The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything (19 page)

Centering prayer moves us to our center, where God dwells, waiting to meet us.

Three Steps

Father Pennington’s essay in
Finding God at the Center
breaks down centering prayer into three steps.

“Faith,” Father Pennington points out, “is fundamental for this prayer, as for any prayer.” Moving to the center, you trust that you’re moving toward the God who is
intimior intimo meo
.

In other words, you find a mantra or prayer word such as “love,” “mercy,” or “God” to help you focus. Don’t concentrate on the meaning of the word. Rather, let the word anchor you in the presence of God. As the author of
The Cloud of Unknowing
says, “It is best when this word is wholly interior without a definite thought or actual sound.”

Distractions are unavoidable in prayer. Even Ignatius mentions them. (“I was disturbed by someone whistling,” he once wrote, “but not so greatly disquieted.”) The prayer word gently recalls you to the presence of God.

And that’s it. Centering prayer is simple in theory. In practice, it can be difficult for beginners, especially if your life is packed with “content.” The notion that you could meet God without “doing” anything may seem bizarre. But centering prayer is not about producing or doing or achieving. It’s about being. Or rather, being with.

As Margaret Silf says, “In the eye of the storm is a center of perfect peace, where our deepest desire is embraced by God’s own desire for us.” Or to use Father Barry’s analogy of friendship, centering prayer is like a long silent walk with a good friend. While you’re not speaking to one another, there may be a deeper type of communication going on.

T
HE
C
OLLOQUY

In Chapter Six, we touched on the idea of “speaking” with God by imagining God, or Jesus, in front of you. And I confessed that I’ve always found this a difficult way to pray. But for Ignatius it was an essential part of the Spiritual Exercises: he wanted you to come to know God, and Jesus. Conversation, or what he calls a “colloquy,” was one way of doing this. For many people who travel along the way of Ignatius, this is the most enjoyable way to pray.

At the end of most meditations in the Exercises, Ignatius recommends that we imagine ourselves speaking to Mary, Jesus, and God the Father. At one point during the First Week, Ignatius asks us to speak with Jesus on the cross and ask ourselves,
What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What ought I do for Christ?

Sometimes this prayer has worked wonders for me. On a recent retreat, for example, I imagined standing before Jesus and asked myself, “What am I doing for Christ?” and started to grow angry. That anger was an obvious sign that something was happening deep down. “I’m doing way too much!” I complained to Jesus in prayer, and then listed all the unnecessary projects that I should have declined. And I felt Jesus say to me,
“I’m not asking you to do all that”

Most of the colloquies in the Exercises are of a freer form, that is, they are not attached to specific questions like “What am I doing for Christ?” Often in the Second Week, when you are reflecting on the ministries and miracles of Jesus, a retreat director will ask you to imagine speaking to Jesus, or one of the disciples, to review what happened during the prayer. Ignatius recommends that you imagine speaking to God, doing so as “one friend speaks to another.”

Colloquies can be simple. One Catholic sister whom I directed on a retreat spent four days sitting on a bench and imagining Jesus sitting beside her, while she told him what was on her mind. “Jesus and I had a great afternoon!” she said one day.

Again, what you “hear” in prayer needs to harmonize with your religious beliefs, what fits with your understanding of God, and what you know about yourself. In other words,
Does this make sense?
In time, you will be able to better discern what seems authentically from God.

O
THER
F
ORMS OF
P
RAYER

This is not an exhaustive book on prayer. “By no means!” as St. Paul would say. But I don’t want to leave you with the idea that those forms of prayer above are the only ways that Jesuits pray, or the only methods in the Ignatian tradition. Or the only methods recommended by other saints, theologians, or spiritual writers. So here are some very brief explanations of a few other ways to pray.

Communal prayer
can happen in any group where participants are focused on God. For Catholics that includes the recitation of the Daily Office, as practiced by monastic communities and other groups; communal recitations of the Rosary; and the worship
par excellence:
the celebration of the Mass, called the “source and summit” of the church’s life.

Other Christian denominations come together for Sunday services in which Scripture readings, songs, and preaching lift the congregation’s hearts and minds to God. For Jews, the Friday evening
Shabbat
service reminds them of their covenant with God and their responsibilities to the community. For Muslims, the five-times daily call to prayer, which is often prayed privately, but many times in common, reminds them of their reliance on Allah, the Guide, the Restorer, the Gentle One.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that God meets us in groups, not simply when we’re praying alone. “The funniest thing happened yesterday,” said one young Jesuit recently. “I felt really moved during the Mass, almost to the point of tears.” We both laughed at the tendency to overlook group worship as a way of interacting intimately with the Creator. Communal prayer is as much an occasion for the “Creator to deal directly with the creature,” as Ignatius says, as is private prayer.

Rote prayer,
like the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Rosary, the Jewish
Shema
(“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God . . .”), and the psalms serve the believer in many ways. For one thing, they provide you with a ready-made template that is helpful when it is hard to find words to pray. Christians who pray the Our Father (or Lord’s Prayer) know they are uttering words given to us by Jesus. It has been called the “perfect prayer,” moving from praise to hope to petition to forgiveness. For another, rote prayers connect you with believers across the world. Rote formulas also help you lose yourself in prayer. As David’s mother said about the Rosary, they can help you look at God, and God look at you.

Journaling
is writing about your prayer or spiritual life. This method helps you both record and examine your prayer experiences, which are otherwise often dismissed as “just something that happened” or, more often, simply forgotten. Something in human nature works against remembering the fruits of prayer—for if we remembered all that we heard in prayer, we would have to change, and part of us recoils from that.

Dorothy Day, the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, kept a spiritual journal for almost fifty years, which was later published as
The Duty of Delight
(edited by Robert Ellsberg). She pointed to another benefit of journaling, in an entry from 1950. “It is always so good to write our problems down so that in reading them over 6 months or a year later one can see them evaporate.”

Interestingly, in their book
Birth: A Guide for Prayer,
Jacqueline Syrup Bergan and Marie Schwan, C.S.J., distinguish between keeping a diary of one’s prayer and “meditative writing,” where the writing itself is a prayer.

Meditative writing is like “writing a letter to one we love,” Bergan and Schwan say. They offer three ways of doing this: writing a letter to God; writing down an imagined conversation between you and God; writing an answer to a question, like, “What do you want me to do for you?” and then writing the answer in God’s voice. Meditative writing is useful for those who find it difficult to focus in prayer: it can free the mind of distractions and let God speak through the very act of writing.

Nature prayer
is my term for finding God in meadows, fields, gardens, or backyards; or peering up at the night sky, walking along the beach, or joining in bird-watching expeditions, all the while searching for the divine presence. It can be a powerful way of connecting with God, something that I discovered when one woman challenged me with her style of prayer during a retreat that I was directing.

“What was your prayer like yesterday?” I asked a middle-aged Catholic sister on retreat. “Well, I spent a long time hugging a tree.” I had to suppress a laugh. Was she kidding?

“When I hugged the tree, I felt connected to the earth and to the beauty of God’s creation,” she continued. “Stretching my hands around its trunk made me feel grounded, connected to the earth, in a way that I never had. And here I was holding on to a living creature, which reminded me that God is continually creating.” Her comments changed the way I look at that kind of prayer.

My busy life in New York City means that I have few opportunities to appreciate nature. The view from my window is an array of brick walls with a tiny sliver of blue sky, visible only if I crane my neck. So I treasure any time outdoors. One fall, I traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to direct a weekend retreat with Sister Maddy. The Jesuit retreat house is spectacularly situated only a few yards from the Atlantic Ocean. And only a few hundred yards from the house—separated from the ocean by a narrow spit of land—is a large, freshwater pond. To my mind, this is one of the most beautiful spots in the country.

On that Friday, however, I arrived in the dark of night, after a seemingly endless series of subways and trains that took me from New York to Boston to Gloucester. So I could see nothing of the retreat house’s lovely grounds.

But in the early morning, when I stepped outside into the bright autumn sunshine, the view almost took my breath away. Near the retreat house were tall trees with red and orange leaves that stirred in the cool breeze. Above me was the vault of a brilliant blue sky. As I walked behind the retreat house, I saw fishing boats chugging around the bay, plowing through the steel-blue water. And though the air was filled with the calls of seagulls, ducks, and blackbirds, it seemed as if a silence filled my soul.

The colors, the smells, even the sounds, seemed ways of God comforting, calming, and consoling me.

Most of the men and women on retreat said the same. “How are you experiencing God this weekend?” I asked one man. “With all this!” he said, making an expansive gesture toward the window. At a talk that weekend, Sister Maddy told the story of her young nephew, who once stood on the rocks overlooking the Atlantic, taking in deep breaths.

“What are you doing?” said Maddy.

“Trying to take all this into me so I can take it home!” he said.

An Ignatian use of the imagination can aid us in nature prayer. (Ignatius himself used to gaze at the stars from the rooftop of the Jesuit headquarters in Rome.) Whenever I stand on a beach, I use the ocean as an image of a God who bears away my worries. With each wave that breaks on the shore and recedes, I imagine my fears and worries borne out to sea, to be received by God.

Music
is another way to pray. “Who sings well prays twice,” St. Augustine said. Ask any choir member or churchgoer who has felt lifted up during a worship service. Or ask a monk or nun who has chanted the psalms for years on end, until not only the words but the melodies become ways of expressing oneself to God. Sometimes the music itself can express what we are feeling better than words do. Lately, when I find it difficult to pray, I use a recording of the psalms, chanted by a monastery choir, whose songs pray for me when words do not come so easily.

Olivier Messiaen, the twentieth-century composer, once said that music serves for humanity as a conduit to the ineffable. When asked if a listener needed to have a spiritual experience to appreciate his music, Messiaen answered, “Not at all. But it would be the highest compliment to me as a composer if you had a spiritual experience because of hearing my music.”

Work
can be prayerful if done contemplatively. “Hands to work, hearts to God,” as the Shakers used to say. Sometimes when I’m washing dishes or ironing or arranging the altar for Mass, I lose myself in the task and am reminded of doing small things with love.

But you have to be careful. Busy Jesuits (including me) sometimes say, half-mischievously, “My work is my prayer.” This may mean our work leads us to God. Or it may be an excuse for not praying. Or it may mean we’re doing neither wholeheartedly.

G
OD COMMUNICATES WITH US
in many ways. But prayer is a special time when God’s voice is often heard most clearly because we are giving God our undivided attention. Whether in Ignatian contemplation,
lectio divina,
the colloquy, the examen, or any other practice, the “still small” voice can be heard with a clarity that can delight, astonish, and surprise you.

So when you pray, however you pray, and feel that God is speaking to you—pay attention.