Why We Were Made: Infused Prayer

Going back to my little book, The Spirituality of Saint Faustina, it says that Saint Faustina was often in the prayer of infused contemplation. It gives this example from the saint’s diary: “I more often commune with the Lord in a more profound manner. My senses sleep and, although not in a visible way, all things become more real and clearer to me than if I saw them with my eyes. My intellect learns more in one moment than during long years of thinking and meditation, both as regards the essence of God and as regards revealed truths, and also as regards the knowledge of my own misery” Diary #882. When God infuses Himself in a person through contemplative prayer, the person’s knowledge and love and all the other virtues grow very rapidly, much faster and far deeper than one can ever achieve without infused contemplation. This is evidenced by the fact that Saint Faustina had no theological training, and yet she had many and deep theological insights and a profound understanding. Her heroic virtue was also do to this infusion of God.

In another place in her diary, she wrote: “My communion with the Lord is now purely spiritual. My soul is touched by God and wholly absorbs itself in Him, even to the complete forgetfulness of self. Permeated by God to its very depths, it drowns in His beauty; it completely dissolves in Him—I am at a loss to describe this, because in writing I am making use of the sense; but there, in that union, the sense are not active; there is a merging of God and the soul; and the life of God to which the soul is admitted is so great that the human tongue cannot express it. When the soul returns to its habitual form of life, it then sees that this life is all darkness and mist and dreamlike confusion, an infant’s swaddling clothes. In such moments the soul only receives from God, for of itself it does nothing; it does not make even the slightest effort; all in her is wrought by God” Diary #767.

The sense are not able to contain God, so deep prayer requires that the sense be bypassed in order that the true receptacle of God, the soul, may be ready and waiting for whenever the Lord decides to act and infuse Himself into one well prepared for His wondrous self-gift. If one is inordinately attached to anything, he will not be able to be free to be attached to the only True Attachment, the Divine Bridegroom. Penance, suffering, humiliation, and deprivation all help prepare our sense to be bypassed so that we can get on with the real reason we were made. Obedience and trust prepare our wills so that it can come into perfect union and harmony with God, and so that He can infuse Himself into our wills. When one gives such a love to God, the Lord always gives so much more in return because He gives Himself, and He is God, the Almighty, Eternal One.


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