The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [50]
Instead, Ron leaned back in his rocking chair and asked me to talk more about what I felt about having Jesus as a friend. After I did, he smiled and said, “I think you’re beginning to pray.”
It was a liberating moment, one in which I realized the possibility of a different kind of relationship with God. Ron wasn’t saying that this was the right way, or the wrong way, or the only way, to pray. Rather, he was saying that thinking about Jesus as a friend was a kind of prayer. That it was okay to have feelings about God in addition to thinking about God. And that using your imagination in prayer was also okay.
Ron’s words implied something else, too. Through these highly personal thoughts, feelings, and desires—being attracted to the idea of Jesus as a friend, thinking about what it was like for the apostles, wondering if Jesus could be my friend, hoping that I might someday experience this friendship—God was communicating with me. That was revelatory.
Strange as it sounded, God apparently wanted to be in a relationship with me.
For the beginner, that’s a key insight about prayer. God desires to communicate with us and can use all sorts of means to do so.
In Chapter Two we talked about how we become aware of the desire for God. During this retreat my desire manifested itself in the simple attraction to the idea of Jesus as friend. For others their first memorable experience of prayer may arrive as they contemplate a weird-looking insect making its way across a leaf or as they listen to a Mozart concerto. But this insight—that God wants to communicate with us—is central to the way of Ignatius.
WHAT IS PRAYER, ANYWAY?
A few weeks after my retreat at Campion Center in the summer of 1988, I entered the Jesuit novitiate. At the time, the novitiate for the New England region was housed in a grand old brick house next to an even grander brick church in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, then a neighborhood comprised primarily of poor Latino and African American families. In past decades the house had served as a convent for the sisters who taught at the elementary school next door. As a result, the common rooms were huge, the bedrooms tiny: a twin bed and a desk barely fit. “You have to go into the hall to change your mind,” one novice said, only half-jokingly.
The first month in the novitiate was glorious: I was overjoyed to be a Jesuit. And I relaxed instantly into the daily schedule, which included studying Jesuit history and spirituality and working outside the house (which for me, that fall, was in a hospital for the seriously ill).
It also meant lots of prayer.
The day began with morning prayer in common, at 7:00 a.m., every day except Saturdays (when we cleaned the house in the morning) and Sundays (when we were expected to attend Mass in a local parish).
Traditionally, one of the novices led the morning prayer, which took a variety of forms. One day it might be the standard prayer for Catholic priests and brothers (called the Daily Office and contained in a book called a breviary). It consists mainly of psalms and readings from the Old and New Testaments.
Another day, morning prayer might be a simpler version of the Daily Office, with a novice choosing a single psalm, leaving more time for silent meditation. The psalms were prayed antiphonally, with one side of the room speaking one stanza, and then the other side, and back and forth, much as they do in monasteries.
As much as I disliked getting up early, I loved that part of the day: praying with the rest of the community while the early-morning sunlight poured through the clear windows of our plain, airy chapel. (Or often didn’t pour in, since this was Boston, not Florida.) Morning prayer centered me for the remainder of the day.
At 5:15 p.m. we attended Mass, the central prayer of the church, which was celebrated by one of the priests in the novitiate. This was absolutely my favorite time of the day. Before entering the Jesuits, I had never been to a daily Mass and so didn’t know what to expect. What did people do