Feast Day of St. Augustine

Today is the feast day of my beloved patron saint, St. Augustine of Hippo. So I thought I would celebrate this day by sharing with you some of his insights concerning prayer that have helped me in some way.

In his treatise, "On The Lord's Sermon on the Mount", 2.3.14, Augustine wrote this regarding the usefulness of frequent prayer:

But again one might ask whether we are to pray by words or deeds and what need there is for prayer, if God already knows what is needful for us. But it is because the act of prayer clarifies and purges our heart and makes it more capable of receiving the divine gifts that are poured out for us in the spirit. God does not give heed to the ambitiousness of our prayers, because he is always ready to give to us his light, not a visible light but an intellectual and spiritual one: but we are not always ready to receive it when we turn aside and down to other things out of a desire for temporal things. For in prayer there occurs a turning of the heart to he who is always ready to give if we will but take what he gives: and in that turning is the purification of the inner eye when the things we crave in the temporal world are shut out; so that the vision of the pure heart can bear the pure light that shines divinely without setting or wavering: and not only bear it, but abide in it; not only without difficulty, but even with unspeakable joy, with which the blessed life is truly and genuinely brought to fulfillment.

In other words, frequent prayer, manifested either in our words or our daily deeds, always orients us more closely toward the gifts of grace that our Father in heaven is always ready to give us. If even once per day we turn our souls toward matters of the spirit, we are forever changed because of it - a change not necessarily substantiated by the particular feelings or emotions associated with prayer, or even because of the ambitiousness of our prayer. Rather, as Augustine points out, it is a gradual change that is noticeable as the things we cling to in the physical, temporal world pass away. It involves a purification of the inner eye through which the vision of the pure heart may eventually come to bear and abide, with unspeakable joy, in the pure light that is God with His overflowing grace.