The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [65]
Even the progress of the spiritual life mirrors that of a relationship. At the beginning of many relationships, as I mentioned, there’s often a period of infatuation. All you want is to spend time with the other. But the relationship has to move beyond that superficial level and into something deeper and more complex. It will also move into places that you couldn’t have imagined when you first fell in love. It will have its ups and downs, its times of silence, its times of frustration. Just like any friendship will.
Your relationship with God will change over your lifetime: sometimes it will happen naturally, almost easily, and feel rich and consoling; at other times it will seem difficult, almost a chore, yielding little in the way of “results.” But the important thing—as in any friendship—is to keep at it and, ultimately, come to know and love the Other more deeply. And to let the Other come to know and love you more deeply.
Chapter Seven
God Meets You Where You Are
Ignatian Traditions of Prayer
IN THE LAST THREE chapters we looked at how a prayer like the examen can help us find God in our lives, and how we can “listen” to God in prayer and in daily life. But there are many other traditions of prayer besides the examen. So among those, what’s the best way to pray?
GOD LOOKS AT ME, AND I LOOK AT GOD
The answer is: whatever you are comfortable with. “God meets you where you are,” as David said. No form of prayer is any better than another, any more than one way of being with a friend is better than another. What’s better is what’s best for you.
Here’s a story David liked to tell on himself, about labeling different forms of prayer as “better” or “worse.”
One weekend after he had returned from a post as a spiritual director at the prestigious Josephinum seminary in Ohio, David visited his mother, an elderly Irish-Catholic woman, at her home outside of Boston. He noticed that she was praying her Rosary, one of the oldest Catholic spiritual traditions. The Rosary is a set of beads of varying sizes, arranged in five groups of ten. The small beads remind you to pray a Hail Mary. (“Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women. And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”) The large ones, the Our Father. There are also different events from the lives of Jesus and Mary to think about while you are praying each “decade,” or set of ten.
The origins of the Rosary lie deep in the Middle Ages: lay men and women used the Rosary as a way of praying along with the nearby monastic communities, who themselves would move through the 150 psalms during the year. (Three times around the Rosary would mean 150 Hail Marys.) As Sally Cunneen writes in a book of essays called Awake My Soul, “When most Christians were illiterate and when books, including Bibles, were unavailable except in monasteries, a string of beads or seeds provided a simple means for the faithful to re-create their attachment to the events of the Gospel as they prayed the prayer that Jesus taught and, also, repeated the words of Gabriel and Elizabeth to Mary,” that is, the Hail Mary.
After his experience as a spiritual director, David felt that this “simple means” of prayer that his mother enjoyed was, well, too simple. So he decided to teach his mother something about “real prayer,” as he said.
“Why do you pray the Rosary?” he asked her.
“David, I’ve always prayed the Rosary,” she said.
“But why?”
“Well, I enjoy it,” she said.
Sensing that he was making little progress, David decided he would probe his mother’s limited experience in prayer and teach her a “better” way to pray.
So he asked, “What happens when you pray the Rosary?”
“Well, I quiet myself down,” she said. “And then I look at God, and God looks at me.”
“That stopped me in my tracks!” David said