I like this passage where Saint Alphonsus talks about liking a passage in Saint Bernard:

St. Bernard… says that mental prayer is like a mirror; this comparison pleases me very much. If one has a stain on one’s countenance and one looks in the mirror, one sees it and takes it away; without this mirror, the stain remains, and will always remain; as one does not see it, one does not take it away. So it is with mental prayer: if we have a defect, if we find ourselves in a dangerous occasion, when we go to mental prayer, as if going before the mirror, we see in our conscience this defect that we have, we see this danger of losing God; we see it and we take it away.

I like this because, like the word mental prayer itself, the text has a twofold meaning:

• If the mental prayer is meditation, we may be actively taking the defect away.
• If the mental prayer is contemplation, we may be passively taking the defect away.

In both cases, the defects disappear because mental prayer is a mirror. Of course, the cleaning-up done in contemplation is a lot better, because the one doing the cleaning (God) is a lot more thorough than the one who does the cleaning in meditation (us).

But all in all, this is one occasion when I very much like Saint Alphonsus’ use of the word mental prayer to cover both meditation and contemplation.