Meeting God in Prayer: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. —Richard Rohr

Monday
Prayer is not primarily something we are doing to God, something we are giving to God but what God is doing for us. And what God is doing for us is giving the divine Self in love. —Ruth Burrows

Tuesday
Quiet, contemplative prayer happens when we are still and open ourselves to Christ’s Spirit working secretly in us, when we heed the psalmist’s plea: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalms 46:10). These are times when we trustingly sink into God’s formless hands for cleansing, illumination, and communion. —Tilden Edwards

Wednesday
In prayer, we know we’re not being manipulated, we’re not being used, we’re not being judged, we’re not being evaluated. Who wouldn’t want to go there? It’s the place of ultimate freedom. —Richard Rohr

Thursday
We can imagine God as our intimate friend, with whom we share everything. We can talk to the Divine about our needs, complaints, and difficulties. We can ask for advice, offer thanksgiving, and make acts of faith or reparation for our sins. We can seek guidance for our children, or shed tears about illness and death. —Beverly Lanzetta

Friday
Prayer is the longing of the human heart for God. It is a yearning and desire for relationship with God, and it is God’s attention to our desire: God-in-communion with us. —Ilia Delio

Breath Prayer

Minister Adele Ahlberg Calhoun suggests a form of breath prayer that allows us to bring our heart’s deepest longing into our intimate relationship with God:

Breath prayer reminds us that just as we can’t live on one breath of air, we can’t live on one breath of God. God is the oxygen of our soul, and we need to breathe [God] in all day long. After all, it is in [God] that “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Breath prayer reminds us that each breath we are given is God’s gift and that God’s Spirit is nearer to us than our own breath. . . .

To practice breath prayer, ponder the nearness of God. Settle deeply into the truth that Christ is in you. Deeply breathe in, repeating any name of God that is dear to you. . . . As you exhale, voice a deep desire of your heart. When you exhale, offer up the desire of your heart. The brevity of the prayer allows it to be repeated over and over throughout the day.

Examples of breath prayers are

breathe in “Abba,” breathe out “I belong to you.”
breathe in “Healer,” breathe out “speak the word and I shall be healed.”
breathe in “Shepherd,” breathe out “bring home my lost [ones].”
breathe in “Holy One,” breathe out “keep me true.”
breathe in “Lord,” breathe out “here I am.”
breathe in “Jesus,” breathe out “have mercy on me.”

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:
Adele Ahlberg Calhoun, Spiritual Disciplines Handbook: Practices That Transform Us (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 205–206.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on sacred breathing and our True Self in God.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Barbara Holmes, Untitled 14 & 21 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States, used with permission. Abel Marquez, Lady Praying, 2020 (detail), photograph, free use. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

The creative team at CAC sent a single-use camera to core teacher Dr. Barbara Holmes as part of an exploration into contemplative photography. Her photos are featured here together with other images in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: Sometimes we don’t have the energy to climb the stairs or jump off the dock. Wherever we are in this moment: in community, in solitude, in joy, in sorrow, with motivation or with great exhaustion… God meets us here.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

Opening to God

Franciscan theologian Ilia Delio speaks of the love of God which is at the heart of the eternal and ineffable desire to pray:

Prayer is the longing of the human heart for God. It is a yearning and desire for relationship with God, and it is God’s attention to our desire: God-in-communion with us. The great spiritual writer Augustine of Hippo [354–430] captured the longing of the human heart in the beginning of his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” [1] We long for God because we are created by God, and this longing is both the source of our hope in God and the very thing we resist. Prayer is an awakening to the fact that the fulfillment of my life lies in God.

God delights in creation and loves each of us with a personal love. Prayer, therefore, is God’s desire to breathe in me, to be the spirit of my life, to draw me into the fullness of life. When I pray—when I breathe with God—I become part of the intimacy of God’s life. The Franciscan theologian, Saint Bonaventure [c. 1217–1274], wrote in his Soliloquy, “[God] is the One who is closer to you than you are to yourself.” [2] Prayer is recognizing the intimate in-dwelling of God in our lives, the One who remains faithful in love even when the world around us may fall apart. . . .

Delio writes of the risk and vulnerability that we are invited to share with God in prayer and the fruit it offers us:

To pray is to open up oneself to God who dwells within us. It means holding back nothing from God and sharing everything with God. . . . Only the grace of God can enable us to let go of our fears and allow God to be the God of our lives. True prayer is fundamental for life in God. It is that grace of conversion that opens up our hearts to realize the humble presence of God in our lives. Prayer of the heart is unceasing prayer, where God breathes in us and our hearts are turned toward God. This deepening of our lives in the divine life is the path to self-discovery. In and through prayer we discover our true selves, the self that God has created each of us to be. . . .

Life in God should be a daring adventure of love but often we settle for mediocrity. We follow the daily practice of prayer but we are unwilling or, for various reasons, unable to give ourselves totally to God. To settle on the plain of mediocrity is to settle for something less than God, which leaves our hearts restless and unfulfilled. . . . Prayer is that dynamic, life-giving relationship with God by which we grow deep in God’s Word, strong in God’s grace, and free in God’s love to dream with God the unimaginable.

References:
[1] The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960), 43.

[2] Bonaventure, “Soliloquy on the Four Spiritual Exercises,” in The Works of Bonaventure: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint, vol. 3, Opuscula, trans. José de Vinck (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1966), 44.

Ilia Delio, Ten Evenings with God (Liguori, MO: Liguori Publications, 2008), 15, 17.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard and Ilia Delio on the prayer of Francis and Clare.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

After prayer and meditation, I often write to help me sort it all out. I find the practice to be very cathartic and it helps me maintain an awareness of the interconnected world. Realizing that the responsibility for my inner peace rests with me isn’t always welcomed. That forces me to surrender to a Higher Power and gives me the courage to see the shift of consciousness occurring within me.
—Terry L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

An Intimate Sharing

Contemporary mystic and writer Beverly Lanzetta has thought deeply about how to live a contemplative life in the world. In describing prayer, she turns to Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and Thomas Merton (1915–1968):

Teresa of Avila describes mental (contemplative) prayer as, “nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with [God] who we know loves us.” [1] We can imagine God as our intimate friend, with whom we share everything. We can talk to the Divine about our needs, complaints, and difficulties. We can ask for advice, offer thanksgiving, and make acts of faith or reparation for our sins. We can seek guidance for our children, or shed tears about illness and death.

Quite frequently, the most efficacious [way to] pray is found in darkness, emptiness. When we find ourselves simply open to the vast mystery surrounding us, when we center our hearts on an obscure faith, and are absorbed into the divine Presence. This is the contemplation of night, when darkness quiets the soul, and we surrender to unknowing. Thomas Merton prays:

Your brightness is my darkness. I know nothing of You and, by myself, I cannot even imagine how to go about knowing You. If I imagine You, I am mistaken. If I understand You, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know You, I am crazy. The darkness is enough. [2]

James Finley describes what happens inside us when we commit to such a path of prayer:

As you develop the habit of meditation, you will become more skilled in learning to enter more directly into a quiet state of meditative openness to God. Little by little you will experience yourself becoming more familiar with the inner landscape of your newly awakened heart. As your newly awakened heart is allowed to repeatedly rest in meditative awareness, it slowly discovers its center of gravity in the hidden depths of God. . . .

Since “God is love” (1 John 4:8), God’s ways are the ways in which love awakens you again and again to the infinite love that is the reality of all that is real. As you ripen and mature on the spiritual path that meditation embodies, you will consider yourself blessed and most fortunate in no longer being surprised by all the ways in which you never cease to be delighted by God. Your heart becomes accustomed to God, peeking out at you from the inner recesses of the task at hand, from the sideways glance of the stranger in the street, or from the way sunlight suddenly fills the room on a cloudy day.

Learning not to be surprised by the ways in which you are perpetually surprised, you will learn to rest in an abiding sense of confidence in God. Learning to abide in this confidence, you learn to see God in learning to see the God-given Godly nature of yourself, others, and everything around you. [3]

References:
[1] Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, chap. 8, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. 1, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1976), 67.

[2] Thomas Merton, Dialogues with Silence: Prayers and Drawings, ed. Jonathan Montaldo (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), xiii–xiv.

[3] James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 33–34.

Beverly Lanzetta, The Monk Within: Embracing a Sacred Way of Life (Sebastopol, CA: Blue Sapphire Books, 2018), 353–354.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to James Finley and Mirabai Starr discuss Teresa of Avila’s life and work on Turning to the Mystics.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Quality of Relationship

Father Richard writes about the transformation that prayer can make in our lives. We begin living from a deeper self, united in God:

When we live from our true self in God, religion is not about requirements; it’s about relationship, the quality and capacity of our relatedness to God and others. The essential self can say prayers, but this true self also is a prayer. Just by being, just by walking from here to there, it is a prayer. That’s why Paul can say something like pray always (1 Thessalonians 5:17). He can’t mean that we should walk around saying “Our Fathers” all day! But we can pray always when we live in conscious union with God. The surprise for most of us is that this place of relationship with God is really not about being perfect. The self in God will still make mistakes, but it lives from a center other than its own. It’s hard to get a feel for this until we’ve met a centered person, someone grounded and in union with God.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that we have to have met a saint. My definition of Christianity at one time was that a Christian is someone who’s met one, because this whole thing is contagious! When we meet a person of a certain quality of maturity, we too can become more mature. We meet a patient person and we learn how to be patient. We meet a loving person and we learn how to be loving. That’s the way human beings operate. When we meet a really grounded, happy, and free person, we become more like that because we’ll be satisfied with nothing less. This whole thing, our faith, spreads through and by the quality of our relationships.

In prayer, it is possible to experience that quality of relationship with God. In that place, we know we’re not being manipulated, we’re not being used, we’re not being judged, we’re not being evaluated. Who wouldn’t want to go there? It’s the place of ultimate freedom. It’s the state that every one of us wants to live in. That’s why we tell people to go pray for some set time each day, because when we do, we slowly learn to live in this place. We become a reflection of our own experience. We ourselves become our best teacher—yet it is the Spirit (see Romans 8:16). God rubs off on us. It’s almost that simple. I don’t know any other way to say it.

I want to say as strongly as I can that all of the elements and practices of religion—the Bible, sacraments, priesthood, churches, the rosary, contemplative sit, everything—is to help us experience this essential and united self. Pure and simple. That’s all. If our religion doesn’t help us experience this undefended and beloved self, then change it, get rid of it, or do something very different.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Contemplative Prayer (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2003), CD, MP3.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard, Cynthia Bourgeault, and Thomas Merton on the “True Self.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

I twice experienced the absolute love and presence of God holding me, embracing me, and piercing divine love down to the bone. Soon after I was brought to wordless prayer. Since then prayer has become a quiet, interior sitting in Presence that invites joy. Despite the pain and struggles of life, this aliveness in the Spirit has been like the pool of living water.
—Jacqui L.

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Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Prayer of Mutual Presence

Tilden Edwards is a spiritual teacher and founder of The Shalem Institute, a contemplative organization. In this passage, he describes the purpose of prayer:

Authentic prayer is opening to God’s gracious presence with all that we are, with what Scripture summarizes as our whole heart, soul, and mind (Matthew 22:37). Therefore prayer is more a way of being than an isolated act of doing.

Prayer is aimed at our deepest problem: our tendency to forget our liberating connectedness with God. When this happens we become lost in a sense of ultimate separateness. From this narrow outside-of-God place rise our worst fears, cravings, restlessness, and personal and social sinfulness. . . .

Prayer also arises from our deepest hope: for the abundance of life that comes when we abide in our deepest home, our widest consciousness. Prayer is our bridge to Home.

Edwards goes on to distinguish between two types of prayer:

Active prayer is present where our wills normally shape our opening to God, with faint or strong promptings from deep within. Intercession, petition, confession, thanksgiving, and praise are forms of active prayer. These are forms of prayer that most of us learn as children and find reinforced in corporate worship and Scripture. Their content and shape rise naturally out of our daily lives and evolving spiritual life.

Quiet, contemplative prayer happens when we are still and open ourselves to Christ’s Spirit working secretly in us, when we heed the psalmist’s plea: “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalms 46:10). These are times when we trustingly sink into God’s formless hands for cleansing, illumination, and communion. . . . We are in a state of quiet appreciation, simply hollowed out for God. At the gifted [that is, graced] depth of this kind of prayer we pass beyond any image of God and beyond any image of self. We are left in a mutual raw presence. Here we realize that God and ourselves quite literally are more than we can imagine. . . .

Such contemplative prayer finds us in what Scripture calls our “hearts”: our deepest, truest self in God, the self that is deeper than our normal sense of mind and feelings, yet includes these in a transfigured way. Here is the “home” of God in us, where we are most together, “I pray that Christ will dwell in your hearts through faith” (Ephesians 3:17). It is the core dimension of our being where we most realize our divinely gifted nature, indeed, where we sense ourselves being intimately breathed in and out by God continually. In the placeless place of the spiritual heart we are in touch before thoughts, beyond thoughts. We can bring into that inner sanctuary only our naked trust and longing. . . .

If the fundamental spiritual discipline is prayer, opening to God, then the fundamental discipline of prayer is turning to our heart and inviting a sustained mutual presence.

Reference:
Tilden Edwards, Living in the Presence: Spiritual Exercises to Open Your Life to the Awareness of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987, 1995), 11–13.

Explore Further. . .

Read Cynthia Bourgeault on the Divine Mercy at the heart of the universe.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Love’s Method of Communication

Carmelite nun Ruth Burrows has reflected deeply on the nature of prayer through her numerous books. Here she describes prayer as our inner “Yes” to what God seeks to do, which is always to love us:

Almost always when we talk about prayer we are thinking of something we do and, from that standpoint, questions, problems, confusion, discouragement, illusions multiply. For me, it is of fundamental importance to correct this view. Our Christian knowledge assures us that prayer is essentially what God does, how God addresses us, looks at us. It is not primarily something we are doing to God, something we are giving to God but what God is doing for us. And what God is doing for us is giving the divine Self in love.

[For Christians,] any talk of prayer, if we are to stand in the clear, pure atmosphere of truth, must begin by reflecting in firm belief on what Jesus shows us of God. Let us push straight to the heart of the matter. What is the core, the central message of the revelation of Jesus? Surely it is of the unconditional love of God for us, for each one of us: God, the unutterable, incomprehensible Mystery, the Reality of all reality, the Life of all life. And this means that divine Love desires to communicate Its Holy Self to us. Nothing less! This is God’s irrevocable will and purpose; it is the reason why everything that is, is, and why each of us exists. We are here to receive this ineffable, all-transforming, all beatifying Love.

CAC teacher James Finley likewise understands meditation and prayer as the opportunity to realize God’s constant love for us at all times:

To practice meditation as an act of religious faith is to open ourselves to the endlessly reassuring realization that our very being and the very being of everyone and everything around us is the generosity of God. For God is creating us in the present moment, loving us into being, such that our very presence in the present moment is the manifested presence of God. We meditate that we might awaken to this unitive mystery, not just in meditation, but in every moment of our lives. [1]

Burrows continues:

Basing ourselves, therefore, on what Jesus shows us of God . . . we must realize that what we have to do is allow ourselves to be loved, to be there for Love to love us. . . .

The essential thing we have to do is believe in the enfolding, nurturing, transforming Love of God which is the Reality: the Reality that is absolutely, totally there whether we avert to It or not. Prayer, from our side, is a deliberate decision to avert to It, to respond to It in the fullest way we can. To do this we must set time aside to devote exclusively to the ‘Yes’ of faith.

References:
[1] James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 9.

Ruth Burrows, Essence of Prayer (Mahwah, NJ: HiddenSpring, 2006), 1–2, 3, 5.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to James Finley and Kirsten Oates discuss prayer and contemplation on Turning to the Mystics.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

Meditation has helped me focus on my life of prayer as I travel the difficult road of grief as a widow. It helps me face the day and encourages me in my work as a Christian Counselor. I have gained a better understanding of what I already believed about God, and I can look forward with hope.
—Rosaleen R.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Prayerful Stance

For Father Richard, when we surrender to love in the present moment, we encounter the flow of Divine Presence:

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a life stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. Fully contemplative people are more than aware of Divine Presence; they trust, allow, and delight in it. They “stand” on it!

The contemplative secret is learning to live in such a now. The now is not as empty as it might appear to be or that we fear it may be. Try to realize that everything is right here, right now. When we’re doing life right, it means nothing more than it is right now, because God is in this moment in a non-blaming way. When we are able to experience that, taste and enjoy it, we don’t need to hold on to it. The next moment will have its own taste and enjoyment.

Because most of our moments are not tasted or real or in the Presence, we are never full. We create artificial fullness and want to hang on to that. But there’s nothing to hold on to when we begin to taste the fullness of now. God is either in this now or God isn’t at all. If the now has never been full or sufficient, we will always be grasping. Here is a litmus test: If we’re pushing ourselves and others around, we have not yet found the secret of happiness. This moment is as full of the Divine Presence as it can be. Saints have called this the “sacrament of the present moment.”

The present moment has no competition; it is not judged in comparison to any other. It has never happened before and will not happen again. But when I’m in competition, I’m not in love. I can’t get to love because I’m looking for a new way to dominate. The way we know this mind is not the truth is that God does not deal with us like this. The mystics, those who really pray, know this. Those who enter deeply into the great mystery do not experience a God who compares, differentiates, and judges. They experience an all-embracing receptor, a receiver who recognizes the divine image in each and every individual.

For Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love. Returning to love. Trusting that love is the deepest stream of reality. That’s why prayer isn’t primarily words; it’s primarily an attitude, a stance, a modus operandi. That’s why Paul could say, “Pray always.” “Pray unceasingly.” If we read that as requiring words, it is surely impossible. We’ve got a lot of other things to do. We can pray unceasingly, however, if we find the stream and know how to wade in its waters. The stream will flow through us, and all we have to do is keep choosing to stay there.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999, 2003), 31, 65–66, 81.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on the sacrament of the present moment.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Meeting God in Prayer: Weekly Summary

Opening to God

An Intimate Sharing

A Quality of Relationship

Prayer of Mutual Presence

Love’s Method of Communication

A Prayerful Stance

Category Archive

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Stay connected

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Meeting God in Prayer: Weekly Summary

Opening to God

An Intimate Sharing

A Quality of Relationship

Prayer of Mutual Presence

Love’s Method of Communication

A Prayerful Stance

Category Archive

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