Beholding prayer…takes prayer out of the small pockets of conscious mental dialogue and makes it a life lived out fully in the Trinity. Strahan Coleman, Beholding Conscious mental dialogue. That’s it in a nutshell. And I am in awe at the brilliance of its simplicity. Three words nail me, illuminating how I default to measuring my … Continue reading
You are calling me deeper into prayer. But I don’t know what you mean. What I thought you meant lies dashed on rocks, guts spilled out of it. And I can talk about intention and attention: the practices by which we attend to you repeatedly, in order that our lives might intend you. I can … Continue reading
If a person is to enter the second dwelling places, it is important that he strive to give up unnecessary things and business affairs. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, I.2.14 I started reading Teresa again last night. As you do. Or as, in fact, I really don’t. Normally, I read her in order to … Continue reading
I’m circling back round again to presence. Spiralling, my summerhouse friend would call it. Present to myself in order to be present to God and, out of that, present to others. I’m there because of Monday’s conversation, long and unexpected. I’m there because of Saturday’s teaching, the topic I myself had chosen. And, when I … Continue reading
Update me about boundaries, she said. And my internal monologue wondered stroppily whether I had to. I was bored by boundaries, you see. Or, perhaps more truthfully, a bit uncomfortable about the ambivalence inherent in my last month of boundary-making and boundary-keeping. Though we’d spent many minutes talking about them last time, I’d made less … Continue reading
Twenty years, give or take, after becoming a Christian, God enrolled me in a school of prayer. And, truth be told, I’m a slow learner. It’s not that I did not pray in those twenty years. It is not that I didn’t adore, confess, thank, and supplicate. I paused, rejoiced, asked, and yielded. In fact, I’ve been round … Continue reading
…do You really listen quite attentively, do You perhaps listen, my whole life long, until I have told You everything, until I have spoken out my entire self to You? Do You remain so silent precisely because you are waiting until I am really finished, so that You can then speak Your word to me, … Continue reading
…when the Lord has been sought in watching and prayers, with strenuous effort, with showers of tears, He will at length present Himself to the soul. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 32.2, Cantica Canticorum I am here again. At the Abbey. And there are few tears. And the effort is more strenuous than once it was, … Continue reading
In a nutshell, this is what has been so hard about prayer lately: …if prayer is the mutual presence of persons, then the preparation will be to find that point where I am most available as a person. Iain Matthew, The Impact of God Present to God and to my self. The splitting of the personal … Continue reading
(The source of all quotations in this post is Ross Collings, John of the Cross.) It is precisely the agonizing inability to grasp any conception of Jesus or his Father as an illuminating object of…prayer which constitutes the truest experience of faith ‘in the Passion of Christ’ – that is, subjectively, from within the redemptive … Continue reading
The Art of Steering 