Tense as an arrow (the prayer of imploring)

Day 7- August 5

He was also often seen standing upright with all his height, towards the sky, like an arrow that a well-strung bow would have launched straight into the blue. He would raise his hands above his head, tightly stretched, joined together, or slightly opened as if to receive something from heaven. It is believed that he was then the object of an increase of grace and that, in a state of rapture, he obtained from God, for the order of which he had laid the foundations, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, for himself and for the brothers, a little of the delectable sweetness which is found in the acts of the beatitudes and which makes one consider oneself happy even in the rigors of poverty, the bitterness of sorrow, the violence of persecution, the hunger and thirst of justice, the embrace of mercy, and that one maintains oneself in a joyful fervor, for the observance of the precepts and the practice of the evangelical counsels.

In these moments, the holy Father seemed to enter, as if by stealth, into the Holy of Holies and into the Third heaven. (...) By his word and his holy example, he never ceased to teach his brothers to pray in the same way...