This suggestion for prayer comes from the old Loyola Hall website. It was penned by Edel McClean and grew out of her retreats for people with chronic illness. The psalms have always been used in communal or liturgical ways but they also seem to evoke very intense feelings that can resonate powerfully with us as …
Category Archives: Ways of Praying
Spiritual Exercise, Part II
I noted in a previous post that St. Ignatius prefers to talk about spiritual exercises or practices rather than about praying as such. I explored the way new retreatants often are surprised that a retreat can feel like hard work. Another surprise is in the offing if they come with the expectation that they will …
Spiritual Exercise, Part I
Maybe surprisingly, St Ignatius in his retreat manual, the Spiritual Exercises, doesn’t talk much about prayer. OK he talks endlessly about prayer but always as a variety of spiritual exercise. Spiritual exercise is his preferred category. There is a prejudice that prayer, if you are doing it right, should be serene, peaceful, passive, restful even. …
The Practice of Gratitude
Gratitude is a pleasant state of mind in itself, rooted in the awareness of having been gifted, but it can also be a way of responding to God the Giver with thankfulness and generosity. Gratitude needs to be entertained though, dwelled with, so it becomes a habit of seeing and feeling and acting. And that …
Praying through Film, Story, Song, Art
(I wrote this a few years back for the Loyola Hall website. It’s a way of praying and an attitude towards experience.) If you want God to speak to you you need to give God a vocabulary. Scripture is, of course, a privileged source of ‘words’ that God might address to you — hence the …
Contemplative ‘Mindmapping’
(I wrote this a few years back for the Loyola Hall website. It’s a way of praying I still use myself from time to time.) This is a kind of prayer you do with your eyes open and a pen and paper in front of you. It’s well suited as a short exercise of 10 …
Imaginative Contemplation
While Lectio Divina seems naturally suited to praying with texts where words and their resonances are uppermost, other pieces of scripture engage us primarily as stories. Stories have the capacity to draw us in. Almost without effort we find ourselves imagining the place and the people and the better the story the more we find …
Lectio Divina
Lectio Divina (Latin for godly reading) is a simple yet profound method of prayer found in many traditions of Christian spirituality, though perhaps most associated with Saint Benedict and the monastic tradition. Sometimes it is called “meditative reading” or “spiritual reading”, but could perhaps better be described as praying with a listening heart, since most …
“A Template for Daily Meditation”
Shawn Anthony, at Lo-Fi Tribe, has written a piece (which has now disappeared — January 2007) on how to structure a daily space for meditation–what he calls a template. It made me think about two of the templates I am familiar with and have found helpful along the way–the monastic practice of Lectio Divina and …