[Scriptum compendiosum Psalterii intentionem declarans]

For it cannot be that he speaks with God who, even while silent, is chatting with the whole world. Also, prayer is the food of the heart. For just as he loses the sweetness of a good morsel who does not chew it, so he who does not crush prayer with the teeth of understanding loses the spiritual sweetness in prayer. Bernard: "Food in the mouth is tasted in the heart." The soul must not neglect to chew it with the teeth of understanding, lest it swallow it whole and cheat the palate of a taste sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. Also, in prayer we ask that God attend to us, according to the words: "Attend to me and hear me." How is it probable that He will do this if we do not attend to ourselves? Bernard: "How do you attend to me if you do not attend to yourself?" Also, what is more effective in prayer is from the part of the heart. Augustine: "He attends more to the voice of the heart than to the ears of the body." And Isidore: "Prayer is of the heart, not of labor; for God does not attend to the words of the one deprecating, but looks at the heart of the one praying." He who does not have his heart in prayer, therefore, withholds what is best in prayer. From these things, it appears that the intention of the heart is necessary in prayer, so that what we pray with our mouth we also

meditate upon in our mind. Let him know who said, "I will sing with the spirit, I will sing also with the mind." And this is what our preceptor says in the rule: "When you pray to God with psalms and hymns, let that which is brought forth by the mouth be felt in the heart." Whence Hugo says in his exposition of the rule: "Often, he says, we pray while we intend our heart elsewhere, and we do not even recall what we are saying, but God does not hear that prayer because the one who is praying is not attending." This often happens at the instigation of the devil. Knowing the utility of praying and envying us the grace of obtaining it, he sends in a tumult of thoughts to those praying, so that he may divide the mind from the prayer and take away the fruit of the prayer. Against this malice, we must have constancy of mind, so that the more the crowd of thoughts attacks us, the more robustly our mind remains fixed in the rectitude of its state. And for this, the same Bernard exhorts in his forty-eighth sermon on the Song of Songs, saying: "You must sing purely; while you sing, think of nothing else but what you are singing." And I do not say that only vain and idle thoughts are to be avoided; those are also to be avoided at that hour and in that place which official brothers are compelled to admit, as if by necessary frequency.