‘cosmic Christocentrism.’ The summit of creation, therefore, is the communion of all persons in love with one another and with God. The Kiss of GodPrayer, understood as heart to heart, is at the epicentre of this work of transfiguration because our true life is hidden in the Son who returns our hearts to the Father. It is the fulfilment of the great priestly prayer of Christ that all may be one. This is only made possible because in Christ the divine and human heart unite. This union of hearts, between God and humanity, is consistently symbolized throughout the Treatise by the image of a kiss. It is through this kiss that God draws us to himself and this union will be fully consummated in heaven. We can, however, receive pre-sentiments of this ‘nuptial kiss’ in the present world, because God has invited us to participate in his divine friendship. The union of our hearts with God in prayer is, thus, expressed through meditation where we seek to ‘warm our hearts with heavenly love,’ and through prayers of aspirations that unite us to God in the midst of our activities. However, it is through contemplation that we enjoy the presence of God in the depths of our heart. And yet, ‘the devout heart has no less love when it turns to external duties than when it prays.’ Such a perspective, drawn from the Song of Songs, can only express the story between God’s heart and the human heart as a ‘love story.’ It is the story of God’s seeking out His lost love, ‘the highest possible romance.’ We cannot understand prayer without understanding love and romance. It is God who is seeking us, and prayer is our response to being courted by God. ? ................
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