Summary of Conversion: Spiritual Insights Into an Essential Encounter with God by Fr. Donald Haggerty

July 17, 2024 by Leave a Comment

What is this book about?

Contemporary spiritual writer Fr. Donald Haggerty provides a profound exploration of the journey of Christian conversion through his insightful observations. In this collection of concise, meditative reflections, Fr. Haggerty examines the crucial steps of a soul’s return to God, addressing the repercussions of sin, the true meaning of mercy, and the need for a radical commitment to God’s will. Fr. Haggerty also emphasizes the transformative fruits of conversion, which elevate a relationship with God from mediocrity to genuine holiness. These special graces include a love for the poor, a simple lifestyle, and deep devotion to the Eucharist. A particularly compelling aspect of this book is the concept of a “second conversion.” This unique and thought-provoking idea highlights the ongoing invitation to embrace a deeper, more passionate relationship with God, serving as the thematic heartbeat of this inspiring work.

The following are my favourite reflections from each of the chapters (with my own headings). I highly encourage you read the book yourself 🙂

Ch. 1: Preliminary Thoughts on Conversion

The necessity of conversion: “Conversion is the spark that allows a soul to catch fire with God. It strikes the flint and begins the early burning of a passion for God. It is the first leap of flame that can quickly become a fire lasting a lifetime. Conversions are necessary for deeper spirituality, as many saints can testify. It would seem that no one without an experience of a serious conversion will be taken to the more profound depths of a personal encounter with God or invited by grace into a contemplative life of prayer. This seems to be almost a private maxim of Our Lord with souls. He wants us to know the experience of being finally conquered and subdued in the presence of his love. For being vanquished by him is essential to all greater love for him” (15).

God’s initiative of grace: “A conversion is never planned or conceived as a personal project. It is not a prepared item on a life’s journey. It may have a time of gestation, but that is difficult to measure. Most souls have no realization until they are near the event itself that they are moving in the direction of a conversion. It is not something ordinarily sought but, rather, seems to seek out a soul. The favor and predilection of God are always behind it. It is as though his eyes linger on certain souls, watching them for a time, before targeting them as a prey of his love. In truth, therefore, conversions are never entirely sudden, coming out of nowhere, even when they seem to ignite an explosively new force within a life. The hidden chiseling of the hand of God has usually been at work for an unknown time; concealed touches have been laid upon the heart; the trailing of the soul has taken place into its shadowed hours, sometimes for long periods of time, even for years. All these preliminary anticipations only point to the essential truth of a serious conversion. God meets a soul at a crossroad of life and in some unexpected way makes his real presence known. A personal encounter with the real mystery of a personal God is at the heart of every great conversion” (16).

A definite choice: “As much as God may draw a soul, leading it to the day of recognition that he desires, it remains for a soul to choose. God never exercises a last compelling push or shove across the threshold that finally takes a soul to its knees in a surrender of itself to God. There is always an interior act of consent to God that must be exercised deep in the soul, an utterly personal choice. The choice for God, with all its unknown risk and its uncertainty, takes our soul across the threshold of a conversion. This never happens except when an hour of decisive consent to God occurs, sometimes to the point of sweat and tears. Ordinarily the interior act in affirming a “yes” to God is accompanied as well by a visible action. The decision to seek a confessional when there is the long burden of sin, the choice to make an act of profound offering in the life of personal prayer, even a promise or vow, the decision to enter a monastery or cloister, a seminary or religious house—in each case a consent and personal surrender take place. The impact of that choice, which could have been refused, affects all that follows in our life. This personal choice and the determination it elicits from our soul can mark an entire life. Many souls become great spiritually because this first taste of a serious choice for God is never forgotten during their lifetime. Even in later struggles and in the shadowed periods of life, the capacity for a serious inward choice for God remains ready to be exercised once again. Their “yes” to God at the time of their conversion deepens into a “yes” to everything he asks over the course of their lives. The ability to find that “yes” many times again in a life shapes over time our relationship with God” (16-17).

Ch. 2: Aftermath of a Conversion

Post-conversion time is key: “The period of time after a conversion is often decisive for a lifetime. It is a privileged interval of discovery, not just in coming to know God more vividly, but in sensing a request from God to let our life be used by him. The explosive force of grace experienced in a conversion lingers in its effects and often casts a sharp light on God’s desires for the steps he wants us to take now in life. He has revealed his presence in a personal manner, and now he begins to reveal a purpose in our life that was never previously suspected. At the same time, this light may not answer all questions. We may know with certainty after a conversion that we belong to God in a special manner. But we may not have concrete answers about how this belonging to God affects the significant choices in our life. Nonetheless, the graces are real in which God is drawing the soul to desire a life deeply rooted in him. He wants our life offered to him only from a free desire animated by love. Converted souls sometimes become saintly souls because they leap in that decisive time of grace toward the vista of a great gift of themselves to God” (27-28).

The desire for more: “The desire to know what God wants from us can be urgent. A delay might be harmful; the loss, irrecoverable. All this worry and anxiety, however, may be misguided and without reason. God may not be asking for a particular decision of any kind at that hour. It is true that he does not permit complacency about the future, as though the days ahead require no seeking and will take care of themselves. But surely he intends to lead us to his desires. On the other hand, perhaps the anxiety has the useful purpose of carving a need to recognize a deeper offering that still awaits our life. The desire for that offering must become a permanent and prodding hunger in our soul. This desire for a deeper offering to God, if once it is embraced as an indispensable element of prayer, is often a first step in taking any soul into the graces of a contemplative life. And for this reason God allows us to taste an inexplicable dissatisfaction and uncertainty about our life. His intention is not for us to look to external solutions. He wants us to open the eyes of our soul to something far more profound in prayer than we have considered as yet” (36).

Ch. 3: The Understanding of Sin

Memory of past sins purified by the virtue of hope: “Every converted soul should take note of Saint John of the Cross’ insight that memory is purified by the virtue of hope. Certainly past events do not change, including our sins. There is a fixed, factual truth to everything that has happened, an irrecoverable character to earlier choices, and effects that may be still consequential. Memory cannot alter that. In this sense, the past cannot be taken back. We may regret sin and repent, but events do not evaporate and disappear, and sometimes the memory of them causes disturbance. Yet the virtue of hope, rather than dimming memory, can cause a different kind of remembrance. Looking back at sin, we can perceive what we had not realized in the past: that God in an utterly personal manner was present in a perseverance of love through that lost time, keeping pace with us even as we may have plunged recklessly into sin. He was preparing our rescue even while we were oblivious to his love. Perhaps there were many quiet approaches to our soul even unknown to us. He never renounced us, and he never cast us from his gaze. A form of purification affecting our memory allows us to perceive that this faithfulness of God invites us to a conviction of hope for the rest of our life. A thread of continuity persists through past and present and future. For God, all is of one piece, united in the single gaze he casts on our life. God’s perseverance in a work of mercy will be consistent with all his past faithfulness to our soul. The fidelity he has already shown us continues always. This recognition is indeed an essential certitude in every life that becomes prayerful and contemplative” (36-7).

Offer your past life as a gift to Jesus: “Why is it sometimes said that Our Lord wants us to bring failure and sinfulness to him as a gift? At first the question seems absurd and incomprehensible in suggesting that sins can be a gift offered to God. It appears a clear contradiction to the genuine effort of proving our love for him by virtue and generous self-giving. Yet many saints came to realize the importance of bringing the fullness of self as a gift to the foot of the Cross, which must include the truth of an ineradicable tendency to sinfulness in our lives. When Saint Jerome after many years finally completed his translation of the Bible into Latin in Bethlehem, it was Christmas time and he thought to make this work his gift to the Christ Child on his birthday. In a vision, the Child Jesus appeared to him and told him that he did not want his translation as a birthday gift. Jerome was upset and perplexed after so many years of hard work, and he questioned: “Then what do you want?” “Give me your sins, Jerome. I want you to give me your sins as my gift” (41).

Ch. 4: The Mercy of God

The enormous cost of mercy: “The encounter with a merciful God ought to mark our lives forever. Yet this attribute of God’s mercy, always inseparable from his love for souls, is easily taken for granted, precisely because it is always available to souls. The true meaning of mercy is understood only when another link is present. The mercy of God cannot be separated from the suffering that Jesus Christ endured at Calvary. An enormous cost permeates the divine offer of mercy to souls. That cost is not something we must pay, but it is something we should never forget. We are forgiven all the sins for which we repent in a conversion, but this truth implies our recognition that precisely these sins tore apart the body of Christ on the Cross. The reception of mercy requires an effort to gaze on the wounds of Christ as pain we ourselves inflicted upon him. Otherwise, mere relief from the guilt of sin is sought, which is often only a temporary impulse. The mercy of God is limitless, but this does not invite a distortion of mercy’s harder truth and the hard task of a change of life after a conversion” (52)… “According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, mercy is the supreme attribute of God and, for that reason, must be honored and loved in all its truth. We have received it as a gift. But like any gift, it ought not to be diminished in value because it has been extended so freely to us. Rather, it should provoke a deepening humility in our lives” (53).

God’s merciful knowledge of us: “The divine knowledge of a soul is always a merciful knowledge. We can never be in a true relationship with God until we discover that we are only known mercifully. Not just loved with intermittent mercy after sinning and repenting once again, but that we cannot be looked at, that we cannot be known by God or drawn to him except as a soul in need, poor and destitute, incapable of avoiding collapse and ruin without divine intervention. A profound mercy, in other words, permeates God’s vision of our soul. On our part, faithfulness to this mercy is to keep an awareness of the divine gaze upon our soul. It is to know ourselves as known by God in mercy. The soul conscious of mercy enters into prayer in poverty and need, but it also knows God’s presence as a gaze of love upon its poverty. And its confidence in mercy becomes an implicit wonder and admiration directed toward God’s attraction for the poverty at the heart of our soul” (61).

Ch. 5: A Transformed Love for Souls

Missionary zeal for souls: “A conversion is not just a change of life-style. The new recognition of God infuses strong desires in our soul that God should be known by others as we now know him. A kind of missionary zeal for souls can take hold of our heart and enter into our impulses with other people. We would like to see conversions spread contagiously among our contacts with people. More immediately we would be happy at times to bowl over an unbelieving soul with the overwhelming truth of God. This enthusiasm for winning souls may be naïve in its optimism regarding the appeal of God to people who do not know him. But, in another sense, it is sign of our love for God. And a zeal for souls as we continue life is essential to a love for souls. We taste a graced impulse in wanting to bring others to the truth of God and to Catholic faith. We have to be led by God in this love for souls, learning wisdom of heart and suffering for souls, if we truly want their conversion to the faith. Even God in his omnipotence cannot convert a soul that does not want to know him” (67).

Only knock on the door: “Truth is a power, but only when one does not demand that it have immediate effect” (Romano Guardini). To approach someone in any spiritual danger without probing unnecessarily or trying to satisfy a curiosity, moved simply by a desire for the spiritual welfare of another, means to limit ourselves initially to knocking on a door and waiting for an invitation to enter. Unfortunately, the door may remain shut and no entry granted. Even in the zeal to save another from harm, the door ought not to be broken down, lest an escape out the back window take place and a disappearance from our lives forever. Souls at risk often need our abiding for a time in prayer for them and a willingness to befriend them gradually rather than to stage a dramatic rescue” (72).

Trust in God’s timing: “After our own experience of conversion, we should trust that there is a kind of vulnerability for God in everyone, a spark in the soul ready to flame up toward God at unexpected moments. Often it takes misfortune, a tragedy, a personal loss, and then the vigilance against God suddenly gives way. The crushing moment has become a divine knock at the soul’s door. The suffering has become a merciful gesture. We cannot know this by looking from the outside, but we should always respect its possibility. A personal misfortune may mean salvation for a soul, and we should take care to tread gently, not to get in God’s way, and yet to be ready to be his instrument” (80). Haggerty recommends that in this we seek to discover the “hidden poverty” in others that draws our love for them to lead them to Christ (cf. 78).

Ch. 6: Seeking the Will of God

The ultimate goal in life: “A conversion is the beginning of a lifelong engagement with the will of God. The saints tell us that a complete union of our will with the will of God is the ultimate goal of life, inseparable from our love for God. This surrender of ourselves to God faces test after test in life. Knowing God’s will with some sense of certainty is the initial dilemma. Yet we may discover that this difficulty is matched at times by the ease with which God in his providence makes his desires known in the depth of our heart. He is always leading us to truth if we are ready to recognize it. Choosing is still another thing. Relinquishing our own desires and preferences once we know what God wants and giving ourselves to God’s choice is a conversion we must seek many times in life. We experience this demand strongly at the outset of a conversion. It is an early taste of a need repeated throughout life to seek his light patiently, waiting upon his direction and his lead. God’s interest in our regard is always to bring us into some deeper conformity with his own will” (81).

Ask and it will be given: ““Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Lk 11:9). The words of Jesus identify a necessary disposition in prayer, though not, perhaps, only in their usual meaning. These words invite us to make confident requests to God, expecting that he will respond, at least in some manner. But the same words or a variation of them can become our own words to God. “Ask, Lord, and you will receive from me; seek, Lord, you will find what you look for; knock, Lord, and I shall open to you.” Instead of making a request to God, we can invite his request to us. Perhaps it is a crucial spiritual act, for it may well be that God does not draw so near to our soul unless we solicit his unknown desire and accede to him in anticipation the surrender to all he will ask. “Give God permission” was a favorite refrain of Mother Teresa. It is a very deliberate choice, surely, to make ourselves more accessible to God and his will, leaving a door in our soul permanently ajar for him to do as he pleases” (93).

Discovering God’s will through “unlikely” people: “The most common patterns for this disguise of communication after a conversion involve God using an improbable, unsuitable person to speak his desire to us and rouse some form of offering from our soul. Sometimes a person with no obvious place in our life to offer advice confronts us unexpectedly with a spiritual challenge, a challenge that has been brooding already in our soul, suppressed and neglected, until now with these words it cannot be ignored. Another time someone brings a steady trial into our life that does not disappear but, rather, becomes a daily dreaded presence in our life, and again God is speaking his will to us, asking for the sacrifice of humble patience from us. Other times the ambassador of God hides behind the tattered ruins of a poor soul, offering to us an insight of new respect for human suffering because we allow ourselves a conversation with a poor man. In all this we might remember that a refusal to accept that God speaks through unlikely instruments shows a serious lack of faith. Knowing God’s will is not meant to be a remote and inscrutable task. On the contrary, his will may be ready to speak to us very nearby, as close to us as the next stranger’s glance in our direction” (86).

Ch. 7: A New Vision for the Poor

You did it to Me: “The presence of God is never only in a church. Our Lord states clearly in Saint Matthew’s Gospel that he will hide himself in poor people. “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” But now the desire for an encounter seems to shift somewhat. Often we may enter a church for a visit or for a more lengthy prayer seeking his presence in the Eucharist. Now, outside a church, it is God who seeks an encounter with us. In our contact with a poor person, a pursuit of our own soul is taking place, and we may not realize it. A conversion of insight is necessary to perceive this truth and accustom ourselves to it. Even if we ignore his presence there and do not perceive it, even if we are blind to this presence of Christ in the poor, the presence of God in these encounters is real. He does not require our recognition in order to be immediately present, as the Gospel of Saint Matthew makes quite clear. Our own choice to help or to ignore a poor person does not determine the reality of Christ’s presence. The divine gesture of offering himself to us in the poor and, shockingly, begging from us occurs sometimes in spite of ourselves. He takes the lead in this and simply waits for our recognition. Often in our lives, as our faith advances after a conversion, we may sense that we are being pursued by his desire to be known. He wants us to unmask the poor man, rough and dirty, and perceive the invisible truth of his own presence in the moment. How often this happens we can scarcely know. Perhaps it takes place at times precisely as we are on our way to a church looking to find his silent presence in the quiet tranquility of the tabernacle. But we must first encounter him in the poor man if we want to sense his presence more strongly in the tabernacle” (102).

Ch. 8: The Import of a “Second Conversion”

“The explicit idea of a “second conversion” in the spiritual life was first broached by a Jesuit in the 1600s, Father Louis Lallemant, a novice master in France to one of the future North American martyrs, Saint Jean de Brébeuf. It is likely that he taught his young Jesuit novices the need to cross the threshold of a “second conversion” if serious holiness was to be attained. His view was that a man must come to a point in life, sometime after a commitment to God is already firmly in place, in which he realizes that he has not yet fully offered his life to God. Despite what may be years of faithfulness in a vocation, a deeper offering still awaits the soul. A life may be committed and devout and externally dutiful, but it still awaits a deeper realization of an entire offering of itself as an utterly personal act before God. A man has to arrive at a decisive reckoning in which he sees now with fresh eyes what it means to give himself unreservedly to God. Until that time, a life still lacks one thing, as Jesus says to the rich young man in Saint Matthew’s Gospel. A man has not surrendered himself as yet in a complete offering to God. An utterly personal prayer of absolute oblation before God is still needed, which from the day it is made changes forever a soul’s relationship with Jesus Christ. The act is a deep interior release of the soul to be from then onward at the complete disposal of God’s purposes. In the setting of the 1600s and Jesuit missionary endeavors, Father Lallemant may have pointed to a readiness to face martyrdom as a test for crossing this threshold of the second conversion. And, in fact, the Jesuit martyrs of North America as a group did offer themselves to martyrdom prior to their deaths in upstate New York and Canada” (112 – 113).

Will you lay down your life for me? The surrender to God in a “second conversion” requires an essential component. Without this element, a lapse into mere sentiment is possible, even likely. In short, we must be willing to suffer for love, with all the unknown days of our life still in front of us. The surrender is a great “yes” pronounced with absolute determination, a “yes” to giving the entirety of ourselves, including all the unforeseen and uncertain turns a life can take. The depth and intensity of that “yes” even to suffering is the measure of our soul’s surrender to God. And, indeed, that willingness to hold back nothing in the offering of ourselves to Our Lord’s love is a dramatic step spiritually. Do we know the day it takes place? Perhaps not; it may be carving itself into the deeper desire of our soul for some time. What we do know is that there is no surrender of this sort unless a life has become courageous and bold in love. For some time, surely, before such an act of surrender is truly present, a question repeats itself within the recesses of a soul, like a faint wind heard from inside a cave: “Will you lay down your life for me?” (Jn 13:38). The answer must be an offering spoken from the same depth within the soul: “Yes, I am ready, I am unafraid; I will love you at any cost.” The words do not invite suffering into one’s life; generosity, yes, and greater selflessness. We do not ask for suffering with this “yes”, which would be a foolish and risky presumption. The “yes” rouses, instead, a great release from self that accompanies every intense love. It does not create new pain in life; it simply offers the soul to greater love. Every other question, even of suffering, becomes secondary and is no reason for fear. (116).

Ch. 9: Priests: A Need for Interior Conversion?

A man of serious prayer: “Every priest should realize the importance of making a second great offering of his life to Jesus Christ crucified. Otherwise, he risks living out his life largely taken up with an external understanding of the priesthood. The first priests were martyrs. The end of these lives declares to every priest the essential challenge. A serious sacrificial pouring out of ourselves is the demand of love in this sacred vocation. But this pouring out is not something simply external and completed in service to others. The great offering of a priest must take place in the silent truth of his prayer. The conversion of priests is linked always to a renewed dedication to the life of prayer. A priest is a man of serious prayer and sacrificially committed to prayer, or else he is to some extent false and spurious despite his performance of holy functions. The priests who will not go a day without an hour in silence before a tabernacle seem always to be the vibrant, faithful priests carrying a love for souls in their own souls” (125).

A loveless marriage: “The lack of attraction in priests for prayer is surely a sign of distracted lives, sometimes too tired to pursue this difficult interior dimension of life. Yet the absence of time spent in silence before a tabernacle, seeking the sacred presence of God, if it really is a form of disinterest or neglect, implies a choice to remain on the outer crust of religious pursuit. It is one of the self-contradictions of clerical and religious lives—to profess a solemn commitment to God while forsaking the pursuit of close relations with God. This loss is akin to the tragedy of a loveless marriage, with nothing more than occasional small talk interrupting the more deafening absence of communication—the silence of people trapped in company they find tedious and at times barely tolerable” (129).

Parish priest excuse: “The parish priest unconcerned about prayer might say that his availability to people is the essential demand of his vocation. It is easy, however, to confuse social contact with people with a spiritual concern for them. Real apostolic zeal is certainly different. It is preoccupied with the presence of souls in the course of a day. This kind of awareness can only be due to a more serious approach to prayer. Unfortunately, many priests treat prayer almost as an interference with the work of a day. A parish priest without much prayer tends to identify his life’s work in measurable terms. Statistics, attendance records, collection counts, numbers served confirm his sense of service. But the danger of the eternal loss of souls in his care, including all those living within the boundaries of his parish, may not preoccupy him at all. In contrast, for a prayerful priest, the danger of Catholic souls long away from the Church’s sacraments seems to be always a lingering obsession in his thoughts. It is why a priest’s love for the confessional is a mark of his soul, precisely to catch such souls for Christ. Yet many priests seem to consider this a boring task and give minimal attention and time to making the sacrament available. Prayerfulness would awaken a different sensitivity, a spiritual anxiety for souls. Sadly, there is often nothing of the sort in a priest. Such a priest fails as a spiritual father to the wide spectrum of people entrusted to him by God” (131).

To live for others: “Some years ago an Italian priest died at a summer beach outing for his parish after saving five children and two adults from drowning in the Adriatic Sea after the waves from a summer storm began to throw them against a rocky breakwater. The priest swam out repeatedly and helped each of them to shore. Crawling exhausted out of the water, his last words were to ask if all the children were safe. Then his heart gave way, and he expired. Fortunate, indeed, is a priest who finishes his life in an hour of intense love. But fortunate, too, are priests when they realize that the gift of their lives for others is the sole purpose of their life. The realization must burn each morning in silent prayer as a priest begins his day” (135).

Ch. 10: The Witness of Simplicity

The challenge of simplicity: “The words of Saint Paul that Jesus Christ, who was rich, became poor for love of us should pierce the heart after a conversion. These words point ultimately to the crucifixion at Calvary, where Jesus the poor man suffered ignominy and shame. A conversion of any depth can never be simply the correction of unsavory human behaviors. The encounter with Jesus Christ on a Cross, which may draw our first repentant tears, lingers in its impact on our soul. The impossibility of a life of excessive ease and comfort is the consequence. A crossroad is faced in that awareness. Conversions will stumble or be waylaid entirely if we refuse to recognize the face of Christ as a poor man inviting poverty to some extent into our own lives. This challenge of simplifying our lives accompanies every genuine conversion. At the very least, Our Lord seems always to ask a greater generosity to the poor. The impulse to give away will affirm the truth of a real encounter with Christ in a conversion” (138).

Ch. 11: Love for the Eucharist

Conversion and the Eucharist: “There is no deep conversion in a Catholic life without a new perception of the Eucharist. The attraction for Our Lord’s presence is suddenly sharp and vivid when we place ourselves near a tabernacle. Now we understand why the Church speaks of the real presence in the Eucharist. We experience the reality for ourselves in our proximity to him inside a church. Our Lord gives a gift of himself and discloses himself in this awakened experience of our faith. The challenge is to keep a vibrant love for the Eucharist at the heart of our lives. Many people after a conversion begin to attend Mass every day, and the practice remains a lifelong treasure. The discovery of Our Lord in a conversion becomes a continuing quest lived out day to day for deeper contact with him. The Eucharist is Jesus himself, and the need to remain never far from him is often implanted by grace in the depth of our soul at the very outset of a conversion. This favor is meant to be a permanent grace” (151).

Union with the crucified and risen Lord: “The reception of Holy Communion is not for the comfort of the soul. That is too indulgent a view. It has a deeper, hidden purpose that is generally not considered. We receive in the Eucharist not just the presence of Our Lord, but the presence of the Passion of Jesus Christ crucified into our soul. We are united to a body that still bears the marks of a terrible suffering inflicted on it. The union is always with Jesus Christ crucified. We can never separate the reception of the Eucharist from a real encounter, an encounter by touch, with the wounds of Our Lord. This union with him by means of his crucified body and blood has a serious spiritual implication. The reception of the Eucharist is meant to draw us closer to the sacrificial Passion of Christ. We are to learn a mystery for our own life by a proximity to his suffering. He wants us to look at his wounds when we receive him. There we will learn everything needed for love, which is essentially sacrificial. The Eucharist is not meant for comfort; it is meant to draw a soul to greater sacrificial offering. It is the great sacrament of a desire compelling us to surrender fully to his Passion living itself again in our life” (162).

Ch. 12: Passion for God

Will Christ become your Beloved? “Whether, after a conversion, Our Lord truly becomes the beloved of our soul is significant beyond measure and all-important in the life of prayer. This, too, like an initial discovery of God, entails a necessary interior striving; it means we must choose Our Lord as the beloved passion of our life and then let prayer be affected by this choice. If he becomes the beloved of our life in a quite determined manner, something resistant to fading and decline will return always to grip us again with a desire for prayer. The deeper layers of unfelt desire in our soul will always continue to stir with some unseen flame. We will seek with a passion of the soul to meet him in prayer. We will belong to him and know this as an ultimate truth of our soul because he is our beloved, and we want nothing else but to belong to him” (166). “The surrender to him as our beloved must be repeated often, even on what may seem drab days of prayer. The surrender in itself purifies our soul. Unless we allow our desire for God to undergo purification by these repeated acts of surrender, we risk a halt on the path to God” (168).

Extras:

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