This prayer is remarkable in beauty and simplicity yet profound in its depth.
January 10, 1914
MY aspiration rises towards Thee always the same in its form, infantile and almost commonplace in its simplicity, but my call is more and more ardent, and behind the maladroit words, there is all the fervour of my concentrated will. And I implore Thee, O Lord, in spite of the naïveté of this expression which so lacks all intellectuality, I implore Thee for more light, more purity, more true sincerity and love, and that for all, for the multitude which constitutes what I call my being, and for the multitude which constitutes the universal being; I implore Thee, knowing however that to implore is quite useless, since it is we alone, in our ignorance and ill-will, who can be an obstacle to Thy glorious and total manifestation, but something infantile in me finds a support in this mental attitude; I implore Thee that the peace of Thy reign may spread, upon earth.
O inaccessible summit which we scale incessantly without ever attaining to Thee, sole Reality of our being which we believe we have discovered only to find that Thou escapest us at once, marvellous state which we think we have seized but which leads us farther, and always farther, into depths and immensities ever-unexplored; none can say: “I have known Thee”, and yet all carry Thee in themselves, and in the silence of the soul can hear the echo of Thy voice; but this silence itself is progressive, and whatever may be the perfection of the union we have realised, so long as by our body we belong to the world of relativities, this union with Thee will be always capable of a greater perfection.
But all the words by which we speak of Thee are but a vain babbling. Grant that I may become.
Thy faithful servitor.
The text above is quoted from the Third Edition, 1954 (translation by Rishabhchand Samsukha)
This book is freely available at https://www.auro-ebooks.com/prayers-and-meditations-1954-edition/
