How deep do you want to go?

Progress Through Mental Prayer
Edward Leen
Scepter
2023
183 pages
ISBN: 978-1594174759

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Achieving union with Christ has to be our ultimate goal in life, and to do so, prayer is all important. Though this book is a new edition of one written nearly ninety years ago, it is written in clear language with a straight forward message. Fr Edward Leen, a member of the Holy Ghost Order, was for a time in the 1920s president of Blackrock College, Dublin, and also spent a few years in Nigeria.

The early chapters take us through the aim of mental prayer, perseverance in it, its relationship with vocal prayer and what the author calls the ordinary process of mental prayer. In this we have to attempt to be in the presence of God with our thoughts, affections and imaginings to form, deepen and strengthen the conviction that the life of the Man-God is the good life for us, that his way of acting and thinking is what is most deserving of our imitation. This leads to meditation, which has for its object to fill our minds with the conviction that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and that our life is a false and vain one if it does not conform to the spirit of his. What comes through emphatically from the earliest chapters is the assurance that God plays his part, that if a soul has willed to draw near to God, he on his side, tends to draw near to it.

The next chapters deal with the transforming effects of mental prayer on the soul using the three temptations which Jesus underwent as similar to those that the soul will undergo in its efforts to stay the course. It isn’t easy but the reward is great.

Part Two of the book has chapters on “The Vision of Faith Purified in Mental Prayer”, “The Preliminary Acts in Mental Prayer, the Body of Mental Prayer” and “Progress in Mental Prayer: Its Effect on Method”. Here again, there is great emphasis on how much God wants the soul to share his life. All of us who have made any attempt whatever to engage in mental prayer know how we can be so easily distracted. Fr Leen puts it very bluntly to us that we should never go unprepared into our meditation. He draws a comparison with entering the room of a person occupying any important position – we would never do so without preparing the matters to discuss. Going even further he suggests that we should prepare our morning meditation the night before and go to sleep ruling out thoughts or distractions, mindful of our encounter in the morning with the king of kings.

In the last part of the book Fr Leen deals with the importance of spiritual reading. He encourages mortification and the absolute necessity of silence and control of the tongue. In some ways it is almost as if he predicted the arrival of social media half a century after his death – if he were alive today he would certainly have a lot to say about the sometimes devastating effect of social media on some of our young people.

All in all a very readable book and though written in the 1930s, it is one that totally relevant for the twenty-first century reader who wishes to advance in the life of prayer.