Eucharistic Reflection - Become An Interior Soul

(Photo©Lawrence Lew, O.P. Used With Permission)

“Hence I say, if we wish to become saints, we must become interior souls. We are obliged thereto by our vocation as adorers. Without this interior spirit, how can we pray? If in the presence of our Lord we cannot spend a single instant without a book, if we have nothing to say to Him from our own heart, what are we going to do at Adoration? What can we never speak to Him from the abundance of our own heart? Must we always borrow the thoughts and words of strangers? No, no! Let us strive to become recollected interior souls.

No one can be this in the way that Jesus and Mary were; but everyone can become recollected in the degree given him by grace. Without the interior life, we shall never receive any consolation, encouragement in prayer; we shall only be unhappy at the feet of our Lord. If you wish to become true adorers, we must have this interior spirit. We should talk to our Lord when kneeling in His presence, ask Him questions, await His reply; we should enjoy God's presence. We should be happy in His company, happy in His service; we should take pleasure in His familiarity, so sweet, so encouraging. But to discover the Heart of Jesus we must be interior.

After all, what does it mean to be interior? It means to love, to converse, to live with Jesus. But Jesus does not make Himself heard by bodily ears, nor seen with bodily eyes; He speaks only to the recollected soul. He is wholly interior in the Blessed Sacrament: He no longer enters into the heart through the sight, as during His mortal life; He now enters the soul direct and speaks to it alone. When the soul does not expand in His presence it is because He does not act upon it - there is some obstacle in His path.

Ah! Do not make our Lord out to have said what is not true! He has said that His yoke is sweet and His burden light. But it is only so for him who carries it in a prayerful, recollected spirit; otherwise, he will find it heavy and fatiguing. When we do not lead interior lives, everything we do goes haltingly. Oh, how I should wish to see accomplished in us what was so fully realized in the Blessed Virgin: ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ - the Kingdom of love, of virtue and of interior graces. Then indeed shall we begin to be adorers and saints. The grass of the field dies yearly because its roots do not lie deep in the soil; but the oak, the olive and the cedar stand year after year because their roots run deep into the earth. In order to grow strong, to endure, we must descend to the very depths, even to self-annihilation…There we shall find Jesus. He is there annihilated... it was such that Mary found Him. Oh, may that Blessed Mother, our perfect exemplar of the interior life, make us live, as she did, in Jesus! May we, like her, remain always in Him and never leave Him!”

(From Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament by Saint Peter Julian Eymard)