Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine, and I'm a Dominican friar of the

province of St Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for

the domestic Institute and this is Pines of Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about a little difficulty in

mental prayer. Specifically, I'd like to address how we know that prayer is working, quote unquote, because sometimes you can gauge progress in a spiritual life.

You're like, I delight more in God, I delight less in sin, there seems to be something going

on in my interior life that I can't account for otherwise, but often enough we don't really

know what's going on in our interior life.

And in those moments, I think it's helpful to have, not so much like a program, but a way of proceeding,

so that way we can have some modicum of assurance that our

prayer is doing what it ought to do that is to say cultivating communion with the

most high God so let's think about it a little bit together. Here we go.

All right, so there are plenty of traditions which propose methods of prayer.

You've probably heard of the Ignatian tradition in which you imagine yourself within

the setting and proceed through steps, you know, kind of manipulating as it were, or not in the

bad sense, sense manipulating but like

manipulating or changing that scene so as to enter more deeply into its logic

or you may have heard of the seletion method of prayer which is outlined for us in the introduction to the

devout life or you may have come across more Carmelite types of prayer. Here I'm just

going to propose what St. Thomas Aquinas teaches in the Summa theologia and you might think to yourself

well it happens to be quite nice right simple straightforward and eminently

practicable because what it is is it's effectively a liturgical method of approach.

Not in the sense that you should spend all of your prayer time at mass,

...