Where have I come in order to make this prayer today? Perhaps I am kneeling quietly in a small room, or in a remote corner of the church. It is good to isolate oneself, as much as possible, in prayer. Prayer is an audience with God, and, generally speaking, it will be more profitable and more intimate for the soul if the soul begins by resolutely disentangling itself from other persons and other preoccupations.
Our Lord, indeed, recommended us, when we pray, to shut the door of our room and pray in secret. Hence, at the beginning of the prayer today, you might, perhaps, comfort yourself that you are all alone. But you are not alone; you are never alone; you never can be alone. As you sit or kneel here, it is a steadying and salutary thought to dwell upon, that God is beside you, watching you, knowing your every innermost thought and feeling, reading the secrets of your heart like the pages of an open book.
The writer of this page is sitting in a small room, with the door closed, alone, in a country hotel. He has just slipped a new sheet of paper into the typewriter. It is necessary to be alone when writing if you are to have full power of concentration. Let us both sit back for a moment and reflect. Who said we are alone? God's presence fills the space of this little room. God's eyes see every word that is typed upon this page. God reads every idea in the mind, observes every movement of the body, takes cognizance of every mood. God knows me with a knowledge as absolutely complete and detailed as if He were concentrating on me alone all His divine intelligence. If there was no one else and nothing else, except God and myself, and if He then focused all His attention upon me, His vision of what I do and think would not be one tiny degree clearer than it is at this moment.
The life of prayer culminates in a realization of this presence of God which tends to become uninterrupted. The soul gradually awakens to the truth that "everything is naked and open to His eye." That is why such a soul is constantly concerned as the Cure of Ars put it _ to do nothing except what can be offered to God. Every task is presented to Him for His blessing; every pleasure is sanctified because He is its center; every problem is discussed with Him, as it were instinctively.
There is nothing surprising in all this. If you had a friend who was wise, trustworthy, anxious about your welfare, that is just how you would treat him. God is ever present, interested in all that interests me, beholding all that I do and think and say. If I remember that, I surely shall be chary of any discourtesy to Him. I shall consult Him about everything, offer everything to Him for His divine approval. In a word, I shall pray always.
This development is of gradual growth. It can be fostered by a faithful use of the practice of ejaculatory prayer, the number increasing little by little. This is the first way that God is everywhere _ by His presence, say the theologians, by which they mean He is present as seeing and beholding all things.
One effect of realizing this watchfulness of God is to rid the soul of all deliberate sin. If you were on the point of telling a foul story and suddenly realized the fact that mother or father would overhear you, you would call a halt in time. No sinful deed or thought escapes the allseeing eye of the heavenly Father. He is not present, as sometimes people foolishly imagine, as a policeman trying to catch them. He watches everything with the eye of a loving Father, and the soul that keeps conscious of this fact will find itself pausing when temptation to sin attacks it and resolving that it dare not do this shameful thing in such a presence.