Translated from the original by Ana Giménez.
As we were saying yesterday that faith in God and vocal prayer are part of he first mansions. Let us focus on what is important.
What image do we have of God? We know the image Teresa had when she wrote her second edition of the book of The Life. We should aim to have the same image. We should read and meditate it, in order to do so:
“I have often reflected with amazement upon God’s great goodness and my soul has delighted in the thought of His great magnificence and mercy. May He be blessed for all this, for it has become clear to me that, even in this life, He has not failed to reward me for any of my good desires. However wretched and imperfect my good works have been, this Lord of mine has been improving them, perfecting them and making them of greater worth, and yet hiding my evil deeds and my sins as soon as they have been committed. He has even allowed the eyes of those who have seen them to be blind to them and He blots them from their memory. He gilds my faults and makes some virtue of mine to shine forth in splendour; yet it was He Himself Who gave it me and almost forced me to possess it”. (The Life 4.10)
I heard a lecture by my friend and psychiatrist Javier García Campayo, saying that the human being produces 200,000 thoughts a day. Most of them are about the future or the past. Meanwhile, life, its present, goes by without noticing. Mindfulness and other techniques try to mend that harmful deviance, not only for our health but for our Christian world, too.
We have created a space in our life to that mystery we call God. He who lives within us in the most intimate of the self.
From there He, gradually, makes Himself present in that inward- looking conversation that our minds hold indefinitely.
Live the day in His presence, dialogue with Him; To talk to Him about your own things, that is praying.
Because that mystery that we call God, bathes our existence and defines Himself as Love. Life is a mystery of love. From the deepest, from the seventh mansions, He calls us to meet a more intimate communication. His callings at the beginning may be simple: a conversation, a reading, a landscape, the smile of a child, something unfair… The inhabitant of the first mansions, opens his eyes to present reality and learns how to listen to those small callings to live in His friendship, till one gets to deep whistling calls, arrows of love and fiery darts.
We will get there with God´s help.