“Prayer is conversation.” - David Fleming SJ
What does God want most from us? C.S. Lewis answers this question succinctly, “God doesn’t want something from us. He simply wants us.”
God simply wants a relationship with us. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola writes boldly about Divine Will: God wants to give us everything that God has and everything that God is. To him, the spiritual life is a response to God’s desire to have a deeper relationship with us. Key to this relationship is prayer, a conversation with God as if between two good friends. Click here for more.
WEEK 3
PRAYER PERIOD 1
Click on the 20’ meditation music below as you:
Reread what you wrote regarding your “conversation” with God during last week’s meeting.
Ask God how you might be invited to linger, to listen more, to savor, or to relish what transpired between you and God.
Edit or expand on the conversation you began at the last meeting.
PRAYER PERIOD 2
Click on the 20’ meditation music above as you pray with God by imagining:
Being with God/Jesus as if with a good friend.
Your friend asking you, “What’s close to your heart at this time?”
Asking yourself:
What would you most like to express to him or her?
What would he or she want to share with you?
In your journal, note your “conversation” with God in prayer.
PRAYER PERIOD 3
Click on guided meditation below to pray for 20’. Note in your journal your “conversation” with God in prayer.
WEEK 2
PRAYER PERIOD 1
Click on the 20’ meditation music below as you:
Reread what you wrote regarding your “conversation” with God during last week’s meeting.
Ask God how you might be invited to linger, to listen more, to savor, or to relish what transpired between you and God.
Edit or expand on the conversation you began at the last meeting.
PRAYER PERIOD 2
Click on the 20’ meditation music above as you pray with God by imagining:
Being with God/Jesus as if with a good friend.
Your friend asking you, “What’s close to your heart at this time?”
Asking yourself:
What would you most like to express to him or her?
What would he or she want to share with you?
In your journal, note your “conversation” with God in prayer.
PRAYER PERIOD 3
Click on guided meditation below to pray for 20’. Note in your journal your “conversation” with God in prayer.
In the core of every person is a foundational mystical experience of
the incomprehensible God that provides the basic horizon of life,
the undertow or basic metabolism of daily existence.
There, hidden in the stuff of everyday experience, God is at work –
the one to whom we say our inmost yes or no.
Yes, we may deny this, ignore it, repress it, snow it under with a
blizzard of activity, but it is nonetheless there.
God who is both beyond yet so near.
- Karl Rahner, SJ
GOD OF MY PRAYER
When I flee from prayer, it’s not that I want to flee from you, but from myself and my own superficiality.
I have left the world behind, and still cannot find my way into the true sanctuary of my inner self, the only place where you can be found and adored.
I definitely shut out the noise of the world, and yet I am still hopelessly deaf to the eloquent sounds of your silence!
But you want me to pray, a patient waiting for you, a silent standing by; until you, who are ever present in the inmost center of my being, open the gate to me from within.
Then, I shall be able to enter into myself, into the hidden sanctuary of my own being; there I will empty out before you the vessel of my heart. That will be the true hour of my love.
Give me, O God of my prayer, the grace to continue waiting for you in prayer.
- Karl Rahner, SJ
WEEK 1
PRAYER PERIOD 1
Click on the 20’ meditation music below as you:
Reread what you wrote regarding your “conversation” with God during the first meeting.
Ask God how you might be invited to linger, to listen more, to savor, or to relish what transpired between you and God.
Edit or expand on the conversation you began at the first meeting.
PRAYER PERIOD 2
Click on the 20’ meditation music above as you pray with God by imagining:
Being with God/Jesus as if with a good friend.
Your friend asking you, “What’s close to your heart at this time?”
Asking yourself:
What would you most like to express to him or her?
What would he or she want to share with you?
In your journal, note your “conversation” with God in prayer.
PRAYER PERIOD 3
Click on guided meditation below to pray for 20’. Note in your journal your “conversation” with God in prayer.