Mary Oliver's meditation on the simplicity of true prayer: Praying
It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate, this isn't a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
Saint Hesychius of Jerusalem writes: "There is but one task that we must hold before us and must always perform in the same manner---to call on Jesus Christ, our Lord, entreating Him with a burning heart that He would grant us to partake of and to taste the blessings of His Holy Name. For constancy is the mother of habit for both virtue and vice, and habit eventually takes over as second nature." A taste of heaven is not yet habit. But such a taste creates the desire for virtue.
I feel the pull outside myself. Old drives and ambitions and fears scatter my inner poise. The poise of my interior life is fragile. Like a seedling, it requires care. Unceasing mental busyness has given way to unceasing prayer and concentration on the Divine Name, but the newness has shallow roots and needs time. I need time to grow deep roots that will sustain me in the second half of life. The gate is narrow, yet I have entered it. The path is hard and few find it, therefore I must be vigilant and uncompromising in my determination to walk it.
Why does God send love into our hearts? Why must we tend this love so diligently?
Why love for God above all else?
Because, "where your treasure is," Jesus said, "there your heart will be also." Our loves move us. If we love wrongly we move wrongly. If crude loves attach us to unholy things, we become crude and unholy. "The foot of the soul is love," wrote St. Augustine, "for it moves by means of love to the place it is going."
The place we long to go is God. The only thing that'll carry us there is love.
I practice loving God alone---who alone satisfies, making every other thought as nothing. This is not rest, but leads to rest. It is in this practice that habits are formed, and from habits comes virtue---that inner freedom from all false loves to love the only thing that should be loved, God, in whom the relinquishment of all other things gives us Everything. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing calls this "forgetting." Julian of Norwich says that "we need to know the littleness of all created beings and set at nothing everything that is made," so we can love God "who is unmade."
I pray this way so that I may be so bound to God and not to myself and the lower loves. I pray this way so that as Julian also says, there may be "no created things between my God and me"---not even a single thought to cloud my vision of God's glory or shade my heart from God's love.