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. …

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 …

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 …