A Proper Understanding of Prayer and Meditation

by St. Teresa of Avila

St. Teresa, in the third chapter of the fourth mansion of the Interior Castle explains four key points that help give us a proper understanding of what is to be understood by prayer and meditation. In summary, she explains that recollection is a loving awareness of Our Lord that comes in the form of a gift and not as a result of spiritual gymnastics. St. Teresa points out that, as we become absorbed in Our Lord, it is insufficient, stifling, frustrating and even dangerous to strive for some state of consciousness in which we act against our desire to understand. Instead of a state of consciousness, she encourages us to seek a deep union of friendship with God:

1.	Deeper prayer does not require that we manage our thoughts (which she calls "human industry") but that we seek to simply and humbly yield to the work of Our Lord.
2.	Deeper prayer comes through a resignation to the Will of God. This resignation brings peace, whereas human efforts bring frustration. Peace is a matter of bringing our created will into harmony with the loving Will that created it.
3.	Real meditation isn't about thinking about nothing, or even about our own consciousness or our own petty affairs. The effort to achieve a state of thoughtlessness itself can mislead the soul into thinking in even more distracting ways than otherwise would have been the case. If we are self-occupied with self-awareness or lack of self-awareness (which is the common mistake in many modern forms of prayer), thinking or not thinking, understanding or not understanding, we have already lost sight of the real point and purpose of our meditation - Our Lord Jesus Christ! We have made it into a mental exercise of thinking about ourselves, under the guise of a meditation. This awareness of our own mental activity leads us not to God or what He reveals to us, but rather keeps us absorbed in ourselves!
4.	The most pleasing and substantial service we can do for God is to have only His honour and glory in view, and to forget ourselves, our own benefit, delight, and pleasure. In prayer and meditation, St. Teresa explains, we should not seek to "charm our faculties" into some false state of readiness for God, but that if our mind or faculties are ever to be directed by God, then the ability to achieve such a thing comes from God alone. We need do nothing but simply turn our attention to Him and occupy our minds with Him in prayer, which is the central focus we must have when in all our prayer and meditation.