I went to a public high school, and I didn’t know what to do with dances for I suppose obvious reasons. So I just got like very limited because you create a kind of space of security in your immediate vicinity, and I brought that with me. Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and then Ascension is launching a new podcast on rhythmic dance, and I will be your instructor. So my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I’m a Dominican Friar of the province of Saint Joseph. In this episode, I thought that we could talk a little bit about the Salesian method of Prayer. Perhaps you’ve heard that word Salesian, maybe associated with a religious order, maybe associated with Saint Francis de Sales himself.
Here we’re going to talk about it in the latter sense. So in his book, the Introduction to The Devout Life, Saint Francis de Sales prescribes to the person that he addresses the book to, who we call Philothea in the text. He describes to her a way of proceeding through different meditations so that at the end you have a more profound sense of God and a richer love for him, which you can play out in your daily life. So the idea here is it’s not so much like a method to master or a life hack without which you know you can’t get on. Rather, it’s just simple steps that represent the kind of transitions of the heart in its relationship to God.
So prayer is defined in a variety of ways in the Christian tradition. I think here of the definition of Saint John Damascene, which you often hear. It’s just the raising of one’s mind and heart to God. I also really like the definition given by Saint Teresa of Avila. She says that prayer is the simple gaze of the Soul upon the God by whom she knows herself to be loved. Alright, so we’re not trying to complicate prayer. We’re not saying that like in order to be a good prayer you need to pass through these steps. Each of which has sub-steps. Like no, no, no, don’t worry. You don’t need to be a technician to be good at praying. But it is helpful to have that experience kind of described to you in somewhat more technical terms so that way you have an appreciation of what’s going on, what probably has already been going on in your life so that in being more attentive to it you can receive more richly from it.
So the first Saint Francis says is that we ask God for inspiration. Alright, we place ourselves in his holy presence and we ask him for inspiration. The idea here is that at the beginning of a conversation you begin the conversation. That’s that’s all that it really is. So when he says, “Place yourself in the presence of God,” he gives you a variety of ways in which you can begin to do that. He says, “Think about the fact that God is present everywhere, giving everything its being, giving everything its peculiar way of interacting with other things in the world.” Or he says, “Think about how God is present in your own interior life by grace.” Alright, so the Son and the Holy Spirit are sent to us as the author and gift of sanctification, and wherever the Holy Spirit is, there too our Father and Son. So we can speak of the indwelling Holy Trinity. Or he says, “Maybe you’re more imaginatively driven.
Think of a particular episode in the Gospel and place yourself in that scene. There you can hear a certain resonance with Saint Ignatius of Loyola.” Alright, so having done this, then ask God for inspiration. Because if prayer goes well, whatever that means, if prayer goes well, it’s going to be by God’s grace. It’s not something that we do. Again, because we’re like soldiers in the army of prayer rules. No, no, no. It’s just God gives himself to us. We seek to respond to that offer, and we have to ask him for inspiration if it’s going to go well. The next stage he passes to is simple meditations.
So in the first part of the Introduction to The Devout Life, he proposes complete meditations that you can work through at your leisure. And so he’ll start with things like creation. He’ll move through considerations about death and judgment and purgatory and hell, some of which are a little terrible. Alright, and then he ends with a description of Heaven and Hell, our choice between them, how our lives are, as it were, kind of posed in the interval between Heaven and Hell with the opportunity to choose those things which are best and most beautiful.
So in these meditations, he gives us kind of doctrinal points. It’s almost like he takes a little article of the Creed, and then he gives you a little description of it. Why? Because the point of the Christian life is to know a lot of things about the Lord. Not so much like you don’t have to be smart to be holy, and sometimes being smart can pose obstacles that make it difficult, difficult to be humble, it makes it difficult to be receptive. So we’re not saying you need to be smart to be holy, but you are made to the image and likeness of God, which means that you have a mind with which to know and a heart with which to love. And God intends to feed your mind with his Revelation and to inspire your heart with his grace, and the ordinary way in which he inspires your heart is by feeding your mind.
You’ll often hear it said, you cannot love what you do not know. So if you want to love God, then learn a little bit about him, and your meditation is just a simple pondering of those mysteries of the Divine Life. Again, you don’t have to have a degree in theology, you just need to be willing to think about God a little bit as God continues to reveal himself to you. So in each meditation, he gives you a couple of different considerations, and then he moves to the third stage, which he calls affections or resolutions. The idea here isn’t so much like, “Alright, I thought about a thing, and now I’m going to do a thing,” because it might not be the season for doing a thing.
I think about the example of Saint Dominic, who was the founder of the Dominican Order, which I joined. He was born somewhere around and didn’t found the Order of Preachers until and then he died in. So he spent the vast majority of his life, like, of his life preparing for the work which would subsequently change the world. And if you think Father Gregory changed the world, are we serious right now? Saint Thomas Aquinas, alright, cheers. So I don’t think that we have to always be super concerned about activity, but we do need to translate these insights into movements of the heart, because we need to translate them such that they fill the whole of our humanity.
So if you’ve been pondering about God and His creative work, you say, “Lord, I recognize you as the giver of all good things. I respond to you, I thrill at the thought of you as the giver of all good things.” Just simple work there of putting it into language and then translating it into the heart. And that might mean, “Okay, Lord, I want to respond more generously to that offer of grace. I’ve been praying for like seven minutes each morning. I’d like to pray for ten. Give me the grace to do it.” Alright, so that would be the third part where these insights become affections or resolutions. Alright, so movements of the heart.
The fourth and final part, Saint Francis says, we can kind of tie up the experience. Alright, so we thank God for the gifts that he’s given. Alright, we ask God for what we need throughout the course of the day. And then he says, you can make a little spiritual bouquet. So tied together different insights and movements of the heart from your experience of prayer. Alright, bundle them up into a little bouquet and put that in your lapel so that throughout the course of the day you can pick it up, smell it, and recall the experience. You know how very much like the sense of smell is tied to memory.
Obviously, we’re not really smelling our prayers, but it’s a really evocative image. So that way we can cling to the good things that God has done, lest we grow forgetful and ultimately be like spiritual amnesiacs. We want to have a profound sense, a rooted sense of what God is doing in our life, such that we can appreciate his providence in the past, cling to it in the present, and project it out into the future, cognizant of the fact that if we are to become saints, it is by his good pleasure. So that’s just a little description of the Salesian method of prayer.
Why do I mention it? Well, because it’s awesome. Also, because it’s going to take up a big part of a new podcast that Ascension is putting together called Catholic Classics. In that podcast, I’ll be having discussions with another Dominican prior, Father Jacob Bertrand Jancic, where for each episode, we’ll read a section of the Introduction to The Devout Life, and then we’ll make commentary upon it.
The point there is just to translate it to your experience, right? To help you grow in the life of prayer, to help you grow in your Christian observance. And that’ll just be the first of what we hope to be several different spiritual classics. I hope to have some good conversations with you in that new setting, the podcast Catholic Classics. So you can look for more information as it becomes available from ascension all right until then, Cheers
Source: Fr. Gregory Pine O.P., Accession Presents, Learn to Pray like St. Francis de Sales, YouTube, October 13th, 2022, https://youtu.be/yTIN2OSrcTY?si=4XtClY0pzex-T_Wm
Saint Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church 