The theme of our retreat this weekend will be the life of the Holy Spirit in us,

understanding this with the help of St. Thomas Aquinas,

and I thought I would just give a little prelude by talking about the challenge and possibility of mental prayer.

What mental prayer is, or one way of understanding it, at least.

And what I'm going to talk to you about is based globally on influences from Thomas Aquinas,

but also other things from the spiritual tradition.

And it's really my own rendition or

view of things it's not there's nothing super universal or scientific about it

prayer is is in many ways a kind of personal art it's a lot like cooking or

playing baseball or you know playing a musical instrument there there are some standard rules, and then there's

the sort of ways that you sort of discover yourself how to go down the path. So talking

someone else about it is a kind of propudic, but there's no substitute for doing it yourself.

So one of the themes of what I'm going to talk to you about for maybe the next half hour or so

is the fact that if you see an underlying theme, it's this, and it will be in the next conference,

too.

Intellect is assimilative will is ecstatic.

The mind assimilates truth about the world, our intellect, as it were, goes out in the world and captures truth about the world and brings it in.

So when your mind is alive, you're bringing in truths about reality.

And then when you discover goods in the world, your heart is alights upon them and you can love them.

So you can, just to take a very simple aesthetic,

aesthetic example, you look at a beautiful picture,

your mind is assimilating the kind of beauty of the picture,

...