Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Memorial of Saint Agatha, Virgin and Martyr
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Balancing my prayer life
Strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees. Make straight paths for your feet, so that the lame may be healed. Strive for peace with everyone, and to be holy. See to it that no one be deprived of the grace of God.
Prayer is active, and God does the work. God listens as we speak, and we listen as God speaks.
How do you find yourself praying? I pray the Rosary, and the Our Father, and ask God for what I think I need and, even more, what I think others need. I pray out loud and silently, and I pray with hope, often in desperate circumstances that seem to offer no hope otherwise.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. The Lord knows how we are formed; he remembers that we are dust. But the kindness of the Lord is from eternity to eternity to those who fear him.
Henri Nouwen offers another way of praying: simply sitting and saying, “Here I am, Lord.” Anything else he says just gets in the way. He just sits.
Alongside my more directed prayers during which I mostly ask God to listen, I am learning to pray, with Henri Nouwen, in silence. “Here I am, Lord.” This type of prayer is called “Centering Prayer,” a few minutes once or twice a day when I stop my busy-ness and settle into the practice of leaving my thoughts and feelings on the altar, so to speak.
I am learning not to follow those thoughts, but to let them go instead. When I follow them, my thoughts tend to turn my awareness back toward myself, rather than toward God. Father Thomas Keating, who developed methods for praying in this way, suggests that instead of following our thoughts, we choose a simple single word, like “Jesus,” or “Holy,” or even something with no religious connotation, like “Purple.” The idea is to notice our thoughts coming into our minds and then, ever so gently, let them leave again.
In a wonderful metaphor, Fr. Keating dons his virtual scuba gear and settles down under the surface of a flowing stream. He finds a boulder and sits on it during his prayer time. When a thought rises in his mind, he invites the thought to rise up through the river and float away with the current.
Rather than try harder, if his thought won’t go willingly he remembers his “sacred word” and repeats it a few times. Always he continues his silent, centering prayer. He does not seek to empty his mind, nor even to actively direct his consciousness toward God, but simply to sit in God’s presence and trust God with himself.
My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord; I know them, and they follow me.
 (Hebrews 12, Psalm 103, John 10, Mark 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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