In this episode of Midnight Carmelite, we explore the deep connection between prayer, the intellect, and will. Drawing on the wisdom of St. John of the Cross and a famous illustration by Bishop Fulton Sheen, we uncover how intellectual knowledge naturally leads to love and how love, in turn, begets a profound "love knowledge" that surpasses all concepts. We discuss why God sometimes withdraws spiritual consolations and how true prayer is found not in feelings or inspirations but in the silent, refocusing act of the will choosing to love God for who He is.
You have the concepts, but you need the tool. When the audio ends and the silence returns, don't go back to "trying harder." Use the "5-Minute Prayer Reset" to stabilize your interior life and prepare for the Divine Physician.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello there, and welcome to this week's episode of Midnight Carmelite. This week I want to talk about prayer in relation to the intellect and the will. I think it's helpful in the spiritual life for us to understand this distinction. When we're understanding prayer, we have to look at it from the perspective that it's love that creates knowledge. I've talked about this on the podcast before, so knowledge creates love, and then love creates knowledge.
For example, you find out this is easy with couples, so that's what we'll use. Let's say boy meets girl. A boy sees a girl exists and says, Wow, I want to date this person; I would like to get to know this person. Goes through the normal getting to know, courtship, and marriage. And along the way, as you have conversations, knowledge grows and love grows alongside of that. As you're dating, you say, this is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Great. But then what happens is that over time, even during dating, what starts to happen is that as you know something deeply and love it deeply, mysteriously, love creates knowledge that you can't simply know.
Bishop Sheen famously gives this example, and I'll repeat Bishop Sheen's example here. He says, Imagine you have a married couple and they go to a party. And at the party, the husband looks at the wife, and she's socializing and she's happy, and by all accounts, someone would look at her and be like, Oh, this person seems fine, right? But the husband, because he's loved the wife for so long and knows her so well, that love allows him to see beyond what another person would know, by virtue of that love, that he knows something's wrong on the inside. He just knows it. So he gets home, and he says, How are you doing? I know something's wrong; what's on your mind? And she says, You know me so well.
That's the famous Bishop Sheen story. And what it illustrates is that we need to remember that what we know and go out to and learn more about and achieve that knowing, we love more. And as we love more, that love begets a knowledge that simply our intellectual knowing can't know. So there's the distinction between the will and the intellect at first. The intellect's driving the horse, so to speak, as love grows, but then all of a sudden it flips. And the will is driving the ship, in a sense, that despite anything you know, the will is giving this love-knowledge, we'll call it, that is beyond the intellectual.
And that's how we have to understand prayer. We can't conceptualize God. We can't do it. God is beyond any concept; he's infinite. So when we're talking about prayer, we have to remember that it's love, and love is in the will. Love is a choice. Love is showing up.
So how does this apply to our lives? John of the Cross talks about this. He says, People start in the prayer life, and God will give you consolation. God will give you spiritual feelings; you'll smell incense at Mass and be happy; you'll feel like God's with you; you'll maybe sit down to prayer and have some sort of intellectual inspiration about something. But none of those things are God. They're all the consolations of God. And as we all know, no one likes to be loved for the sake of, let's say, their money or their power or their status or things incidental to who they are. People want to be loved for who they are.
God will withdraw consolations because, remember, he's a triune community of persons. God would like to be loved for himself too, for the sake of him being God, because he's the most lovable of all things that are lovable, even though he's not a thing. So he'll pull back the consolations. Well, then there's nothing really to intellectually know at that point, right? Even if you get intellectual inspirations about scripture, those are all meant to feed your will to want to love God more.
So let's say you're sitting down with scripture and you're reading the Good Samaritan, and then all of a sudden it pops into your head, like, someone acted as a Good Samaritan to me when I really needed it. And that's how Jesus tells us to act. Lord, I love you. Thank you for sending that person who helped me. Or vice versa, where you just love God because he empowered you with his charity to help you love another person in a charitable way. That love part where you're drawn to God as the focus—that's the prayer. The other stuff, that's all getting you to that point.
That's why in higher levels of prayer, it's mostly silent. Why? Because the lover and the beloved are just spending time with each other. They're one. And they're growing closer in union with each other. So I think it is important to remember that love is in the will. The will is the power through which the person loves. And that's what prayer is about. So even if you're sitting in a holy hour, let's say, and your focus is on God, you're not running around with the mad horses or the madman or being distracted by attachments, as John of the Cross would say. You're there, and you keep refocusing to love God. And you keep refocusing on loving your neighbor when you're out in the world. I'll see you next time.
