Table of content

Prayer is lifting up the soul to God
Prayer is the spiritual life-breath of the Knight
Prayer renews the world
The purpose of prayer
Try the fastest and most effective prayer
Why am I overcome in temptation?
How to win a soul for the Immaculata?

1. Prayer is lifting up the soul to God

One cannot live in dependence upon God, in God and unto God unless one converses with Him often. Therefore the most important bond between man and God is prayer. Father Kolbe speaks very often of the necessity of prayer. Almost daily he exhorts the Knights of the Immaculata to more fervent prayer, to spending time with God, to fidelity in their spiritual obligations. It is not possible to be the knight of a lord unless one is in regular contact with him, laying one’s life and deeds again and again at his feet, receiving advice and direction from him, submitting everything to him for inspection.

2. Prayer is the spiritual life-breath of the Knight

“In prayer he gather strength for his work, here he drawsfrom the very source of his being. We know from where we must draw the supernatural strength for our sanctification. Grace must come to help us in this endeavor, but we obtain grace through prayer. As prayer goes, so goes everything else. Everything depends on prayer. “The one who prays will be saved; the one who does not pray is damned,” said St. Alphonsus Liguori.

Satan knows that quite well. He knows that he always wins, when it is a question of natural means. He is a pure spirit, is keenly intelligent to a far higher degree than we are, and therefore he understands all this much better than we do. But when a person reaches higher, for supernatural help in prayer, then he trembles. Then begins his battle, no longer with human beings, but with God, and he knows that he will be defeated. Therefore he tries by all means to keep the soul from praying, through distractions, dryness, fatigue, discouragement, etc., which we personally experience again and again.” (Conference on the stages of the interior life, Konferencje św. Maksymiliana Kolbego, Niepokalanów 1990, p. 189)

Through prayer and suffering we can obtain many graces. External activity only prepares the way for grace; of itself it cannot provide these graces. There is one prayer that surely corresponds to God’s will, namely the request for one’s own sanctification and that of one’s neighbor. When we pray that the Immaculata might win all souls, then that is surely God’s will.

“For this intention we can offer up all our efforts, troubles and sufferings to the Immaculata, so that she might conquer the world. Once Napoleon was asked what was needed to win a battle. He answered: “Three things are needed: Money, money, and still more money!” Just so, when it is a matter of sanctifying souls, one needs prayer, prayer and still more prayer. If prayer is lacking, the soul becomes weak. One will have precisely as much from the treasury of graces as one draws from it.”

Prayer is the most misunderstood and yet the most powerful means of restoring peace to souls, of making them happy, and of bringing them close to God’s love.

3. Prayer renews the world

Prayer is the prerequisite for the rebirth and the life of every soul. Through prayer St. Thérèse [of Lisieux] became the patroness of all the missions, although she never went out-side the walls of her cloister. That is how we, too, want to pray: to pray well, to pray much, with the lips, with the heart. Then we will personally experience how the Immaculata rules more and more over our souls, how we will belong more and more completely to her, how guilt vanishes and faults diminish, how gently and powerfully we draw closer and closer to God. External activity is good, but it goes without saying that it is secondary, and even less than secondary in comparison with the interior life, the life of recollection and prayer, the life of personal love for God. To the extent that we ourselves burn more and more with divine love, we will be able to kindle the hearts of others with this love.

To win souls for God is a very difficult undertaking. Often human means fail: fruitless conversations and discussions, projects that trickle away into the sand, publications printed in vain, and so on. But prayer never disappoints! The most important means in the struggle for souls is prayer. We must remember this often. Satan knows how effective prayer is, and therefore he also endeavors to disrupt our prayers.

4. The purpose of prayer

But while praying we must never lose sight of the purpose of prayer: union with God. As for prayer, this is not a matter of kneeling for a long time saying prayers, but rather of frequently uttering heart-felt ejaculatory prayers, which in no way cause us to neglect our duties. (RN 15 (1936), p. 360.)

The best devotion to the Immaculata is not the recitation of many prayers, but rather the simple, intimate relationship of a child to its Mother, which is best expressed through short, but very fervent and frequent ejaculatory prayers. A child that loves its mother does not say many words; often a glance, a single word is enough. When it is in danger, it calls almost unconsciously: Mother!

5. Try the fastest and most effective prayer

Precisely in today’s hectic world the apostolate of ejaculatory prayers, to which the Saint encourages us, is the best way of remaining in union with God and raising one’s activities to a supernatural plane, and also of doing much for the salvation of souls.

Ejaculatory prayers are like bullets from a machine gun, with which we strafe the Enemy in order to beat him.

Without knowing it, our neighbor is ceaselessly bombarded, the grace of the Lord and the compassion of the Immaculata are called down upon him, until one day he casts himself down, overwhelmed, before his Creator and Redeemer. The Mother of God herself taught this apostolate of ejaculatory prayers to the children at Fatima, and through those visionaries she teaches us, too. (Letter to Niepokalanów, October 15, 1931 ; BMK, p. 174.)

6. Why am I overcome in temptation?

When something in life goes wrong, when the Knight is defeated by the Enemy or the victory is not won, one should first ask oneself: Have we prayed enough? Has each one of us really taken this matter to prayer? We must especially guard against activism, which sees in external activity the entire effectiveness of a project.

The Knight who spends himself completely in these externals is in great danger of becoming fruitless himself and of maneuvering himself into a great
deception.

7. How to win a soul for the Immaculata?

The conversion and sanctification of a soul was, is, and always will be a work of divine grace. Neither the spoken nor the written word, nor any other external means can accomplish anything of the sort without the grace of God.

But one receives grace for oneself and for others only through humble prayer, mortification and fidelity in performing one’s usual daily duties.