The absolute necessity of God’s aide is the last idea to come to us (Dom Guillerand), but how obvious it is! Any movement not inspired by the Holy Spirit is a movement of nothingness decapitated from the Head. And most of our planning, projection, evaluation, whatever trundles through our head, is decapitated nothingness! a useless noise and waste when compared to, once we know, God’s gift of self. For in Giving Himself God gives all Providence and even the Future of Heaven with Him: and He gives the path to it, our path.

We must become so aware of the necessity of His aide that, in total poverty of spirit, we receive everything from Him and deny every movement that would come from us and our ‘thinking it through’. Ignoring all that mental hubbub, we must trust that He alone is the Answer and that to wait on Him in the silence of prayer is the best movement we can make: opening ourselves to let His light flood the light of our mind, so we are guided by the soul infused with God and not by what we ‘think’.

Thought is a useless appendage, a dead weight, a web of defeatism, a shackle to past habits and views. It must be daily cleansed, constantly renewed by a prayer that is cognizant of thought’s false allure and steadfastly faithful to the draw of God, Who can override and overfill us such that thought loses its interpretive grip. For thought always superimposes a dead world and makes it tempting, tempts us with the illusion it is solid, accurate, real, when it is decrepit. It is the thought-world and its many deceptions that must be laid to rest through contemplative surrender at the altar of unknowing trust in God and His Providence.

Then we will learn to see with God-infused eyes the God-given world as it is really is: as held in the freshness of His love. Then we can respond to His actual intention for it and for us. Then is our movement restored from the nothingness of our head to the plenitude of the Head, Christ. Then we can recover our destiny in God as a member of His Body, alive with the aide He wants to give us, which is His life. For God’s Being and His giving It and His desire to give It, are all the same in Him: His Life is forever the Life of Love. So let us learn to accept Him, Newness Itself, at all times: He our absolute Guide and Friend– our Savior.

April 13, 2023
*This reflection inspired by Dom Augustin Guillerand’s The Prayer of the Presence of God.