Recently I read through Charles Bello’s Prayer as a Place. One of the side-concepts that the book stresses is the idea that we do not need to add religious activity to our life, we simply need to create space to spend time with the source of our life – God. One of the most effective ways to fill this space once you work out how to create it is, of course, with prayer, which is what Bello’s book focuses on. There are three types of prayer covered by Bello. The idea of different “types” of prayer isn’t to create a formula, but to facilitate focus. If you’re anything like me, it seems impossible to focus your thoughts during prayer on anything longer than half a sentence. Below I’m going to share the types of prayer that have really benefited the space that I have created (not all of these are in the book).
Centering Prayer: In Prayer as a Place, this is presented as a stand alone prayer with the idea of resting in God’s love like a child would rest in their parents arms. As a meditative prayer, the idea of centering is to help clear your mind of all distractions. It is NOT about clearing your mind completely, but trying to find the mental space to focus only on God’s word for your moment. I have not used this as a stand alone prayer, instead I spend about 5 minutes before all of my different prayers focusing on a phrase that I feel expresses what God is working in my heart at the moment. “You are my strength” is the phrase I used this morning. I cannot stress enough how important these five minutes have been for me. Even though God is using the various following “sessions” to mold and refresh me, these five minutes of centering prayer boost my mental capacity to focus when it matters the most: during the meat of the prayers below.
Daily Walk: While I was thinking through the benefit of creating space for prayer, I was thinking about how important it is to start each day with prayer. I suck at this, honestly, because it’s hard enough for me to get up in the morning (though that seems to be changing lately). Usually my morning prayers take place while getting ready for work. But because I know the importance, I developed a prayer that I am calling the “Daily Walk” as a call back to a discipleship program that I went through as a youth. During the Daily Walk prayer, I look ahead and prayer over each part of the day. The idea is to anticipate the challenge areas of the day, and ask God to reveal opportunities to you. This morning during my Daily Walk prayer, I anticipated the busy first half of the day would put me in a mood that just wants to veg out on my own, so I prayed that during the afternoon at home I would have patience with my daughters. I was right; I’d prefer to be alone right now, but since I’m not, as soon as my ill-disposition started to creep in, God reminded me of my prayer this morning and I’m enjoying something as simple as teaching my daughter the rules of baseball as the Rangers beat up on the Orioles. God is faithful. I personally like to break down my day as logically as possible, regardless of the length of prayer required for any give section. In general, weekend days have large chunks of time, but work days include smaller sections such as “transit to work” and “lunch hour.”
The Examen (or Examine): If the centering prayer is the most important, the Examen has been the most fruitful so far. Based on a prayer life developed by St. Ignatius, the Examen takes a contemplative look back through the events and feelings of the day. There are several applications for this type of prayer (google it), but I am gaining great benefit from Bello’s method. First you mentally walk through your day and ask God to reveal to you the most Life-Draining moment of the day; maybe a moment of frustration, anger, disappointment, or pain. You take this instance and you relive the emotions and circumstances to get a good idea of exactly how you felt and why you reacted the way you did. DO NOT think of ways you shoulda/coulda/woulda changed the situation… just relive it. Then ask God to reveal to you WHY it was so life-draining and also ask for guidance and transformation so that you might handle the situation differently (if applicable). For the second part of the Examen, you want to do the same thing, except focus on the most Life-Affirming moment of the day. God has given me so much insight to my personality and has also revealed some new practices to implement in my life. The concept sounds pretty basic, but you might be surprised at when God was working in your life through out the day.
Progressive-Reflective Player: Along with the Daily Walk, this is the other type that isn’t in Bello’s book. I call this Progressive-Reflective because it is more of a look forward. It is a focused prayer asking for clarity on a specific situation that I know is forth-coming. It is reflective in the sense that I understand that I will have to face the situation and so I can reflect on the possible choices and similar situations in the past. This is obviously a pretty common type of prayer for most people, but by adding the centering prayer at the beginning of the prayer session I have found much more clarity and less distractions than I normally have during these types of prayers.
Many of us are great at the “pray without ceasing” thing… we pray conversationally with God throughout the day, thanking Him periodically for something positive or expressing a quick prayer for strength and guidance in a tough situation. But I know that before I started creating this space to spend quality time with God, my prayer life was active, but not very deep. By just creating space and using that space in a focused manner over the last three weeks, God has shown Himself faithful in a “every moment of every day” kind of way. I encourage all of you to create space, center yourself, and spend some quality time wtih God…