In Secret
Ordinary Time
Office of Readings · St. Augustine, Commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Book II
By the word room we should understand the heart itself. We are taught to pray there, with the door shut, so that we pray to our Father in secret: with our whole heart turned inward to him, with no distraction of wandering thoughts.
Augustine is reading the instruction literally and finding something interior in it. The room isn't a room; it's the heart. The shut door isn't keeping people out; it's keeping the world's noise from rushing in. Augustine is specific about this: temporal, visible things press in through the fleshly sense, flooding the mind with what he calls 'a crowd of vain phantoms.' That's the problem with most prayer. We start, and immediately the senses drag in the conversation from yesterday, the thing we're anxious about, the notification we half-remember. The door swings open and the room fills up.
Shutting it means resisting that. Not by sheer force of will, but by turning away from the senses and directing the whole heart inward toward God. Augustine calls it 'undivided and single-minded striving,' and he ties it directly to the cleansing of the heart. Secret prayer, in this reading, isn't just private prayer. It's prayer that hasn't been divided up and handed out to a dozen distractions before it even begins.
The Father who sees in secret is already present in that inmost place. The whole movement of prayer is just closing the door so you can actually be there too.
Today's intention
Today I'll resist the first wave of distractions and give God a few genuinely undivided minutes before the rest of the day takes over.