At no time of day or night are we not thinking about something. The only real question is, What is it? What do I choose to ruminate about in the interstices of the day, in the dark quiet of the night? Where does my mind go when there is nowhere specific defined for it to go?
The question is an important one because its answer defines the kind of person we are choosing to become. If we scheme dark thoughts, however placid and positive we appear to others, we are darkness walking. “He was a pleasant man,” people say of the felon next to whom they have lived for years. He dressed well, and went to work every day, and nodded to the neighbors. But in his heart the malice simmered and seared.
The fact is that we become what we think about. What we seed in our souls grows in us, forms us, becomes what drives us from moment to moment.
What we think about during the waking hours of the day is basic to prayer. And prayer is also basic to it. What I put into my soul will shape me.
Prayer intends to steep me in the thoughts of God, in the sense of the presence of God, in an openness to the will of God, in the likeness of God. To pray is to rivet my mind on the things of God. “As you sweep,” our novice mistress taught us, “pray. Just say any short prayer over and over,” she said. “Eventually it will become part of you.” She forgot to say that eventually you will become it, as well.
And in the same way, I become jealousy. And greed. And lust. And hate. It all depends on what I feed on, what I live on, in my thoughts. What I immerse myself in, down deep inside of me where the soul of a person lies in wait, I will become.
But if I put in the discipline of the presence of God, I will become of God.
If I put in prayer for my enemies, if I pray to a loving God to make me loving, too, then—however many years it takes — it will happen. Then, like a drop of rain in the midst of a flood, I will become part of the heart of the world.
I must pray to become love.
–from The Breath of the Soul by Joan Chittister (Twenty-Third Publications)
