The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything - James Martin [77]
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.
From Each Little Thing
Pedro Ribadaneira, one of the early Jesuits, wrote about his friend Ignatius’s ability to find God in nature.
We frequently saw him taking the occasion of little things to lift his mind to God, who even in the smallest things is great. From seeing a plant, foliage, a leaf, a flower, any kind of fruit, from the consideration of a little worm or any other animal, he raised himself above the heavens and penetrated the deepest thoughts, and from each little thing he drew doctrine and the most profitable counsels for instruction in the spiritual life.
“What was your prayer like yesterday?” I asked a middle-aged Catholic