Chapter 22

Constant Remembrance of God is Preserved in the Heart When Mind is United With Heart

Having entrusted yourself wholly to the sleepless care of God, you must humbly and patiently bear this labor for the sake of the true good, which the diligent prayer-doer receives from God in his own time, when God by His grace sets bounds to our mind and establishes it immovably with God’s remembrance in the heart. When such a standing of the mind becomes as something natural and constant, it bears among the Fathers the name “union of mind with heart”; with such an arrangement, the mind no longer has the desire to be outside the heart; on the contrary, if by any circumstances or much conversation it is held outside heart-attention, it has an irresistible desire to return within itself with a kind of spiritual thirst and with renewed zeal to again occupy itself with building its inner house. (10, 227–228)