The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (18 page)

The text conveyed the confident freedom of Jesus. It seemed that, through my reaction to the story, God was offering me some of that same confidence and freedom.

3. Prayer: What Do You Want to Say to God About the Text?

Now it’s your turn to speak to God. How does the text make you feel? What questions arise in your mind? What is your reaction? Pour it all out to God.

After meditating on this particular passage, you might find yourself fearful. If it means standing up for your friend at work, or standing up for yourself, this could be dangerous. You might worry, rightly, about being rejected, as Jesus was in his hometown.

On the other hand, you might feel emboldened by his confidence, and you may come to see that all prophetic gestures probably made the prophets frightened. Yet, like Jesus, all the prophets acted in the face of this fear, trusting in God. Maybe you feel a mixture of fear
and
confidence. This is the time to be honest with God about your feelings.

During my own prayer I felt frightened about speaking out. Being prophetic sounds romantic until you face an angry mob. Or even a few angry people. What would happen if I spoke out? Would people reject me?

The more I prayed about it, the more I returned to the same question: How was Jesus able to make such bold statements, knowing that people would probably reject him? Gradually I realized that not only did everyone in the synagogue know Jesus, but Jesus probably knew
them
. Most likely he could have anticipated their response—the same way that you can guess how your friends will respond if you say something challenging. So Jesus most likely anticipated their rejection. One reason he was able to speak out was because he was free, unfettered by worries of acceptance or rejection, perfectly embodying what Ignatius called “detachment.”

4. Action: What Do You Want to Do Based on Your Prayer?

Finally, you act. Prayer should move us to action, even if it simply makes us want to be more compassionate and faithful. Entering into a relationship with God will change us, will make us more loving, and will move us to
act
.

Now that you’ve read the story of Jesus in the synagogue, have asked yourself what God is saying, and have spoken to God about your reaction, it’s time to
do
something. Perhaps you resolve to be more courageous in standing up for that person at work. Or you decide to forgive someone who has hurt you. Or you feel that you still want to pray more about what to do. But let your prayer move you to real action.

In my case, the attraction to Jesus’ freedom encouraged me to speak out about that issue. It was a difficult thing to do, and it provoked the ire of a few individuals, but I felt that I was trying to follow Jesus’ example. That helped me through the tough times and gave me confidence. And, in the end, there was little to fear: no one threw me off the brow of any hill, literal or figurative.

Those are the four steps of
lectio:
read, meditate, pray, act.

A
NOTHER, SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT, WAY
of praying
lectio divina
is to dwell on a single word or phrase, and, as Ignatius said, “relish” or “savor” the text. For people who feel uncomfortable with imagery in their prayers, this works very well. And it works especially well with the psalms.

In this method you read the Bible passage meditatively, pausing on any word or phrase that seems meaningful.

This was something that greatly appealed to Ignatius. In his Second Method of Praying, he says that one should pause on words and phrases, “as long as meanings, comparisons, relish, and consolations connected with it are found.”

Let’s take Psalm 23, which begins with the phrase “The Lord is my shepherd.” The next line reads, “He makes me lie down in green pastures.” Perhaps you might find yourself drawn to meditate on what it would feel like to rest in that “green pasture.” If you’re a busy person—or feeling swamped—you might simply rest with God. Maybe all God wants to do in that prayer is to give you rest.

Or perhaps you read “green pastures” and find yourself unexpectedly sad and wonder why. Maybe you can’t see any green pastures in your life. You could share your sadness with God and may feel a new closeness with the God who wants to console you.

Or you may feel joy. This might be the time to share with God your gratitude for “green pastures” in your life. Or maybe God is simply asking you to pay attention to those “green pastures” you’ve been overlooking. Your prayer may be one of gratitude. All this from a simple phrase in the psalm.

Ignatius stresses the need to relax during
lectio
. There’s no need to rush and no need to look for any earth-shaking “results.” Prayer is not about producing. Take your time. As Ignatius writes in the Exercises, we need to slow down:

Pay attention to any phrase that repels you too. You might read about the “darkest valley,” and feel fear. You want to rush over those words or even feel physically uncomfortable. You might be tempted to move on, but places of resistance may be precisely where God wants to meet you.
Resistance
is another fruit of prayer, like emotions, insights, and memories.

Resistance is often an invitation to pray or think more deeply about those feelings.
Why do I feel resistance?
Are you being called to be free of whatever holds you back from a deeper love of God?
Why am I frightened of those dark valleys?
Is it because you don’t trust God to care for you? Perhaps you can recall dark times in the past where you
were
cared for—by friends, family, coworkers—and see God’s hand in this too. Your attention to resistance can lead you to a new level of trust or self-knowledge.

This resistance always reminds me of massage. Every few weeks, because of some chronic pain, I visit a massage therapist. Often she focuses on a sensitive spot on my back. That spot needs attention because that’s where the most “energy” is, as she says. It’s an important spot to pay attention to.

It’s similar in prayer. When you feel reluctant to pray about a particular topic, it may mean you are resisting looking at something urgent, or a situation or memory that needs to be attended to. Maybe God wants to comfort you in that place or release you from some un-freedom or “disordered attachment.” That’s the reason there’s so much “energy” around those passages. In these moments, God offers us the chance to stop resisting and let ourselves be healed. And freed.

C
ENTERING
P
RAYER AND THE
T
HIRD
M
ETHOD

A little theology will help our discussion of “centering prayer,” which has become popular in Christian circles.

Like two great rivers, two traditions of prayer flow through Christian spirituality. One is called “apophatic” and the other “kataphatic.”
Apophatic,
from the Greek word
apophatikos,
which means negative, is an approach to God that moves away from images, words, concepts, and symbols. It is more “content free.” The underlying theology is that God is beyond our comprehension, beyond any mental images we might have, unknowable; and so one seeks to find God by emptying oneself of preconceived notions of the divine.

Harvey Egan, S.J., a professor of theology at Boston College, noted in
The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality
(Michael Downey, ed.) that this tradition is rooted in both the Old and New Testaments. In the Book of Exodus, God dwells in “thick darkness” (20:21) and appears to Moses as a “cloud” (34:5). Moses cannot see God’s face when God passes, which is another way of expressing the divine “otherness.” St. Thomas Aquinas said that one can only know
that
God is, not what God is. The best known writer on this stance is the (still anonymous) author of the fourteenth-century work
The Cloud of Unknowing,
who speaks more of what God is
not,
rather than what God is.

The other stream is kataphatic prayer, which comes from the Greek word
kataphatikos,
meaning “positive.” This tradition seeks to experience God in creation and makes overt use of images, concepts, words, and symbols in prayer. Kataphatic prayer is more “content rich.” The theology here is that we can begin to know God through all of creation.

This method is also firmly rooted in Scripture. The Old Testament stresses that God can be understood through his visible works—that is, the natural world. In Christian theology this is made even more explicit: God is known as a person. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John (14:9), “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” And Aquinas—now arguing for the opposing side—says that although God is ultimately unknowable, we can seek God through the things that are “known to us.”

St. Thomas might be accused of a certain duplicity—arguing both sides of the argument. But he’s right in both cases: God can be known through his works (kataphatic) but not known fully (apophatic). Both approaches are authentic. Both have been used by believers over the millennia. Moreover, many find themselves using these two different approaches at different times in their lives.

You’ve probably guessed where I’m going: Ignatian contemplation, with its emphasis on the imagination, fits squarely in the kataphatic tradition. So does
lectio divina
.

Centering prayer, a practice that seeks to find God at the center of one’s being without the intentional use of images, is closer to the content-free way. In a recent conversation, Father Egan said plainly, “Centering prayer is apophatic.”

As a result, centering prayer is not often associated with Ignatian spirituality. Instead most people align it with Zen Buddhism or yoga. But there are clear echoes of centering prayer in the Spiritual Exercises.

At one point in the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius talks about the “Third Method of Praying,” which he describes as done “according to rhythmic measures.” You take a single word (he suggests words from the Our Father) and concentrate on the word while breathing in and out. “This is done in such a manner that one word of the prayer is said between one breath and another,” he writes. This Ignatian practice is remarkably similar to Zen prayer as well as to the more contemporary centering prayer.

But before going any further with comparisons, let’s talk about what centering prayer is (rather than, apophatically, what it is not) and how it fits in with the Ignatian way.

The three men most responsible for introducing centering prayer into contemporary Christian circles in the English-speaking world are John Main, M. Basil Pennington, and Thomas Keating. Main was an English Benedictine monk. Pennington was, and Keating is, an American Trappist monk, like Thomas Merton. Pennington wrote that the term
centering prayer
was inspired by Merton’s use of similar phrases in his writings.

Pennington and Keating wrote a brief book called
Finding Grace at the Center
along with Thomas E. Clarke, S.J. Before his death in 2005, Father Clarke, a quiet and gentle priest, resided at a small retreat house in a rural area north of New York City. He offers a concise introduction to the method: “Our theme is
the center
” he wrote, “the place of meeting of the human spirit and the divine Spirit, and, in that meeting, the place where the Christian at prayer meets the whole of reality, divine and human, persons and things, time and space, nature and history, evil and good.”

Who can do
that? I thought when I first read his words. But Tom’s point is simple. Centering prayer is a move toward your center, where you encounter God. But it’s not simple navel-gazing, nor is it simply about God and you alone. For any encounter with God will lead you to the rest of creation.

This simple framework may strike many people as suspicious. Initially, I was more suspicious of centering prayer than I had been about imaginative prayer. If Ignatian contemplation sounded ridiculous, meeting God within you sounded arrogant. Who was I to say that God dwelt within me? Some Christians also think centering prayer is suspect because it’s “dangerously” close to Zen Buddhism and other Eastern practices. (The misguided idea that Christians couldn’t learn anything from Eastern spiritualities was a great source of consternation for Thomas Merton.)

But the more I read about centering prayer, the more foolish my objections seemed—for the idea of God’s dwelling within us is a foundational Christian belief. For one thing, most believers recognize conscience as the voice of God within. For another, multiple images of the indwelling God appear in the New Testament and in the early church. St. Paul said one’s body is a “temple of the Holy Spirit,” one place where God resides. St. Augustine wrote that God is
intimior intimo meo:
closer to me than I am to myself.