Highlights

  • God is like the persistent widow, and we are like the unjust judge. As we grow in fidelity to daily prayer, we discover how every day, God comes into our lives and asks, prompts, and even persistently cajoles us to respond to a particular need that helps promote the kingdom of peace, love, and justice. (Location 141)
  • Daily prayer heightens our awareness of the persistent divine knock and the call to open the door of our hearts to God. (Location 150)

1 GROWING IN PRAYERFULNESS

  • daily prayer is not simply a task to be completed but also a continuing attitude to be fostered. What happens after the hour of prayer is more important than the hour itself.” (Location 169)
  • PRAYER SHOULD MAKE US PRAYERFUL—THAT IS, AWARE AND MINDFUL OF THE DAILY PRESENCE AND DIVINE INVITATIONS OF GOD. (Location 173)
  • Righteousness is when the act of prayer, the attitude of prayerfulness, and the action of charity form a coherent whole. The (Location 188)
  • How does God invite our response for the sake of the kingdom? Through the megaphone called our lives. That megaphone consists of the four dimensions of human experience. (Location 201)
  • He has learned that God likes to speak to him through the physical dimension of life: his body’s gut reaction to situations, his deepest feelings, creation, and the situations in which he finds himself. (Location 204)
  • God uses a different preferred dimension with Stephanie. She hears God knocking on the door of her heart primarily in the social dimension of life. “Over the years, I’ve learned that when family members or friends independently tell me the same thing or give me the same advice, that’s God’s way of getting my attention. I listen to what they are saying even when it stings.” (Location 208)
  • Many people are attentive to the spiritual dimension of life as God’s preferred dimension to communicate with them. At fourteen years of age, I became sensitive to God through spiritual reading. Over time, that expanded to public prayer and liturgy, sermons and homilies, and private prayer and personal devotions. (Location 211)
  • Edward is very sensitive to the mental dimension of life. For him, this includes his hunches and intuitions, his imagination, his reason, and even reflecting on his past. He keeps a notebook beside his bed in which he records his dreams. “It never ceases to amaze me how God teaches me about myself through dreams,” he says as he opens his dream notebook and shares with me a dream of particular significance. (Location 213)
  • Six times a day—when he wakes up, at 9 a.m., 12 noon, 3 p.m., 6 p.m., and before retiring—he deliberately sits in a chair, closes his eyes, takes a few deep breaths, and then for ten minutes calls to mind God’s presence. (Location 230)

The Examen

  • To experience its fruitfulness, it should be practiced daily. “There’s no vacation from the Examen,” I was advised. (Location 249)
  • this prayer is prayed by the clock—fifteen to twenty minutes at most. It is not necessary to get through all five steps in every prayer period. (Location 250)
  • person should never feel compelled to stick to the order of the five steps as Ignatius proposed them. Once individuals have practiced the Examen for a while, they are free to change the order of the steps to their own liking. “Make it your own,” a Jesuit priest told me. (Location 255)
  • The Examen consists of five steps: (Location 257)
  • It begins with gratitude. Since the last time I have practiced the Examen, for what am I grateful? (Location 258)
  • If I haven’t used up all the time allotted, I move to the prayer to the Holy Spirit. “I say a simple prayer,” a young Jesuit told me. “I ask the Holy Spirit to heal me of my blindness, deafness, and hard-heartedness so that as I review the hours since I last prayed the Examen, I might see, hear, and experience the presence of God in my day.” This second step acknowledges the importance and centrality of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian. Think of the Holy Spirit as the operating system of our spiritual lives. If there is still time available, I will continue with the review. This is the heart and soul of the Examen. I rummage through the details of the preceding hours and search for the presence of God. Keeping my ears to the ground, I listen for those moments when God was challenging, prodding, or urging me to respond to a particular situation that (Location 262)
  • I ask myself how God was present and active in my daily routine today. (Location 269)
  • Ignatius’s fourth step of the Examen is the dialogue of forgiveness. I express my sorrow for being blind, deaf, and hard-hearted to God’s presence and requests. Because it’s a dialogue, after expressing my sorrow and regret, I wait to hear God’s response. (Location 270)
  • As one Ignatian scholar told me, “If you leave the fourth step feeling guilty, you haven’t done it correctly. (Location 273)
  • The Examen concludes, when time permits, with the renewal. This final step is about renewing and reaffirming my intention to be prayerful, to being attentive to God’s presence and invitations in the ordinary moments of my daily life. I look over tomorrow’s calendar. As best as I can predict, I ask myself where God might catch me unawares with a visit. In this final step, I remind myself that, as the sheep and goats discovered in the parable of the Judgment of the Nations, God is a God of surprise and disguise and never makes an appointment! (Location 275)
  • Prayer should never devolve into a simple task that should be done and checked off a daily to-do list. Rather, it should foster a prayerful awareness and contemplative mindfulness of the myriad ways God comes into our lives. That’s (Location 288)

2 FINDING MY METHOD

  • The challenge for anyone wanting to begin and nurture a relationship with God is to find a suitable and satisfying way to stand at the heart’s door and open it when God, like the persistent widow in Jesus’s parable (see Luke 18:1-5), knocks. (Location 325)
  • When we become intentional about nurturing a relationship with God, our first task is to find our own way to pray. We discover that method by trial and error. Once we find our technique, we practice it and never apologize for it. (Location 345)
  • be aware that the best way to pray is the way that works for you. (Location 348)
  • I then pause to consider the characters in the story. Who are they? What motivations and emotions might they have brought to this scene? (Location 436)
  • The heart of imaginative prayer is assuming the role of one of the characters in the story’s plot. (Location 440)
  • When did I allow my worry and anxiety to sabotage my peace and joy? (Location 467)
  • When could I have been kinder and more charitable, generous, and loving? When did I give in to my desires and passions in an inappropriate way? When did my ego rear its head and seek unrealistic demands? (Location 468)
  • On a scale of 1 (very dissatisfying) to 4 (very satisfying), how satisfying is communal prayer to me? What hinders or distracts me from fully engaging with it? What helps me to fully engage with it? Which methods of scriptural prayer have been helpful to me? Which ones have been dissatisfying? Google Caravaggio’s paintings The Taking of Christ, The Conversion of Saint Paul, or The Calling of Saint Matthew. Practice visio divina with one of them. What reflections or emotions arose within me? (Location 503)

3 PRAYING RIGHT HERE

  • “One challenge in prayer, Jackson,” I countered, “is to pray from where we are and not from where we think we should be. (Location 538)
  • I explained to Jackson that sharing feelings and experiences helps to build a long-lasting relationship. “That’s how we fall in love with God. By opening our hearts to him, we discover he’s eager to find a place to dwell even in a heart that is angry, sad, confused, forgotten, or forlorn. (Location 545)
  • “How does he do that? How do I know God is talking to me?” Jackson asked. I told him that by sharing our struggles and those emotions and feelings we think are inappropriate, we gain deeper insights into ourselves. Insights into our sinful behavior or judgmental attitudes are God’s way of teaching us about ourselves and others. (Location 548)
  • Jackson’s initial hesitancy to express his anger in prayer was simply another reminder to me how we so often live in our heads and are unwilling to tell God what’s in our hearts. (Location 561)
  • Though living in our heads with knowledge of God and his ways is important for our spiritual lives, it is ultimately unsatisfying: it promotes information, not intimacy. To (Location 562)
  • emotions are neutral. It’s how they are expressed that raises the possibility of sin. (Location 581)

The Welcoming Prayer

  • How do we pray with those intrusive feelings that we deem inappropriate to express to God? How do we pray the prayer of the heart, from the neck down? There are four helpful spiritual practices. (Location 590)
  • The Welcoming Prayer, made popular some twenty-five years ago, offers one way to open the door of the heart and release our uncomfortable feelings and emotions. It consists of four simple steps: focus and sink in, name, welcome, let go. (Location 591)
  • The first step is to focus on the unsettling emotion and feel it as a sensation in the body. (Location 593)
  • Once that is done, attempt to name this intrusive emotion. (Location 596)
  • The third step is to show hospitality to the emotion. “Welcome, fear.” (Location 600)
  • Once you have fully experienced, named, and embraced the emotion, slowly bid it farewell as the final step. (Location 604)

“Come as You Are” Prayer

The Psalms

  • The psalms also celebrate God as the Creator who is to be adored as we sit, rapt in awe and wonder (Psalms 8, 9, 19, 29, 48). They are prayers we pray in times of distress, trauma, and loss (Psalms 3, 6, 12, 13, 31, 69, 70). Psalms 78 and 105 express gratitude for God’s grace. Some psalms are thankful for God’s action, answered petitions, and deliverance (Psalms 16, 18, 40, 92, 107, 124). Others sing of confidence, trust, and faith in God (Psalms 11, 23, 27). They even give advice for living in relationship with God (Psalms 1, 49, 119). Psalm 51 is perfect to pray when we are weighed down by the guilt of our sins or as we prepare for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. (Location 670)

The Stations of the Cross

4 PETITIONING AND INTERCEDING

Praying the News

  • “But I can tell you, your prayer was not wasted. It softened your heart and made it more tender and compassionate. No doubt Paul’s wife found consolation in knowing that her husband’s best friend was praying for him. Your prayers assured her that she wasn’t going through this experience alone. That must have given her daily strength. You were expanding her idea of family. (Location 794)
  • Jesus is not suggesting that God will grant every petition or intercession. Rather, he is highlighting the fact that God will respond. (Location 825)
  • The question to ask is not “Why?” but “How am I to respond? How do I maintain childlike trust when the silence of God is deafening or his reply is negative and definitive? How do I stay in a relationship with God when I feel cynical, resentful, or skeptical of his response?” (Location 842)
  • It’s such a temptation to think that we are solitaries on the spiritual journey. But we are not. We walk together in a pilgrim Church with others who, like ourselves, have their own struggles and difficulties. As we open the door of the heart to God, we open the windows of our soul to the world. In doing so, we live the two great commandments of loving God and loving our neighbor (see Mark 12:30-31). (Location 860)
  • OUR DEEPENING SENSITIVITY TO GOD CAN OCCUR NOT ONLY THROUGH FORMAL PERIODS OF PRAYER BUT ALSO THROUGH ANY ACTIVITY THAT PROMOTES SELF-REFLECTION AND GODLY ATTENTION. (Location 886)
  • Experienced pilgrims and their spiritual directors are always on the lookout for the presence of spiritual discontent and discouragement. When they find their hearts heavy and their heads hung low, they consider some helpful questions such as these: What is the misconception generating my disappointment, discontent, or discouragement? What unconscious or unspoken expectation is making me feel powerless and needy? Is this fatigue, stress, or disappointment a result of trying too hard or trying to force God’s grace? Am I analyzing or overthinking my prayer life? Why? (Location 978)
  • Why am I not content to be spiritually where God’s grace has led me? (Location 985)
  • “When all is said and done, we petition and intercede to expand the size of our hearts and to affirm our connection with the wider family of the world. (Location 800)

5 TRYING TOO HARD

  • The purpose of prayer is to make us prayerful—that is, sensitive to the God of surprise and disguise who surrounds us like the air we breathe and knocks on the door of the heart in the nitty-gritty of our daily lives. (Location 900)
  • There’s nothing to “get” in the spiritual life because we already have it. We simply need to become more aware of how God, persistently knocking on the door of our hearts, asks us to help foster the kingdom with acts of peace, love, and justice. (Location 902)
  • That deepening sensitivity can occur not only through formal periods of prayer but also through any activity that promotes self-reflection and godly attention. Some of these activities include the following: gardening; flower arranging; walking or jogging; working on a craft; (Location 904)
  • observing nature—bees, birds, butterflies, caterpillars, clouds, the night sky—closely; sipping morning coffee or tea on the back porch or in the kitchen; walking hand-in-hand with someone on the beach; journaling; cooking a meal; folding clothes; looking out the window of a bus, commuter train, or plane; sitting in your favorite chair, closing your eyes, and reflecting on your day; layering frosting on a newly baked cake; (Location 908)
  • scrolling through photographs and enjoying the memories they generate; doing the dishes by hand. (Location 915)
  • God is not an emotion but a presence. Sometimes God’s presence will bring us warm, gratifying feelings like peace and joy, as does the presence of any friend or spouse. But also like the presence of any friend or spouse, that doesn’t always happen. Nor should it. God is so much more and beyond any human emotion we might experience within the confines of our physical bodies. (Location 935)
  • So all we can do is sit where we find ourselves and ponder how to open the door of the heart more widely to the God of surprise and disguise in this present moment. (Location 942)
  • Any experienced cook will tell you, “A watched pot never boils.” The same can be said of the life of prayer. Some people are always studying, analyzing, and overthinking their progress in prayer. (Location 963)
  • It is a misconception to think that growth in prayer is immediately discernible and detectable from yesterday’s or yesteryear’s stage. (Location 967)
  • Heightened sensitivity to the presence of God, which is the immediate goal of prayer, occurs intermittently and incrementally over a lifetime, not instantaneously and immediately over a day, month, or year. (Location 968)
  • Thinking that progress in prayer can be attained by the sheer force of will is a second misconception. (Location 969)
  • Fidelity to prayer is like buying a train ticket and standing on the platform. Only God decides when the train arrives to move you farther along the spiritual journey.” (Location 973)
  • A third misconception suspects the existence of a secret recipe for spiritual growth. (Location 974)
  • These are important questions to raise and address in a spiritual direction session. They help to unmask a potential temptation to lock the door of the heart and give up on prayer. When we give in to that temptation, we have fallen victim to the deadly sin of acedia, the (Location 986)
  • REFLECTION QUESTIONS What unspoken expectations and misconceptions have plagued my relationships in the past? How have I brought them into my relationship with God? What have been the sources of my frustrations in prayer? When and why do I occasionally feel worn out by my prayer? When have I been tempted to analyze and overthink my progress in prayer? Why? What need in me does that satisfy? (Location 1021)

6 PRAYING BEYOND WORDS

  • Some people like to coordinate the prayer with the breath. They inhale “Lord, Jesus Christ.” They hold the breath and pause with “Son of the Living God.” They exhale “Have mercy on me, a sinner.” I typically start my practice by coordinating the prayer with my breath to settle and center myself. However, I do not hold on to it rigidly as my prayer time continues. Undue concern for breath coordination or overemphasizing it can become a hindrance and distraction. (Location 1111)
  • Fostering the continual intention to be reflective and prayerful is more important than any specific technique practiced for a set time. (Location 920)