• Mt. 6:5-15; 7:7-11: Jesus' teaching on Prayer and Meditation

• Jn. 2: 3-5; Lk. 2:19 & 51: Mary's Prayer and Meditation

• Ex. 32: 11-14: Selfless Prayer of Moses

• 1 Thes. 1: 1-3: Constant Prayer of Thanksgiving

"Prayer is opening our understanding to God's brightness and light and exposing our will to the warmth of his love. Nothing else purifies so well our understanding of its ignorance and our will of its sinful attachments. It is a spring of blessings and its waters quench the thirst of the passions of our heart, wash away our imperfections, and make the plants of our good desires grow green and bear flowers.

I strongly recommend to you prayer of the mind and of the heart, and especially that based on the life and sufferings of our Lord. By looking at him often in meditation, your whole being will be filled with him. You will learn his attitudes and model your actions on his" (Introduction to Devout Life, Part II, Chapter 1).

"In this exercise of awareness of God's presence and of ejaculatory prayers is to be found the most important practice of devotion. It can make up for the lack of all other prayers. But to make good its absence, by any other means, is almost impossible. Without this exercise, the contemplative life cannot be well lived and the active life will be lived only badly. Without it, relaxation is only idleness and work only discomfort. Therefore, I ask you earnestly, take up this exercise with all your heart and never stop practicing it" (Introduction to Devout Life, Part II, Chapter 13).

About fifteen years ago I once asked him whether he ever went for any length of time without actually and explicitly turning his mind to God, and he said: ' Sometimes for as long as about a quarter of an hour.' I was amazed at that in a prelate who was so busy and had to immerse himself in such varied and important business. He taught the people under his direction to keep returning to the thought of God deliberately and even when they were doing things directly concerned with him, for instance preaching, hearing confessions, studying, reading and talking about spiritual things, and so on.

One day when talking to me, he used an image about his prayer compared it to oil poured over on a smoothly polished table and spreading ever further on this shining surface; in the same way, from a few words or thoughts of prayer remembered, a feeling of love spread through his soul and was sweetly maintained there. He told me he woke to the thought of God and fell asleep in the same way if he could. (Elisabeth Stopp, "St. Francis de Sales: A Testimony by St. Chantal", p. 97).