The Garden of the Soul…
(from a June 4, 1972 conference)

If we are to find the peace of God in everything that is His holy will, including our sufferings and perplexities and disappointments, we really do need to have a very vivid sense of His closeness to us.  We must live consciously in the presence of God as much as we can. . . . Where is the best place to go if you want to find God? . . .

A certain poet said words to the effect that you are nearer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.  I think this is perfectly true . . .

We are nearer to God in the “garden of the soul” than anywhere else in the universe.  That is where God is to be found.  I did not say that He is to be found most fully in the soul, but in the garden of the soul.  And it must be a garden and not a wilderness.  A garden has to be cultivated and not left to grow wild.  If you relax your attention for long it becomes full of weeds even amongst the flowers.  The garden of the soul must be planned and worked upon and watered.  It needs the sun of success and the tears of contrition.  It must be enclosed so that nothing from outside can damage its most delicate features. . . .

We could use the imagery of a garden and go on to consider the weeds that must be uprooted and not [just] snipped off, and the virtues to be planted, and the temperate use of pleasures and pains.  But although all these parts of the cultivation of a garden are essential if it is to attract the Lord, I want to say something about the most important thing we have to cultivate, the very atmosphere without which nothing else can thrive, and the very fragrance that attracts our Bridegroom.

It is a source of wonder to me just what lengths some people will go to in order to win the Olympic games, or play tennis on the center court of Wimbledon, or be a great musician or artist, or even a performer in a circus.  Years and years of effort and training and self-control go into these activities.  How many of us give even a faint shadow of that amount of care and dedication and training to the cultivation of prayer.  Yet prayer is an art.  The artist may be God, but we shall not get far if we do not clean and stretch and steady the canvas and follow His creative hand as He develops His masterpiece in us.

There are various reasons why many people, who at one time make a firm resolution to take prayer seriously and to make it their most important interest in life, do in fact gradually lose that resolution and before long lose any claim to be men or women of prayer.  Some of the reasons they give, however, are not sound ones.  No one can truthfully say he cannot pray.  You cannot even say you are unable to pray well.  Anyone who really wants to pray well can do so.  He may not feel he prays well; that is a different matter, but the ability is there.  You have only got to be yourself in the presence of God to pray very well.  A more plausible excuse is to say one has no time for prayer.  This is not usually true at all, since those who say it can find time to other things that are voluntary.  It is a question of what you want most strongly.  If we realized the power of prayer, the rewards of prayer, and the loveliness of prayer, we should be much more keen to persevere.

The love affair between God and anyone who loves Him, which is expressed in quiet and prolonged prayer, is much more lovely than the love affair of two clean young people, which we all find so beautiful to see.  They want to be together, and they want to be alone, and they want to forget everything else except each other.  We are commanded to love God more than that, to love Him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength.  God must give us the ability to fulfill that command.  If we love Him like that, could we possibly give only ten or twenty minutes of undivided attention to Him in the course of a whole day?

Let us make, or let us renew, a firm intention to be men and women of prayer.  Nothing can stop us if we really want to be, above all else, dedicated to glorifying God, drawing down blessings on the world, and purifying ourselves by prayer.  Perhaps the biggest step to take is that of making a really effective resolution to give a definite minimum amount of time to prayer and to nothing else.  This resolution should be so firm that even if we feel completely unable to pray or concentrate or do anything prayerful, we will still keep that period of time empty of anything else.  Neither anxiety nor boredom nor restlessness nor anything else must make us violate that time set aside for God.  One can adore God by keeping at prayer even if it is a prayer of boredom or anxiety or restlessness.  If you do keep it up, the time comes when boredom gives way to peace, and anxiety becomes dissolved in an unexpected experience of trust and confidence, and restlessness changes into regret that you cannot go on praying forever.

Giving God the time and one’s undivided attention is, then, the most important effort we should make in becoming really absorbed by the desire to pray.  When God responds to our persistence, we shall no longer have any difficulty in praying a great deal, but shall regret that we cannot be at it a great deal more.

Having fixed the external framework for progress in prayer and in peace and in finding God more intimately by making resolutions about the quantity of time for prayer, we then try to learn how to improve the quality of our prayer, to spend the time at better prayer.  The whole of one’s daily life is the background of prayer, and a fussy, noisy life, full of gossip and curiosity, is not a good remote preparation for quiet and loving, undistracted prayer with God.  In fact, as one’s use of prayer time is improved, so the distinction between prayer time and the rest of the day becomes less.  There grows a quietness of spirit and a kind of calmness and warmth through all one’s daily activities.  One ceases to be over-involved in the temporal affairs of life, although they are till looked after as conscientiously as ever.  One begins almost unconsciously to see everything in God; one sees everything under the eyes of eternity.  A really prayerful life will give us not only an immense reverence for the lovely majesty of God, but a reverence for all created things too, for they are the works of His hands, and He made them lovingly and with a wonderful purpose.  By persevering prayer we come to give glory to God for all creation and to fine a harmony between all things.  The peace of God, which does pass all understanding, brings with it as well a kind of peace we can understand, a harmony with all that is.  All creation was made for prayer. . . .

If only we could realize what it is to be in the presence of our loving Father, paying attention to Him alone.  If we realized what He does to us at such moments, whether we feel it or not, we should at least double our times of prayer and regard the loss of them as a greater loss than almost anything else.  “Awake north wind, come, wind of the south!  Breathe over my garden to spread its fragrance around.  Let my Beloved come into his garden; let him taste its rarest fruits.” (Song of Songs 4:16)  Let us cultivate the garden of the soul; let us keep its rarest fruits for Him.

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