CONTEMPLATIVE LITURGIES FOR GUIDED PRAYER :
a prayer resource for individuals or small groups
The following liturgies are designed to be used in groups but can also be of help for individual prayer times. Their purpose is to keep the mind focused and guided in a fruitful way as it explores the silences of prayer.It is recommended that at least 5-10 minutes of silence be allowed between each passage read.
Each liturgy is arranged according to the classical progressions of spiritual direction:
- from AWAKENING, the time when we first realize or are reminded that we are being invited to the spiritual life,
- to ILLUMINATION, when we realize that there is, at the beginning at least, something we can do to participate,
- to MERCY when, as we begin walking towards the light, we grow in awareness of the need for changes within us,
- to COMMUNION, where we encounter Jesus in our journey, and finally
- to UNION, where the vision and encouragement of God-With-Us is once again our experience
[for Leaders]
In preparation for these liturgies it would be good to do some general research on the writers featured by way of introducing them to those attending. This needn’t be too detailed, simply something about the times they lived in and the ministry they were involved with.
[Music]
The silences of prayer can be broken by the next reading or else by singing, or a CD gently fading in and out. See also our Imago Dei songs listed under “Songs for Prayer” which include sheet music for musicians. If there are no musicians in the group these can also be played on a laptop and sung along with.
[Communion]
If Communion is served the leader can choose whether to read the related passage before or after Communion.
[Sharing]
It is always good to have opportunity for group reflection following a time of shared silence. People might wish to highlight certain passages or experiences that they appreciated or that need clarification.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from the Abbe de Tourville*
Our Lord is our true and chief Director, who, without our knowledge, has arranged matters in such a way that our lives turn out quite differently from what we should have expected; infinitely better for our salvation and glory than we should ever have dared to hope.
*all quotes are taken from Letters of Direction, Abbe de Tourville, Mowbray, London, 1982.
AWAKENING
“God asks only one thing–that you should be on close and friendly terms with Him, without fear; without ceremony. A perfect childlike simplicity puts us at once into intimate relationship with God, without any hindrance. Let us try more and more to maintain in the depths of our souls the childlike simplicity and artlessness which our Lord asks and commands.”
ILLUMINATION
“Leave your soul to pray as suits it best, in its own way, without strain. In a word, follow your bent. For nothing is more individual to each soul than the form of its intimacy with our Lord. His earthly life revealed also that no two were intimate with Him in the same sort of way. Observe the path you take instinctively at those times when you are most keenly aware of the real and intimate presence of our Lord. Realize that there lies your own particular grace.”
MERCY
“The soul gains very little from looking at itself. Such an occupation gives rise only to discouragement, preoccupation, distress, uncertainty, and illusion. From every point of view we gain infinitely more by looking at our Lord, than by looking at ourselves. We shake off our faults more quickly and effectively when we adore our Lord than when we examine and criticize ourselves.”
“Be bold enough always to believe that God is on your side and wholly yours, whatever you may think of yourself. Think of this and say to yourself “I am loved by God more than I can either conceive or understand.” Do not worry any more about what you are or are not. You are the object of His forgiveness. Be satisfied with that and think only of that.”
COMMUNION
“Remember that it is our souls which are God’s joy; not on account of what they do for Him, but on account of what He does for them. All that He asks of them is to gladly accept his kindness, his generosity, his tolerance, his fatherly love. Rejoice that you are what you are; for our Lord loves you very dearly. He loves the whole of you, just as you are.”
UNION
“The Mystery of grace which works in us is in a sense a copy of the Mystery of the Incarnation. By grace Jesus takes possession of our personality and fills it with His Divinity. He desires to make use of us by grace as he made use of His own nature in the Incarnation.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Hans Urs von Balthasar*
“Our innermost being was designed for dialogue with God. He alone can tell us what, in true, we are.”
*all quotes are taken from Prayer, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1986.
AWAKENING
“Contemplative prayer is a conversation in which God’s word has the initiative and we, for the moment, can be nothing more than listeners.”
“The contemplative has to be clay in the hand of the potter, a clay which is molded through prayer itself, content not to know in advance where it is going, only sensing it, as the process is actually taking place, from the disposition of the potter’s shaping hands, confident that it is a good and loving work taking place.”
ILLUMINATION
“Unless we are responding in obedience to the free work of God within us, we are not living up to the idea which God the Father had for us at creation. We were created to be hearers of the Word, and it is in responding to the Word that we attain our true dignity.”
“The reason I run after the earthly water every day is because I have lost my grip on the heavenly water which I am really seeking.”
MERCY
“It is only at the center where we learn what is decisive, namely, the truth about our life, what God wants and expects of us, what we should strive for and what we should avoid in the service of the divine Word.”
COMMUNION
“The eternal world of heaven is a world of intense life and spontaneous activity, seeking to further its aims, and using the prayer, the willingness and openness of the Church and of believers to achieve this.”
UNION
“The person who knows of the fountain of God’s truth and love, which is continually welling up at the center of their being, will feel compelled to keep returning there often to cleanse, renew and refresh their whole being.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Sr. Bernadette Roberts*
“Until we realize by experience that God will never let us go, we cannot let go of our self.”
*all quotes from Life at the Center, by Sr. Bernadette Roberts, State University of NY Press, Albany, NY, 1991.
___________________________________________
AWAKENING
“Our spiritual journey begins in earnest when we follow up on a gratuitous grace, a revelation or piece of enlightenment, that virtually turns our life around. To seek this grace more abundantly and to make ourselves worthy of it, our energies become focused on a reformation of life, a commitment to spiritual practice, a total dedication to pursuing an intimate life with God.”
ILLUMINATION
“God, who draws us along, is the only one who knows the right direction. This direction is not conceived by the mind, not even known to the mind and, therefore, cannot be followed by the mind. What enters into union with God is not our mind, but our will-to-God, which is that particular aspect of self fashioned by God solely for Himself, and which, throughout our spiritual lives, finally comes home to rest.”
“To be perfectly passive, to belong perfectly to God, is the most difficult of human accomplishments. But we cannot even begin the depths of this journey until we first discover our abiding union with Him.”
“We must release our hold on God, because it is He who will hold us in unity, and hold us at a level where our own efforts count for nothing–a level we cannot reach through our self.”
MERCY
“While we are enjoying inner peace, the sensory faculties are running rampant, playing havoc with the outskirts of the inner sanctum, disrupting the peace, and breaking up the tranquility of union with God. These disturbances St. John of the Cross calls ‘foxes,’ which are the ‘chorus of desires and motions of the senses.’ Here they spring up to take control, ‘excite the imagination’, in a word, ‘make war’ on the peaceful interior kingdom.”
“Those who live in fear and trepidation of falling, sinning, losing ground, who spend their lives making sure they do not, have little trust in God. Because they have not sufficiently experienced the continual saving grace of God, they have no understanding of what it means to be confirmed in grace.”
COMMUNION
“If the contemplative state were dependent upon the soul having to maintain it, it would certainly fall apart. The strength and fidelity of this union comes only from God, and the fact that it does not come unbound is due solely to His pledge to the soul.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Bernard de Clairvaux *
“All our desires for God have been placed within our own hearts by His prior desire for us
*all quotes from The Love of God; Bernard de Clairvaux, Multnomah Press, Portland, Ore., 1983
.”
AWAKENING
“You would not be seeking me if you had not already been found of me.”
“Silence is the space most worthy of the mystery of God.”
ILLUMINATION
“God is available to each one, if only we will make it our preoccupation to be with Him and in Him.”
“The Will of God transforms our own will in order that we can love God as we should.”
MERCY
“Nothing can be so restless and fleeting than my heart. How exceedingly vain, trifling, wandering and unsettled is this vagabond. It is under a thousand different determinations at once. It seeks rest everywhere but finds it not.””I can never have mastery of my own heart. Only God has that. So long then, as I am not united to God, I am divided within myself and at perpetual strife within myself.”
“Know yourself and you will have a wholesome fear of God. Know God and you will also love God. In the first, wisdom has its beginning; and in the second, it has its crown.”
COMMUNION
“Union with God can only be secured by love. And subjection to Him can only be grounded in humility. And humility can only be the result of genuinely knowing and believing the truth, that is, the truth of God and of myself.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Carlo Carretto
“True contemplation does not depend on you. You are not the dawn, you are the land that awaits the dawn.”
AWAKENING
“To create a desert means learning to remain undisturbed with one’s own thoughts, one’s own prayer, one’s own destiny. It means shutting oneself up in one’s room, remaining alone in an empty church, setting up a small oratory for oneself in which to localize one’s personal contact with God, to draw breath, to recover one’s inner peace. It means occasionally devoting a whole day to prayer, it means going off into the loneliness of the mountains, or getting up alone in the night to pray. Creating a desert means nothing more than obeying God’s commandment to put aside our daily tasks and seek the refreshing stillness of contemplation.”
ILLUMINATION
“If we want to know God, to become close friends of the Most High, we must acquire the habit of contemplative prayer, made with the eyes of humility and with simplicity of heart. To become lowly, lowlier still, as lowly as possible. This is the great secret of the mystical life. And then having reduced oneself to a single point and become nothing more than a soul which watches attentively and a heart which loves, to get used to a complete reversal of the usual position, the eternal position of pride, and the uneasy position of the ego which always sees itself as the centre of the universe.”
“Prayer is not so much a matter of talking as listening; contemplation is not watching but being watched. To be watched by God: which is passive rather than active, more a matter of silence than of words, of waiting rather than of action. To be able to live in the knowledge that God works while I am sleeping, thinks of me while I work or pray, and will intervene at the appropriate moment, that God awaits me in prayer, and knows my future, this is true peace, the foretaste of heaven, and the answer to all my problems about faith.”
MERCY
“Man before God is the poor one par excellence. But he is a poor man who can rely on Another to satisfy his needs. This is the attitude, the characteristic of the poor man who has courage to ask for what seems impossible. “I have nothing, but God is the fullness of being and I will lose myself in him.” And nothing gives greater glory to God than this struggle on the bastions of the invisible; this cry which springs from the mouth of man who is caught up in the struggle with no weapon other than his own weakness, but with unshakable confidence in God’s will to involve himself in what concerns him as a poor man.”
COMMUNION
The Eucharist is like the cloud which accompanied the people of God on their desert journey; like the pillar of fire which pointed out the way through the depths of the night. The Eucharist is the fullness of the gift, it is the pearl hidden in the mystery of Scripture, the treasure in the field of the Word of God, the secret of the King. In the Eucharist God becomes a presence beside me on my path, bread in my knapsack, friendship close to my heart. This bread speaks to me of humility, of lowliness, of self-giving. Above all, it tells me that it is with this bread, with which he became bread, that he will nourish me for eternal life. As Jesus taught, “Anyone who eats this bread will live forever.” (Jn. 6:58)
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations on the topic of Desire
“Life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.”
Thomas Merton.
AWAKENING
“Human and divine desiring is a core feature of the spiritual life. Our desires energize the spiritual quest. When uncovered, expressed, and recognized our deepest desires, our wants, our longings, our outward and inward searching ultimately lead us to God.”
-Janet Ruffing
Spiritual Direction, Beyond the Beginnings
“Most of us have never discovered where our desires lead us on their own. Instead we attempt to satisfy ourselves in the short-term. We bury our unformed, barely perceptible longings for intimacy with God by settling for whatever forms are immediately available or convenient.”
-Janet Ruffing
ILLUMINATION
“Silence in the presence of God belongs to the core of prayer. It deepens our awareness of both ourselves and God. For it is in the stillness of prayer that we learn what our own desires most truly are.”
-David Benner, Desiring God
“In the process of praying we find that we and our desires get sorted out. Prayer allows our desires room to be, to become conscious, intelligent, and available to us, even to become enlarged and expanded.”
-Janet Ruffing
MERCY
“It often feels frightening or disconcerting to discover that we don’t know what we want or to find that we don’t want something badly enough to make the choices it would require. As each thing we think we want emerges, it takes some time to test out whether we really do want it or not. This interior sorting through requires listening to ourselves at deeper levels than most of us are accustomed to.”
-Janet Ruffing
“Our desires are in themselves, deeply spiritual. Our deepest desires prove that the universe is not centered on ourselves, because they require that we reach out and move on.” -David Benner
COMMUNION
“When I am really living true, my own deepest desire, to become the person God created me to be, is in complete harmony with God’s will for me. God’s will therefore, becomes not something remote and unknowable, but something as close to me as the deepest desire of my own heart, and something that the Lord is only waiting and longing to reveal to me in every moment of my life and in every breath of my prayer. God’s will, his desire for me, and my own deepest desire are one and the same thing.”
-Margaret Silf, Inner Compass
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Eugene Peterson
“God does not impose his reality from without; he grows flowers and fruit from within.”
AWAKENING
“Prayer is the cultivation of a grace-filled relationship with God. We begin experiencing ourselves and the world not as a problem to be solved, but as a reality in which God is acting.”
“I want all of life to be intimate, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, with the God who made, directs, and loves me. I want to do the original work of being in deepening conversation with the God who reveals himself to me and addresses me by name. I want to witness God out of my own experience. I don’t want to live as a parasite on the first-hand spiritual life of others, but to be personally involved with all my senses, tasting and seeing that the Lord is good.”
“God’s continuing love is an assault on our indifference and a victory over our rebellion.”
ILLUMINATION
“Be slow to pray. This is not an enterprise to be entered into lightly. When we venture into prayer, every word may, at any moment, come to mean just what it means and involve us with a holy God who wills our holiness.”
“Prayer is never the first word; it is always the second word. God has the first word. Prayer is answering speech; it is not primarily an address, but a response.”
MERCY
“Every person is involved in both the desires and the difficulties of intimacy in their lives. In every encounter, whether with God or with others, there is the challenge of closeness, the need to break through the defenses of sin in order to be in touch with another.”
“Prayer is the place where the doubts that come from disappointment and failure are dispelled and faith in the resurrection of love and promise is once again discovered.”
“In prayer we enter into a large, leisurely center to existence where God must be deeply pondered, lovingly believed. It means entering into the realms of spirit where wonder and adoration have space to develop, where play and delight have time to flourish.”
COMMUNION
“In the quietness and solitude of prayer we come to realize the end of what God has begun in us and we grasp by faith the complete work in which we will one day know even as we are known.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Henri Nouwen*
*all quotes from The Way of the Heart; Henri Nouwen, Harper, San Francisco, 1981 and With Open Hands, Henri J. M. Nouwen, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1972
“Silence is the home of the Word. Silence gives strength and fruitfulness to the Word.”
AWAKENING
“The chief task of the contemplative is to enter into his or her heart. To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart. There God’s spirit dwells and there the great encounter takes place. There, heart speaks to heart, because there, we stand before the Lord, all-seeing, within us.”
ILLUMINATION
“We have to fashion our own desert where we can withdraw every day and dwell in the gentle healing presence of our Lord. Without such a desert we will lose our own soul, while preaching the gospels to others.”
“Prayer means being constantly ready to let go of your certainty, and to move on further than where you now are. That is why praying demands poverty, that you always begin afresh. Whenever you willingly choose this poverty you make yourself vulnerable, but you become freer to see the world in its true form.”
“Praying is no easy matter. It demands a relationship in which you allow God to enter into the very center of your person, allow him to speak there, allow him to touch the sensitive core of your being.”
MERCY
“It is in the silence of the ‘poor in spirit’ that you learn to see your life in its proper perspective. In this silence, the false pretenses fade away and you can see the world again with a certain distance.”
“In prayer I am constantly on the way, on pilgrimage. Prayer is living in constant expectation that God who makes everything new will cause you to be born again.”
COMMUNION
“The most important thing about prayer is whether God sees it as a prayer of hope, or of little faith. The prayer of little faith is filled with wishes which beg for immediate fulfillment. It has a great deal of fear and anxiety about it. Whenever we pray with hope, we put our lives in the hands of God. Fear and anxiety fade away and everything we are given and everything we are deprived of is nothing but a finger pointing out the direction of God’s hidden promise.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from James Houston*
“What most of us lack is not knowledge of the faith but the spiritual determination to carry out what we already know. True Christianity is turning the possible into the actual.”
*all quotes are from James Houston’s, Joyful Exiles, IVPress, 2006
AWAKENING
“We leave behind the city lights in order to go deeper into the wilderness to appreciate the stars of the night sky. So too we must learn to cultivate silence and solitude in order to have a clearer vision of the character and ways of God.”
ILLUMINATION
“We will never understand our own narrative without first becoming ‘homeless’ and then participating in God’s love where we will see, with certainty, that in Christ all things hold together.”
“Meditation breeds inner conviction, which in turn provides and strengthens consistency and equanimity of heart in the task of developing a more permanent Christian character.”
“The more assuredly we are in Christ, the more decisively we will do what the truth calls us to do. On the other hand, the less sense we have of our unique identity in Christ, the more indecisive, compromising and shallow we will be.”
MERCY
“Our ability to be divinely guided arises from our uncertainty, our inadequacy, our doubts and fears. Instead of denying or ignoring our basic weaknesses, in them we must seek God’s redemptive grace most passionately. As we limp along on our spiritual journey, our compass points to where God’s grace can meet our deepest need, transforming it into gracious strength.”
COMMUNION
“Every point of time is equidistant from eternity. Only in realizing this can we see how contemporary Christ really is, and then also how tangible eternity can be to us now.”
UNION
“Christian maturity is never the maturity of the individual. Just as God the Father never acts alone, the Son never acts independently, nor does the Holy Spirit operate in his own behalf. The Three are One God. Therefore the Christian life is a corporate reality even though it is a personal experience. Only as we cultivate the communion of saints can there be any attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”
If Christians have no engagement with the world, then its future is bleak. We need to be sober and watchful, not seeking ‘solutions’ but rather changed lives that can change the world. Only then can we introduce a new awareness of God’s presence.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Jeanne Guyon*
* all quotes are taken from Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ, Jeanne Guyon, Christian Books Publishing House, Auburn Maine, 1975.
AWAKENING
“There is nothing in this universe that is easier to obtain than the enjoyment of Jesus Christ. Your Lord is more present to you than you are to yourself; his desire to give Himself to you is greater than your desire to lay hold of Him.”
ILLUMINATION
“Abandonment is the key to the inward spiritual life. It is practiced by continually losing your own will in the will of God. Great faith produces great abandonment.”
“Inside your spirit there is an act going on. It is a sweet sinking into Deity. The inward attraction becomes more and more powerful. Your soul, dwelling in love, is drawn by this powerful attraction and sinks continually deeper into that love.The experience of union begins very simply when there is born in you a desire for God. When the soul begins to turn inward to the life of the Spirit; when the soul begins to fall under the powerful, attraction of the Spirit. At this point, an earnest desire for union with God is born.”
“Prayer is a melting, a dissolving and an uplifting of the soul. It causes the soul to ascend to God. Nothing is as quick to return to its center as is the soul to the Spirit. Therefore hold your soul at peace. The more peaceful your soul is, the more quickly it is able to move toward God, its center.”
MERCY
“Jesus Christ is the great magnet of your soul, but of your soul only. He will not draw the impurities and mixtures that are mingled with it. Any such impurities prevent His full power of attraction.”
COMMUNION
“When we speak of continual prayer, we are speaking of a prayer that originates from within. It originates there and works out, filling and permeating your whole being.”
UNION
“Simply keep returning to Him each time you have wandered away. When something is repeated over and over, it becomes a habit. This is true even of your soul. After much practice your soul forms the habit of turning inward to God. When this act has been formed in you, it will express itself as a continual abiding in your spirit and a continuous exchange of love between you and the Lord.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Julian of Norwich*
“Prayer is essentially the expression of our heart longing for love. It is not so much the listing of our requests but the breathing of our one deepest request, to be united with God as fully as possible.”
*all quotes from The Recovery of Love , by Jeff Imbach, Fresh Wind Press, Abbotsford, BC, 2005
AWAKENING
“Life lasts and always will last because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God. In a little hazelnut I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, and the third is that God preserves it.”
ILLUMINATION
“And then our good Lord opened my spiritual eye, and showed me my soul in the midst of my heart. I saw the soul as wide as if it were an endless citadel, and also as if it were a blessed kingdom, and from the state which I was in, I understood that it is a fine city. And in the midst of that city sits our Lord Jesus, true God and true man.”
“Our good Lord revealed that it is very greatly pleasing to him that a simple soul should come naked, openly and familiarly. For this is the loving yearning of the soul through the touch of the Holy Spirit.”
MERCY
“But often when our falling and our wretchedness are shown to us, we are so much afraid and so greatly ashamed of ourselves that we scarcely know where we can put ourselves. But our courteous Lord does not wish us to flee away, for nothing would be less pleasing to him.”
“And after this our Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had for him before, and I saw that nothing hindered me but sin, and I saw that this is true of us all in general, and it seemed to be that if there had been no sin, we should all have been pure and as like our Lord as he created us. But our courteous Lord does not want his servants to despair because they fall often and grievously; for our falling does not hinder him in loving us.”
COMMUNION
“I shall do nothing at all but sin; and my sin will not impede the operation of his goodness.”
UNION
Greatly ought we to rejoice that God dwells in our soul; and more greatly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is created to be God’s dwelling place, and the dwelling of our soul is God, who is uncreated. It is a great understanding to see and know inwardly that God, who is our Creator, dwells in our soul, and it is a far greater understanding to see and know inwardly that our soul, which is created, dwells in God, through whom we are what we are.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Matthew the Poor*
“What the ear hears, the mind forgets. But what the heart hears, it can never erase.”
Matthew the Poor
*all quotes are from Orthodox Prayer Life, by Father Matta El-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor), St. Vladimir’s Press, NY, 2003
AWAKENING
“Prayer is God’s perpetual call within us drawing us toward the fulfillment of the ultimate purpose of our creation, our union with God.”
“Prayer that is spiritual and genuine is both a call and a response : a divine call and a human response. It is the stance of the soul toward its Maker, in and through the awareness of its renewal by the Holy Spirit.”
ILLUMINATION
“Prayer is the essential action through which conversion, renewal, and the growth of one’s soul take place. Through prayer we gain something that cannot be gained otherwise.”
MERCY
“Prayer is an inward light that exposes the blemishes and defects of our daily conduct. If we do not pray, we can never be changed or renewed, and whoever is not changed or renewed can have no genuine or effective relationship with Christ.
COMMUNION
“Man can never leave the presence of God without being transformed and renewed in his being, for this is what Christ has promised.”
UNION
“The world is now in dire need of a living witness of faith issuing from a soul that has a true relationship with God. Such a witness out-weighs and outshines a thousand books on doctrine, faith, or prayer.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Pere Grou, on “The Lord’s Prayer”*
“This is not a prayer composed by men, in order to help us in our devotion. It is the Lord’s prayer. It is Jesus Christ himself who gave it to us and made it to suit his own purposes in us. It was he who said, ‘This is how you should pray”
*all quotes are from Jean Nicolas Grou’s, S.J.. The School of Jesus Christ . Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1932.
Our Father who art in heaven,
“It is to my Father that I speak this prayer. I should never have dared, sinner that I know I am, to give this name to God myself, nor to consider calling myself his child. But it is Jesus Christ himself who grants me permission and gives me the right to do so. It is Jesus Christ who places me in the same rank and relationship to his God as himself when he says ‘My Father and your Father.’ He invites me to share his privileges and rights, with the Father I have in common with him.
Hallowed be thy name
“What then do we desire for God when we say, ‘Hallowed by thy Name?’ We desire that all people should know him, adore him, love him, obey him and render to him all the glory that is his due. But if this wish that we express on God’s behalf be sincere, the first thing we have to do is to hallow his Name within ourselves. That is where we must begin.”
Thy kingdom come,
“The kingdom for whose coming we pray is a dominion that is infinitely dear to the Father; it is the kingdom in which all creation is consistent and in agreement with the will of God. ”
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven
“Is it really possible that God’s will should be done on earth as perfectly as it is done in Heaven? Is not this a mere wish, an ideal to which human weakness cannot attain? But if the thing were not possible would Jesus Christ have made it one of the chief petitions of this prayer? Without doubt he knows our weakness better than we, but he also knows the power of grace and what it can accomplish in a heart that is given up to it. It is Jesus who said, ‘With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” Human frailty then, great as we know it to be, is truly capable, with the grace of God, to arrive at this perfection. ”
Give us this day our daily bread
“But can anyone of us deny often having the thought, “What shall I live on tomorrow?” This thought poisons the life of today, to the point that many of us are far more depressed by our fears for the future than by our discomforts in the present. “I have earned my bread so far,” says the artisan, “but who will give it to me in my oId age?” “My business is doing very well,” says the merchant, “but it may not always be so, and if it should come to grief what would become of me?” “My health,” says another, “is all that I can depend on; supposing I were to fall ill, how could I support my family?” But Jesus would teach us to eat with a quiet mind the bread that God gives us today, and for tomorrow, to trust in his Fatherly goodness.”
Forgive us our trespasses
“The forgiveness of God is so peculiar and personal to each one of us. So many sins, so often forgiven, so many particular graces granted, so many kindnesses and tender appeals to our hearts, such patience in suffering our delays and our wanderings; such forbearance with the many idols we choose to be led by instead of his grace. “0 Lord, forgive us our trespasses. ”
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
“Which of us has not offended God? Which of us does not ask forgiveness of his sins? And which of us is not more or less uneasy about that forgiveness? Which one does not long for some assurance that will bring peace? Well, here is the assurance that Jesus gives to you. If your brother or sister has offended you and you are seriously disposed to forgive them; if you feel no hatred and resentment against them; if, on the first sign of regret they show, you are gladly reconciled to them; if you even go ahead of them and make the first advances towards reconciliation, then you may be at ease and fully confident about the forgiveness of your own sins. ”
COMMUNION
And lead us not into temptation,
“Every age and every condition of life has its own temptations. We always live on the verge of an abyss, always on the point of possibly falling into it. Only death can ever really establish that state of peace from which we can no longer fall. And so we confess our frailty. We count neither on our dispositions, nor our good habits, nor our firmest resolutions. ”
But deliver us from evil.
“Every time we repeat the Lord’s Prayer then, let us recall our own potential weakness in the face of temptation. Let us glance at the dangers that surround us at every quarter and let us acknowledge our continual need of grace, humbly recognizing that if, with grace we can do all things, then without it we can do very little. ”
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Richard Rohr*
“God looks at the places in us that are trying to say ‘yes’.”
* all quotes are from Richard Rohr’s, Everything Belongs, Crossroad Publ. NY, 1999.
AWAKENING
“We must keep in mind that the purpose of the exploration of prayer is not to get anywhere. We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. ”
“The prayer of words attempts to express our dependence on the great mystery of God. The prayer of silence is not so much to express, but to experience that dependence. ”
ILLUMINATION
“We have to pray for the grace of a beginner’s mind. The beginner’s mind is a posture of eagerness, of spiritual hunger. It knows it needs something. To acknowledge oneself as a beginner is to be open to transformation. ”
“Grace will lead us into fears and voids, and grace will fill us, if we are willing to stay in the void. We mustn’t engineer an answer too quickly. To stay in God’s hands, to trust, means that to a certain degree I have to stop taking hold of things myself. I have to hold instead to a degree of uncertainty, fear and tension. This takes practice and grace. ”
MERCY
“Who I really am. That’s a place of utter simplicity. Perhaps we don’t want to go back there often precisely because it’s so simple. It feels so unardorned. There’s nothing to congratulate myself for. I can’t prove any worth, much less superiority. There, I am naked and poor and I feel like nothing. ”
“The only true perfection available to us is the honest acceptance of our imperfection. ”
COMMUNION
“True contemplation looks for the place of perfect simplicity. You can’t stay there, but if you know this simplicity once, it is enough for a whole lifetime. You know your life is radically okay. That you are a child of God. You are in union. There is nothing to prove, nothing to attain. Everything is already there. ”
UNION
“Prayer givers us a sense of abundance and connectedness. It is the ultimate empowerment of the people of God.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Fr. Ronald Rolheiser*
“The horizon of the contemplative is a horizon within which God is the background to all ordinary experience.”
*all quotes from The Shattered Lantern, by Ronald Rolheiser, Crossroad Publishing, NY, 2001
AWAKENING
“We come into life neither restful nor content, but fired by love’s urgent longing, dis-eased, our souls sick in an advantageous way. These urgent longings are experienced in many ways, both holy and unholy, during the course of life. The ultimate object of that longing is consummation, a complete and ecstatic union with God, others, and the cosmic world.”
“Contemplation is about waking up. Simply defined, to be contemplative is to experience an event fully, in all its aspects. We are in contemplation when we stand before reality and experience it without the limits and distortions that are created by our ego. When we stand before reality self-preoccupied we will see precious little of what is actually there to be seen. Moreover, even what we do see will be distorted and shaped by self-interest. ”
ILLUMINATION
“When we operate out of restlessness, rather than out of our true center, then, in the famous phrase of Augustine, God is within us, but we are outside of ourselves. Restlessness is not difficult to define. It is the opposite of being restful. Restfulness is one of the most primal of all cravings inside us. We crave rest to the point where we often identify it with heaven, as in: ‘Grant us eternal rest.’ We are restful when ordinary life is enough. ”
MERCY
“The mind is mostly unequal to the task of imagining God’s existence and the heart is often just as inept at giving us any feeling of God’s existence. But God doesn’t cease to exist for that reason, nor is faith dead just because the imagination and heart have run dry. God exists independent of our perceptions. ”
COMMUNION
“The most important exercise we must do to restore our contemplative faculty is to work at receiving everything, life, health, others around us, love, friendship, food, drink, beauty, as gift. To the extent that we take life for granted we will never see the Giver behind the gift. Conversely, once we stop taking life for granted we will, soon enough, begin to feel it as granted to us by God. ”
UNION
“Jesus says, ‘blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.’ Awareness of God is, for him, attached to a certain state of mind and heart, namely, purity of heart. ”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations on John Ruusbroec*
*all quotes are from The Recovery of Love , by Jeff Imbach, Fresh Wind Press, Abbotsford, BC, 2005
“The practice of love is free and is not ashamed of itself. Its nature is both craving and generous, for it constantly wishes both to demand and to offer, to give and to take.”
John Ruusbroec (1293-1381)
AWAKENING
“Love in the Trinity is both the passion to be One and the passion to be Unique. This is the other side of love. It is the passion to be a separate individual person. It is the dance of separateness, individuality, and diversity. The exchange of love in the Trinity is neither the embrace of union so total there is no distinction left, nor is it the celebration of separate persons. It is both, and both simultaneously, each flowing out of the other.”
“The goal of spiritual experience has often been expressed as coming to rest in peaceful tranquility or serenity. It implies being beyond passion. But quiet is not necessarily the goal of Christian spirituality. The quintessence of spiritual experience is to enter as deeply as possible into the simultaneous flowing of love between Unity and Plurality, between losing oneself in union, bursting forth into fruitful uniqueness, and losing ourselves again in union.”
ILLUMINATION
“If the universe is rooted in the love of the Trinity, then we are experiencing the impulse of love when we desire to make ourselves known in the world, to declare our distinction and uniqueness, and to form our own ego boundaries.”
MERCY
“Love cannot be simply self-sacrifice. Love is an exchange. People recovering from dysfunctional relationships know this. But they feel that the movement to establish their own personhood and create personal boundaries is contradictory to love. This movement to individuality feels necessary for survival, but at the same time it seems to violate their understanding of love. Seeing love rooted in the Trinity gives people the much needed permission and courage to build their own sense of individuality as part of their growth in love.”
COMMUNION / UNION
“Love, as the passionate exchanges within the Trinity, preserves the fact that love is the very ground of our existence. It encompasses the highest ideals in self-sacrifice and the strongest sense of self-worth. Trinitarian love preserves the relation of love to passion and integrates the nurture of personal integrity and uniqueness as an essential part of what love is all about.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Simon Tugwell, O.P.*
“Far and away the most important thing for us, if we want to pray, is seriously to undertake to become the kind of people who can pray, who have room in their lives for prayer. If we make room in our lives for a God to whom we can pray, then prayer should, by and large, look after itself.”
*all quotes are taken from Prayer; Living with God; Simon Tugwell, O.P., Templegate Publ., Springfield, Ill., 1975
AWAKENING
“Prayer is keeping company with God, and accepting the consequences. It challenges us to accept the freedom, the mystery and the otherness of God as well as the unpredictability of ourselves.”
“It is the prayer of the Holy Spirit praying in us in accordance with God that really matters; this is the prayer of the heart that is heard by God. What is important is that our prayer should reach down to the core of our being, the point of unity of our identity. This is something deeper than and underlying all our intellectual and emotional activity. It is from here, if anywhere, that our thoughts and feelings can be ‘taken captive’ in Christ. It is when this deep centre is filled with the peace of Christ that our lives are ‘kept’ in and by him.”
ILLUMINATION
“Faith brings us before God humble and poor. It punctures the self-sufficiency of our world so that there is room for God to be God. Perfect faith is when we are nothing but space for God to be God. Then God is no longer an object to us, nor we to him.”
MERCY
“We must be ready to be dismantled, over and over again, until we are entirely remade, receiving our likeness to God from God himself. Accepting the God who’s name is ‘I am’ means that we give up our preoccupation with who or what we are; we give up asserting our own ‘I am’ in favour of a more essential and more real ‘I am’ on the part of God.”
“We must learn to be what we are, and that means accepting our limitations, our blindness, our confusion about our motivations, our frequent uncertainty as to whether what we have done was good or bad, helpful or unhelpful; and, accepting all that, to offer it all to God and let him do what he wants with it.”
COMMUNION
“The spiritual life is a growth in instinctive sensitivity to the will of God. It is a strong and sound confidence that our inventiveness, our freedom, will suggest to us things that are pleasing to our Father.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from St. Frances de Sales*
“Souls differ more widely from each other than do human faces. But however different souls might be, all of them ultimately have the same vocation–to glorify God by their holiness.”
*all quotes are taken from Thy Will Be Done; by St. Frances de Sales, Sophia Press, Manchester, NH, 1995
AWAKENING
“When you come to Him, speak to Him if you can. If not, stay there. Be seen, and care for nothing else. Remain near God in this gentle and quiet attention of heart and in the sweet slumber of His holy will, for all this is agreeable to Him.”
ILLUMINATION
“We cannot require from ourselves what is not in ourselves. As your spirit looks elsewhere than where you are, it will never apply itself rightly to profiting from where you are. Let us be who we are, and let us be it well, so that we can do honour to the Master whose work we are.”
MERCY
“We must hate our faults, but with a tranquil and quiet hate, not with an angry and restless hate; and so we must have patience when we see them, and draw from them the profit of a holy abasement of ourselves.”
“We must not break the strings nor throw up the lute when we find a discord; we must bend our ear to find where the disorder comes from, and then gently tighten or relax the string as required.”
COMMUNION
“In patience you shall possess your souls. To possess fully our souls is the effect of patience, made more perfect as it is less mixed with disquiet and eagerness.”
“Be attentive to make yourself every day more pure of heart. This purity consists in estimating and weighing all things in the balance of the will of God.”
UNION
“It is a very true thing that the company of well-regulated souls is extremely useful to us to keep our own soul well-regulated.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with further meditations from St. Frances de Sales*
“Delight opens up the heart to God. Whoever truly takes pleasure in God desires faithfully to please God and, in order to please Him, desires to conform to God.”
*all quotes from Finding God’s Will, by St. Frances de Sales, Sopia Institute, Manchester, NH, 1963
AWAKENING
“God is not only the first principle but also the last, the author and Lord of all things. For this reason we desire that all things be subject to Him with supreme obedience. We see that God’s will is supremely perfect, right, just, and equitable. Our chief desire is that His will may be the supreme rule of all things, and that it may be followed, served, and obeyed by all.”
ILLUMINATION
“By often taking delight in God we become conformed to God, and our will is transformed into that of His divine majesty by the complacence it takes in Him.”
“If we do not resist God’s grace, He gives to each of us the inspirations needed to live, work, and preserve ourselves in the spiritual life. Wait in peace of mind for the effects of God’s good pleasure. Let His will always be sufficient for you, since it is always the best.”
“We must always be rendering ourselves pliable and tractable to God’s good pleasure, as though we were wax. A hundred times during the day we should turn our gaze upon God’s loving will, make our will melt into it, and devoutly cry out, ‘O God of infinite sweetness, how amiable is Your will and how desirable are Your favours!'”
MERCY
“At the beginning of their devotion, our hearts love God so as to be united to Him, to become agreeable to Him, and to imitate Him, because He has eternally loved us. But little by little, after they are formed and trained in holy love, they imperceptibly bring about a change. In place of loving God in order to please God, they begin to love Him for the pleasure they themselves take in the exercises of holy love.”
COMMUNION
“Without inspiration our souls would live idle, sluggish, useless lives, but with the coming of the divine rays of inspiration, we feel a light mingled with a life-giving warmth that enlightens our understanding and awakens and animates our will by giving it the strength to will and do the good that pertains to eternal salvation.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from St. Francis of Assisi*
“By Your grace alone, we make our way to You, Most High.”
* all quotes from Francis of Assisi, by Thaddeus Matura O.F.M., St. Anthony Messenger Press, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2000
AWAKENING
“God is delightful and totally desirable above all else. This delightfulness is not continuous, but rather fluctuating and temporary. Pray so that, purified, illumined and set ablaze by the fire of the Spirit, we can have access to it in this life.”
ILLUMINATION
“God wants to give of himself by granting access to the richness of his being; and for this he creates, by the need to love, spiritual and bodily relationships with the human person at the center, who is meant to be his partner. The latter is someone called to an unimaginable destiny, endowed with gifts and multiple energies with which to seek God.”
“At the origin of all prayer we find the Spirit of the Lord who dwells in the faithful and who, perfect adorer of the Father, produces in the heart of the believer an impetus toward God, a movement of holy prayer and gift of self.”
“Human persons are incomplete, fragile and broken. Striken with egoistic tendencies, tempted to affirm themselves as self-sufficient, they abandon themselves to these tendencies far too often and disfigure the image according to which they have been fashioned. As way of conversion, an itinerary is proposed to them: to turn their hearts toward God in love, adoration and praise; to practice a love of neighbour; to live in the communion of the church and its sacraments; to experience and assume the radical poverty of their being; and to follow the footsteps of Christ that lead to the happiness of the Beatitudes. Of such is their destiny and mission.”
MERCY
“One can become, without being aware of it, deaf to God’s word that no longer finds in us a fertile ground in which to grow. The heart, which should be always turned toward the Lord by being attentive, alert and in prayer, can let itself be overtaken by worries, preoccupations and obstacles. And there is much to be said about interpersonal relationships, always threatened as they are by quarrels, conflicts, negative criticism, judgments, condemnations and above all by emotional upset and anger, all of which destroy interior and exterior peace as well as charity.”
COMMUNION
“The gospel path is very simple: to turn our hearts towards God with love, adoration and praise; to love one’s neighbour with a maternal love; to live in the communion of the church; to experience and assume the radical poverty of one’s being; to follow in the footsteps of Christ; and to thereby discover the happiness of the Beatitudes.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from St. John of the Cross*
“Think nothing else but that God ordains all, and where there is no love, put love, and you will draw out love.”
*all quotes are from The Dark Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross
_______________________________
AWAKENING
“Prayer, by its nature, involves a sense of incompleteness and thus of longing in truth.”
“The soul lives in that which it loves. The nature of love is to be united, linked up with and at one with the object of its love. Only love unites and cements the soul with God.”
ILLUMINATION
“In following Christ in the contemplative way, without laying down one’s own ground rules and conditions, we grow into dimensions of the reality of God’s love which lie beyond what we can comprehend, experience or place in any systematic order. We are stripped of all guarantees which are rooted in the self, and we begin to live on the faith, trust and love that we have for God. We now experience God more as he is, as sheer Mystery.”
MERCY
“My spirit has become dry because it forgets to feed on you.”
“The more God wants to give us, the more He makes us desire, even to the point of leaving us empty in order to fill us with goods. Be careful that you do not lack the desire to be poor and in want.”
COMMUNION
“Contemplation is nothing less than a secret, peaceful and loving infusion from God. The road of contemplation is where God himself feeds and refreshes the soul directly, without the soul’s help or meditation.”
“The quiet rest of the soul comes from being united to God, hidden from all the attacks of the devil and from the attacks of its own senses and passions.”
UNION
“There is a remarkable transformation of the heart’s desires as a result of surrendering to God in our soul’s center. Our desire and God’s desire now join in a consonance of desire.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with further meditations from St. John of the Cross*
*all quotes from Living Flame of Love, by St. John of the Cross
AWAKENING
“Love is the inclination, strength, and power for the soul in making its way to God, for love unites it with God. They will see and experience your mild touch who withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild, thus enabling themselves to experience and enjoy you.”
ILLUMINATION
“Pure contemplation lies in receiving. In contemplation the activity of the senses and of discursive reflection terminates, and God alone is the agent who then speaks secretly to the solitary and silent soul.”
MERCY
“It is impossible for this highest wisdom and language of God, which is contemplation, to be received in anything less than a spirit that is silent and detached from discursive knowledge and gratification. Pacify the soul, draw it out, and liberate it from the yoke of its own weak operation.”
COMMUNION
“The Beloved dwells secretly with an embrace so much closer, more intimate and interior, the purer and more alone the soul is to everything other than God. His dwelling is in secret, then, because the devil cannot reach the area of his embrace, nor can the human intellect understand how it occurs.”
UNION
“I am so fortified in love that not only do my sense and spirit no longer faint in you, but my heart and my flesh, reinforced in you, rejoice in the living God with great conformity between the sensory and spiritual parts. What you desire me to ask for, I ask for; and what you do not desire, I do not desire, nor can I, nor does it even enter my mind to desire it. My petitions are now more valuable and estimable in your sight, since they come from you, and you move me to make them, and I make them in the delight and joy of the Holy Spirit”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Sr. Ruth Burrows, OCD*
“We are called to a fulfillment that surpasses the capacity of our natural powers not merely to attain but even to conceive.”
*all quotes are from Ruth Burrows’, The Essence of Prayer, Burnes & Oates, 2006
AWAKENING
“The Gospel message is good news to the poor: ‘Be human, not God.’ This poverty, revolting as it is to our nature, is blessed when it is accepted because it opens us to God and makes us realize our need for a Saviour. Aware that we can never find fulfillment in ourselves, we are drawn to look to him alone.”
ILLUMINATION
“First and foremost we must accept to be loved, allow God to love us, let God be the doer, the giver, let God be God to us. But how hard it is for us to that. We are always reversing the role, intent on serving God, on doing things for God, offering something to God. This is our natural bent and it must be corrected by the vision of faith.”
“Trust is the only way we can allow God to be completely good to us. Faith, trust, surrender to God: this is prayer. Everything depends on our handing ourselves over to God’s loving designs, asking for no tangible certainties.”
MERCY
“There is an enormous amount of self in what we think is our search for God, but God sets to work to purify this, and we must accept this purification, which is painful because it strikes at our most cherished possession, our spiritual achievement. By nature, we tend to be fascinated by our own selves, even in our miseries. We dare not let go of this intense self-interest, feeling that if we do we will just dwindle into nothingness. We dread the void, dread the feeling of being spiritually inadequate. So we look around, in the name of prayer for ways of diverting ourselves from simple, trusting exposure to Love.”
“I don’t want the impossible task of saving myself, of producing, from any supposed resources of my own, a faith that moves me. I have come to understand that God has done it all for us in giving us Jesus. Our part is to use him to the uttermost.”
COMMUNION
“Tenderness is a reverent, almost worshipful response to what is weak, small, vulnerable, dependant. It longs to cherish and protect the fragile preciousness and beauty of being. What human person is not flawed and fragile? True love discerns this and responds with tenderness. Such is God’s love for each one of us.”
UNION
“Faith lives nakedly exposed to God in the experience of reality, in the experience of ourselves, in the experience of prayer. It is thus that we cease to be in control by trying to be our own god, our own creator, and we accept to be human: wholly contingent, with no answer, no fulfillment in ourselves, an emptiness that looks to infinity love for its completion”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from St. Teresa of Avila
AWAKENING
“The whole foundation of prayer must be laid in humility, and the more a soul humbles itself in prayers, the more God lifts it up. The nearer we draw to God, the more this virtue should grow; if it does not, everything is lost. Humility is the right road, and if we can journey along a safe and level path, why should we want wings with which to fly?”
ILLUMINATION
“Let His Majesty guide us wherever He will. We are not our own; we belong to Him. His Majesty may do what He likes with the soul. It is His property. The soul no longer belongs to itself. It has been given over wholly to our Lord. Let it, therefore, cast its cares wholly aside for ever and ever.”
MERCY
“Now it is best for the soul which God has not raised to a higher state not to try and seek to rise higher. Let this be well considered, because all the soul will gain in that manner will be but loss. Do not demand that which you have not merited. It is very important that we do not attempt to raise our spirits ourselves if God does not raise them for us. If He does, then there will be no mistaking it.”
COMMUNION
“What the soul must do in seasons of quiet amounts to no more than proceeding gently and noiselessly into prayer. What I mean by noise is running about with the intellect, looking for many words and meanings. Everything is in motion and rush. Therefore in such times of quietude, let the soul remain in its repose. Put aside learning. The time will come when learning will be useful for the Lord. For here there is no demand for reasoning, but simply for knowing what we are and that we are humbly in God’s presence.”
UNION
“The good effects of this prayer abide in the soul for some time. Now clearly it apprehends that the fruit is not its own. The soul can then begin to share it with others without any loss to itself. It begins to show signs of its being a soul that is guarding the treasures of heaven, and it is desirous of communicating them to others. It desires to pray to God that it may not itself be the only soul that is rich in them.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Thomas Merton*
*all quotes are from Thoughts in Solitude, Shambala Press, Boston, Mass. 1959
AWAKENING
“There is a very real and very recognizable Presence of God in which we confront Him in prayer knowing Him by Whom we are known, aware of Him Who is aware of us, loving Him by Whom we know ourselves to be loved. It is not a vision face to face, but a certain presence of self to Self in which, with the reverent attention of our whole being, we know Him in Whom all things have their being. The ‘eye’ which opens to His presence is in the very center of our humility, in the very heart of our freedom, in the very depths of our spiritual nature. Contemplation is the opening of this ‘eye’.”
ILLUMINATION
“The more we are content with our own poverty, the closer we are to God, for then we accept our poverty in peace, expecting nothing from ourselves and everything from God. The value of our weakness and of our poverty is that they are the earth in which God sows the seed of desire.”
MERCY
“The more we struggle to be true, the more we discover our falsity. Is it merciful of Your light to bring inexorably, to despair? No, it is not to despair that You bring me but to humility. For true humility is, in a way, a very real despair: despair of myself, in order that I may hope entirely in You.”
COMMUNION
“I come to You like Jacob, in the garments of Esau, that is in the merits and the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ. And you, Father, who have willed to be as though blind in the darkness of this great mystery which is the revelation of Your love, pass your hands over my head, and bless me as you would your only Son. You have willed to see me only in Him, but in willing this you have willed to see me more really as I am. For the sinful self is not my real self, it is not the self you have wanted for me, only the self that I have wanted for myself. And I no longer want this false self. But now Father, I come to you in your Son’s self, for it is His Sacred Heart that has taken possession of me and destroyed my sins and it is He who presents me to you.”
UNION
“Nourished by the Sacraments and formed by the prayer and teaching of the Church, we need seek nothing but the particular place willed for us by God within the Kingdom. When we find that place, our life and our prayer both at once become extremely simple.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with further meditations from Thomas Merton*
“The spiritual life reveals itself to us only in so far as we live it.”
* all quotes are from Thoughts in Solitude, by Thomas Merton, Shambala Press, Boston, Mass., 1956
AWAKENING
The spiritual life is, first of all a matter of keeping awake. We must not lose our sensitivity to spiritual inspirations. We must always be able to respond to the slightest promptings that speak, as though by a hidden instinct, in the depth of the soul that is spiritually alive. Prayer is one of the ways by which the spiritual person keeps awake.
ILLUMINATION
If you want to have a spiritual life you must unify your life. If we try to contemplate God without having turned the face of our inner self entirely in His direction, we will end up inevitably contemplating ourselves. On the other hand, if we depend too much on our imagination and emotions, we will fabricate for ourselves our own home-made religious experience. The ‘turning’ of our whole self to God can be achieved only by deep and simple faith, enlivened by a hope which knows that contact with God is possible, and love which desires above all things to do His will.
MERCY
The surest sign that we have received a spiritual understanding of God’s love for us is the appreciation of our own poverty in the light of His infinite mercy. If we know how great is the love of Jesus for us we will never be afraid to go to Him in all our poverty, all our weakness and infirmity. Indeed, when we understand the true nature of His love for us, we will prefer to come to Him poor and helpless.
COMMUNION
“The spiritual life is the silence of our whole being in adoration before God, in the habitual realization that He is the Center to which all things tend, and to Whom all our actions must be directed. That our life and strength proceed from Him, that both in life and in death we depend entirely on Him, that the whole course of our life is foreknown by Him and falls into the plan of His wise and merciful Providence; that it is absurd to live as though without Him, for ourselves, by ourselves; that all our plans and spiritual ambitions are useless unless they come from Him and end in Him and that, in the end, the only thing that matters is His glory.”
UNION
The sacrifice that pleases God is the offering of my soul, and of other people’s souls. My silence, which takes me away from all other things, is therefore the sacrifice of all things and the offering of my soul to God. It is therefore my most pleasing sacrifice. If I can teach others to live in the same silence, I am offering Him a most pleasing sacrifice.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from A.W. Tozer*
“The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring us to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that we may enter into Him, that we may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of our hearts.”
*all quotes from The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer, Horizon Books, Harrisburg, PA, 1948
AWAKENING
We pursue God because, and only because, He has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit. “No one can come to me,” said the Lord, “except that the Father draw him”. The impulse to pursue God originates with God, but the outworking of that impulse is our following hard after Him.
ILLUMINATION
The moment the Spirit quickens us, our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That is the heavenly birth without which we cannot see the Kingdom of God. It is, however, not an end but an inception, for now begins the glorious pursuit, the heart’s happy exploration of the infinite riches of the Godhead.
God wills that we should push on into His Presence and live our whole life there. This is to be known to us in conscious experience. It is more than a doctrine to be held, it is a life to be enjoyed every moment of every day. To push into sensitive living experience into the Holy Presence of God is a privilege open to every child of God.
MERCY
O God, I have tasted your goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am conscious of my need of further grace. I confess my lack of desire O God. I want to want You more; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me your glory I pray so that I may truly know you.
COMMUNION
It is written that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout all the earth. God sees us. When the eyes of the soul looking out meet the eyes of God looking in, heaven has begun right here on this earth.
UNION
Life eternal is nothing other than that blessed regard in which You never cease to behold me, yes, even the secret places of my soul. With You, to behold is to give life.
Contemplative Liturgy
“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love, justified in happy experience by the children of the burning heart.”
with further meditations from A.W. Tozer*
*all quotes from The Pursuit of God, by A.W. Tozer, Horizon Books, Harrisburg, PA, 1948
AWAKENING
He moves us to return. This first comes to our notice when our restless hearts feel a yearning for the Presence of God and we say within ourselves, ‘I will arise and go to my Father.’
In our desire after God let us keep always in mind that God also has desire, and his desire is towards us, especially those who seek him. In them God finds a theater where he can display his presence. With them he can walk unhindered and toward them he can act like the God he is.
ILLUMINATION
The vital quality that the saints have in common is spiritual receptivity, urging them Godward. They have a spiritual awareness and they go on to cultivate it until it becomes the biggest thing in their lives. They are saints because, when they felt the inward longing of the Spirit, they did something about it. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response. As David says, ‘When you said, “Seek my face”, my heart said, “Your face O Lord, I will seek.”‘
Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted.
MERCY
Spiritual receptivity may be increased by exercise or destroyed by neglect. It is not a sovereign and irresistible force which comes upon us as a seizure from above. It is a gift from God, indeed, but one which must be recognized and cultivated as any other gift if it is to realize the purpose for which it was given.
COMMUNION
Those who have been in the Presence of God and have looked with opened eye upon His majesty have a unique quality about them. They speak with spiritual authority. They have been in the Presence of God and they report what they have seen there. They are prophets, not scribes, for the scribe tells us what he has read, but the prophet tells what he has seen.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Evelyn Underhill*
*all quotes are taken from The Spiritual Life; Evelyn Underhill, Morehouse Publ. Harrisburg, Penn., 1937
“A spiritual life is simply a life in which all that we do comes from the center, where we are anchored in God; a life soaked through and through by a sense of His reality and claim, and self-given to the great movement of His will.”
AWAKENING
The word Adoration implies the upward and outward look of humble and joyful admiration. Awe-struck delight in the splendour and beauty of God, the action of God and the Being of God, in and for Himself alone.
ILLUMINATION
To enter consciously into the spiritual life will mean time and attention given to it; a deliberate drawing-in from the circumference to the center. What is asked of us is not necessarily a great deal of time devoted to what we regard as spiritual things, but the constant offering of our wills to God, so that the practical duties which fill most of our days can become part of His order and be given spiritual worth.
“Every quality or virtue, which the Spirit really produces in us, has three distinguishing characters: Tranquility, Gentleness and Strength. All our action must be peaceful, gentle and strong. It suggests an immense depth, and an invulnerable steadiness which come from the fact that our small action is now part of the total action of God whose Spirit works always in tranquility.”
MERCY
“Fuss and feverishness, anxiety, intensity, intolerance, instability, pessimism and wobble, and every kind of hurry and worry–these are signs of the self-made and self-acting soul.”
COMMUNION
“There is no occasion for tumult, strain, conflict, anxiety, once we have reached the living conviction that God is All. All takes place within Him. He alone matters.”
UNION
“The spiritual discipline means filling our minds with ideas that point the right way, instead of ones which distract us from God and spiritual things. It means also some time, even a very short time, given to communion with Him; and perseverance in this practice. This will also involve expelling from our life those thoughts and acts which are inconsistent with our desire for communion with God.”
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Jean Vanier*
*all quotes from Community and Growth: our Pilgrimage Together, by Jean Vanier, Griffin Press Ltd, Toronto, Ont., 1979
“We are nourished in community by everything that stirs the essential in us and brings it to consciousness. This may be a word, a reading, a meeting or a suffering: all these can reawaken our deepest heart and give hope.”
AWAKENING
“Prayer is an attitude of trust in Our Father, seeking His will, seeking to be a presence of love for brothers and sisters. Each of us must know how to rest and unwind in silence and contemplation, heart to heart with God. If we do not pray, if we do not evaluate our activities and find rest in the secret part of our heart, it will be hard to live in community. We will not be open to others. We will live only from the stimuli of the present moment and we will lose sight of our priorities and of the essential.”
“Solitude and community belong together; each requires the other as do the center and circumference of a circle. Solitude without community leads us to loneliness and despair, but community without solitude hurls us into a void of words and feelings.”
ILLUMINATION
There is an internal and secret growth in spiritual
communities. This growth is a deeper rooting in prayer in Jesus. It is invisible, but it creates a tangible atmosphere wherever this growth is present: a lighter joy, a denser silence, a peace which touches hearts and leads people to a true experience of God.
MERCY
Community is the place of forgiveness. There are always words that wound, self-promoting attitudes, situations where susceptibilities clash. That is why living together implies a certain cross, a constant effort and an acceptance that comes from daily and mutual forgiveness. Our antipathy towards others is a thorn in the flesh that perhaps the Holy Spirit may someday liberate us from. But perhaps He will let us go on walking with this thorn which humiliates us and forces us to renew our efforts each day, careful not to offend again.
COMMUNION
The Eucharist links communal and personal nourishment because it is itself both at the same time. The Eucharist is celebration, the epitome of the communal feast, because in it we relive the mystery of Jesus’ gift of his own life for us. It is the time of thanksgiving for the whole community. There we touch the heart of the mystery of community.
UNION
Some people cannot see what nourishment they are and refuse to become bread for others. They have no confidence that their word, their smile, their being or their prayer could nourish others.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations on “Waiting for the Word”
“My soul waits only upon God, for all my expectation is from Him.” (Ps. 62:1)
AWAKENING
“Patience is our highest grace and blessedness. It honours God by giving Him time to have His way with us. It is the highest expression of our faith in His goodness and faithfulness. It brings the soul towards perfect rest in the assurance that God is truly carrying on His work.”
-Andrew Murray
ILLUMINATION
“Waiting on God gives Him time in His own way and divine power to come to us. It combines the deep sense of our helplessness within ourselves to work what is divinely good, with the perfect assurance that God will work out our salvation by His divine power.”
-Andrew Murray
MERCY
“More stillness of soul to realize God’s presence; more consciousness of ignorance of what God’s greater plans may be; more faith in the certainty that God has greater things to show us; more longing that He Himself may be revealed in new glory; these must be the marks of the assemblies of God’s people if they would avoid the reproach, They waited not for His counsel.”
-Andrew Murray
COMMUNION
“In patience you shall possess your souls.” To possess fully our souls is the effect of patience, made more perfect as it is less mixed with disquiet and eagerness.”
-St. Frances de Sales
UNION
“It is what we really know of God in our personal experiences, conquering the enemies within, witnessing God reigning and ruling within, revealing Himself in His Holiness and Power in our inmost being that will be of true spiritual blessing to those around us.”
-Andrew Murray
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from William Barry S.J.*
*all quotes from Finding God in All Things; A Companion to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. William A. Barry, SJ, Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1991
“At every moment of our existence God is communicating to us who God is, is trying to draw us into an awareness, a consciousness of the reality of who we are in God’s sight.”
__________________________________________________________
AWAKENING
Prayer helps us become more aware of the reality of our existence as the object of God’s communication. We are not always alert to the presence of God. Prayer heightens our awareness, it sharpens our ability to feel the ‘finger of God.’
ILLUMINATION
We are all addicted to something that keeps us from fully desiring what we most deeply want, namely God. If we allow God to lead us our deepest desires will gradually emerge.
MERCY
In the presence of Holiness we become acutely conscious of how unholy we are and of how much we are in need of forgiveness. When God reveals sin to us it is always with the purpose of moving us to amendment of life and of giving us the power to change.
We can discern that an experience is of God if it leads us forward, gives us hope, moves us toward freedom, indeed, helps us to move at all. The effects of the evil spirit are to keep us in a rut, asking unanswerable questions, leading us nowhere but to ennui and despair.
COMMUNION
Desires are not under our control. If we do not like some of our desires, we can ask God to help us to overcome them or to change them. We cannot make ourselves desire union with God or intimacy with Jesus. But we can ask for a grace that is not in our power to produce in ourselves.
UNION
We all have experiences of desiring, experiences which are also accompanied by a feeling of great well-being. These experiences are experiences of being touched by the creative desire of God who desires us into being and continues us in being. It is the deepest desire within me and can become the ruling passion in my life, if I let it.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Peter Forsyth
“Our prayer is the answer to God’s.” *
*all quotes are taken from The Soul of Prayer; Regent College Publ., Van., B.C. 1997.
AWAKENING
Prayer is the most personal thing that any of us do, the most human act in which we can engage. We are more ourselves, our true, image-of-God selves, when we pray than at any other time.
ILLUMINATION
The prayer that reaches heaven began there, when Christ went forth. It began when God turned to beseech us, in Christ. The Spirit went out with the power and function in it to return with our soul.
Most of the difficulties of prayer are our own making. We get more interested in ourselves than in God. We get absorbed in what is or is not happening in us. We must train our thinking, our imagination, our understanding to begin with God not ourselves.
In prayer we become more and more sure that He is sure.
MERCY
Not to want to pray is the sin behind any sin. And it ends in not being able to pray. Prayerlessness is an injustice and a damage to our own soul. Not to pray is not to discern life, not to discern the things that really matter, and the powers that really rule.
In Christ’s intercession for us, our prayer, broken, soiled, and feeble as it is, is caught up and made prayer indeed and power with God. His intercession prays for our very prayer, and atones for the sin in it.
UNION
The prayer within all prayer is ‘Thy will be done.’ My prayer is Thy Will. Thou didst create it in me. It is more Thine than mine.
God’s Spirit returns to Him who gave it; and returns not void, but bearing our souls with Him.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Fr. Thomas Keating
“Contemplative prayer is the world in which God can do anything. To move into that realm is the greatest adventure.”*
* all quotes from Open Heart, Open Mind., Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1991
AWAKENING
Contemplative prayer is a process of interior transformation, a conversation initiated by God. One’s way of seeing reality changes in this process. It deepens in us the knowledge that we are already free, that we have already found a place to dwell, that we already belong to God, even though everything and everyone around us keeps suggesting the opposite.
ILLUMINATION
Excessive activity has a way of becoming a drain. It also has a mysterious fascination. Like a treadmill or merry-go-round, it is hard to get off. To interrupt what you are doing in order to pray can be difficult. You need to be convinced that your time of prayer is more important than any other activity.
The experience of God usually comes as something you feel you have experienced before. God is so well suited to us that any experience of Him is a feeling of completion or well-being. What was lacking in us seems to be somehow mysteriously restored.
MERCY
Contemplative prayer is not so much the absence of thoughts as detachment from them. It is the opening of mind and heart, body and emotions, our whole being, to God.
COMMUNION
Receiving is one of the most difficult kinds of activity there is. To receive God is the chief work in contemplative prayer, the principal discipline of which is letting go.
UNION
Continuous prayer in the fullest sense of the term is present when the motivation of all our actions is coming from the Spirit. Life, in union with God, is what God wants it to be.
Contemplative Liturgy
with Advent meditations from Walter Wangerin
The Four Questions of Advent
Who is coming? Luke 1:68-73, 78-79
The word Advent is derived from the Latin adventus, which means “the approach” or “the arrival.” The verb is advenio: “I arrive. I come. I am coming.” Its observance defines not only the One who is coming, but also those who are faithfully and self-consciously waiting–the people who look forward to the coming of that One. Who is coming? Who awaits Him?
Advent is, for Christians, both the beginning and the end. It defines the times, the past and the present, as well as the future when the Blessed One will come. Who is coming?
Who awaits Him? And when will he get here?
Matthew 25: 1-13
The days of Advent are not spent in passive inaction, but in activities strenuous and profitable. Christians prepare themselves to the Lord’s arrival. They scrub and clean their lives, they examine and repair their souls–even as people generally prepare themselves to receive a visitor of ineffable importance. Who is coming? Who awaits Him? When will he get here? And how shall we prepare?
Luke 12:35-40
The Son of Man, He is coming. Jesus. That is the One. And we are the people who await Him. You and I. Since it was for us He died, we are the ones who wait in love. And since He ascended to heaven with promises to return, we wait in faith for the next and final Advent. And when will He get here? Like any New Year’s Day, it will mark both an end and a beginning. He has come, He is come, and He will be coming. And that final Advent will again be both a beginning and an end. It will be the end of this present age and the beginning of our eternal joy. No one knows its day or hour. Therefore Jesus commands us to “Watch. Stay awake. Get ready. Prepare, prepare–and watch. And finally, how shall we prepare? In these days, while yet there are days and times, how should we make ourselves ready? By meditating on His first coming–for though the future may be hidden from us the past is not, and the one can teach us the other.
COMMUNION
Mark 13:32-37
We have the advantage now of meditation: in quietness and confidence to choose the right response, and, by the grace of the present Spirit of Jesus, to practice the right preparation for the coming of the Lord in glory. So let us enter the story one more time. In this present season of Advent let us experience the infant’s Advent in the past and so make ourselves ready for the Advent of the Lord of Glory in the future.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Fr. Richard Rohr*
“If religion does not give us that sense of belonging to a sacred world of meaning, it is pretty useless.”
*all quotes are from Richard Rohr’s Hope Against Darkness: the Transforming Vision of St. Francis in an Age of Anxiety, (Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2001)
AWAKENING
Our uncertainty is the doorway into mystery, the doorway into surrender, the path to God that Jesus called ‘faith’.
The only thing that can endure deep doubt is faith. You will not allow yourselves to go into the deeper levels of doubting without, in fact, a very strong faith. Those who can endure great doubt, in my experience, have been those who rise to great faith.
ILLUMINATION
We only need to be ‘control freaks’ when we don’t believe that God is in charge or when we can’t trust God to be in charge. True religion is ready to let God be in charge, and to let God lead us into a new future that we do not yet understand, and no longer even need to understand.
MERCY
We live not just in an age of anxiety, but also in a time of primal shame. I find very few people who do not feel inadequate. We all have that terrible feeling of a fundamental unworthiness. Guilt, I am told, is about things we have done or not done, but our shame is about the primal emptiness of our very being. Not what we have done, but who we are and who we are not. Guilt is a moral question. Shame is an ontological question. It is not resolved by changing behavior as much as by changing our very self-image, our alignment in the universe.
Only the forgiven can forgive, only the healed can heal, only those who stand daily in need of mercy can offer mercy to others.
COMMUNION
Change just happens, but transformation is always a process of letting go, living in the confusing dark space for awhile, and eventually being spit up on a new and unexpected shore. You can see why Jonah in the belly of the whale is such an important symbol for many Jews and Christians.
UNION
The best ally of God is reality, not theology, not ideology, not what should be as much as what is.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from E.M. Bounds*
“Desire kindles the soul and holds it to the thing it is seeking.”*
*all quotes are from E.M. Bounds, Prayer, Bridge-Logos, 2001
AWAKENING
Desire precedes prayer, accompanies it, is followed by it. Lack of spiritual desire should grieve us, and lead us to mourn its absence. We should seek earnestly that it be given so that our praying from then on will be an expression of the ‘the soul’s sincere desire.’
It is not in our power, perhaps, to create fervency of spirit at will, but we can ask God to implant it. Then it is ours to nourish and cherish, to guard against extinction, to prevent its reduction in amount or decline in quality. It is never out of place to ask God to create within us and keep alive the spirit of fervent prayer.
Prayer must be habitual, but much more than a habit. It is duty, yet one that rises far above and goes beyond the ordinary meaning of the word. It is the expression of a relation to God, a yearning for divine communion. It is the outward and upward flow of the inward life towards its original fountain. It is an assertion of the soul’s paternity, a claiming of the daughter and sonship that links a Christian to the eternal Father.
ILLUMINATION
Persistent prayer is a mighty movement of the soul toward God. It is a stirring of the deepest forces of the soul toward the throne of heavenly grace. It is the ability to hold on, press on, and wait that expresses not a half-needed want, but the sheer necessity we have discerned.
MERCY
Prayer must come out of a clean heart and be presented and urged with the ‘lifting up of holy hands.’ It must be fortified by a life that aims unceasingly to obey God, to attain conformity to the divine law, and to come into submission to the divine will. For it is the ‘prayer of the righteous that avails much.’
COMMUNION
A life of prayer naturally leads to full consecration. It is satisfied with nothing else than an entire dedication of one’s self to God. Never are we to be contented until we are fully and entirely the Lord’s. Praying naturally leads to this act of full consent.
UNION
It takes prayer to bring a person to a consecrated life of holiness to the Lord, and it takes prayer to maintain such a life. Without much prayer, such a life of holiness will break down. Prayer helps consecrated Christians to maintain their attitude of consecration. It keeps them alive to God and aids them in doing the work to which they are called and to which they have given themselves.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from St. Frances de Sales*
“Unless your soul is continually lifted up to God, your flesh will drag it down. Therefore, you must renew your determination for the spiritual life each day.”*
*all quotes are from St. Frances de Sales’ Authentic Devotion, Shaw Books, 2002
AWAKENING
Thank God for His care for you this day. Take a serious look at your behaviour during the day. Think about specific people and places. If you think you have done something worthwhile, thank God for making it possible. If you discover some utterance, opinion, or action that is unworthy of Christ, seek God’s forgiveness and plan to correct this as much as possible.
ILLUMINATION
Inspiration is God’s activity inside us. It could be a feeling of regret or an enlivening of interest in spiritual matters. Either way it is an increasing of desire to live the devout life. If we respond positively to it, we will be blessing God’s initiative in us.
Prayer is like a stream of water that nourishes our best intentions. It is the most effective means at our disposal for the cleansing of our mind and emotion. This is because it places the first in God’s bright light and the other in God’s warm love.
MERCY
Confess with precision. Look behind every sinful action for its motive. Admit if such sins have long been a part of your life. Name the sin. Examine the motive. Admit the span of time that you have lived with this sin. This kind of MERCY will prepare you for the devout life.
The first step toward the devout life is the cleansing of our soul. Remove anything that stands in the way of your union with God. This will be a gradual process. It has been compared with sunrise, which brings light in imperceptible steps. The work of cleansing your soul will go on for a lifetime. There is no reason to be upset by our imperfections. Our perfection consists of struggling against our imperfection.
COMMUNION
You should regularly take Communion so that you can learn how to take it well. Everything takes practice. There are two types of people who need to receive Communion regularly, the perfect and the imperfect. Acknowledge that you belong to the imperfect, like a sick patient visiting a doctor.
UNION
Conclude your meditation with humble thanks and an offering of yourself to God, then gather a bouquet to take with you in the world. When people have been strolling through a beautiful garden, they sometimes pick four or five flowers to take with them through the day. They smell them from time to time to enjoy the memory of their time in the garden. When our souls have roamed in meditation through a spiritual garden, we can choose two or three ideas that seem most helpful and think about them occasionally all day long.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from St. Gregory of Nyssa*
“The bold demand of the soul that climbs the hills of desire tends towards the direct knowledge and enjoyment of God, and not merely one that comes through mirrors or reflections.” *
*all quotes are from St. Gregory of Nyssa’s From Glory to Glory, St. Vladimir’s Press, NY, 2001
AWAKENING
The kingdom of God is within us. It is not separated from our nature nor is it far from those who choose to look for it. It dwells within every one of us, ignored and forgotten, choked with the cares and pleasures of life, but is rediscovered when we turn our hearts to God once again.
For those who are advancing in the divine paths there is no other way of drawing near to God than by the intermediary of faith which does not rely on what is seen. It is only through faith that the questing soul can unite itself with the incomprehensible Godhead. Faith therefore, takes the place of that which escapes our knowledge, being by its own security, a guarantee for what is yet invisible to us.
ILLUMINATION
We should not neglect the Divine command to ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ For though it may not be possible completely to attain the ultimate and sovereign good, it is most desirable for those who are wise to have at least a share in it. We should then make every effort not to fall short of the perfection that is possible for us, and to try to come as close to it and possess as much of it as possible. For it may be that human perfection consists precisely in this constant growth towards the good.
(2Pet. 1:3-9)
Let us imagine a stream flowing from a spring and branching out at random into different channels. Now so long as it flows this way it will be entirely useless for the cultivation of the soil. Its waters are spread out too much; each single channel is small and meager, and the water, because of this, hardly moves. But if we could collect all these wandering and widely scattered channels into one single stream, we would have a full and compact waterflow which would be useful for the many needs of life. So it is with the human mind. If it spreads itself out in all directions, constantly flowing out and dispersing to whatever pleases the senses, it will never have any notable force in its progress towards God. But if the mind is confined on all sides by the banks of chastity, if it has no other outlet, it will be raised up by the very tendency of its motion towards a love of higher things. The mind will begin to be aware of the true meaning of life if it avoids trivial things.
MERCY
The true satisfaction of the soul’s desire consists in constantly going on in her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates an even greater desire for the Transcendent. The soul that is rising upwards must leave all that it has already attained as falling far short of its desire; only then will it begin to grasp something of that magnificence which lies beyond its grasp. The mistake would be to try to hold on to where we are, which would put a stop to the movement of the soul. For sin is ultimately a refusal or unwillingness to grow.
COMMUNION
It was for our sake that Jesus accepted to be born among us, we, who had lost existence by the abuse of our freedom, so that He might restore to life all that had gone astray from it. It is for this reason then that God, the Only-Begotten, has built His own tabernacle among us.
Let us be changed in such ways that we may constantly evolve towards what is better, being transformed from glory to glory, and thus always improving and ever becoming more perfect by daily growth, and never arriving at any limit of final satisfaction. For perfection consists in our never stopping in our growth or desire for Godliness.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations on Advent and the Incarnation
“Silence is so lacking in this world. It is often too noisy, which is not favorable to recollection and listening to the voice of God. In this time of preparation for Christmas, let us cultivate interior recollection so as to receive and keep Jesus in our lives.”
Pope Benedict XVI
AWAKENING
I pray that the Word of the Lord may come again today to those who are silent, and that we may hear what the Lord God says to us in our hearts. Let us silence the desires and importunings of the flesh and the vainglorious fantasies of our imagination, so that we can freely hear what the Spirit is saying. Let our ears be attuned to the voice that is heard above the vault of heaven, for the Spirit of life is always speaking to our souls.
Julian of Vezelay
Advent calls to mind the two comings of our Lord: first the coming of the desire of all nations, so long awaited and so fervently prayed for by all the patriarchs, when the Son of God graciously revealed to the world his visible presence in the flesh; the other that second coming to which we look forward no less than did our ancestors of old. He who first came to us concealed in our flesh will come again revealed in the glory which belongs to him as Lord. Of that day the psalmist sings: God will come openly. Our Lord’s first coming was indeed known only to a small number of good people, but his second will be evident to good and bad alike, as is clearly made known to us by the prophet’s announcement: All flesh will see the salvation of God.
Aelred of Rievaulx
ILLUMINATION
How blessed are those who can confidently say: My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready! Having gathered the fruit of grace from the Lord’s first coming, they will reap a harvest of salvation and glory from the second; for the first opens up the way for the second. He came to us at his first coming in order to come into us at the second.
Peter of Blois
MERCY
Christ continues to be borne to us today. Daily he allows himself to be brought forth by every believing soul. What virginity accomplished physically in the mother of the Lord when she gave birth, a conscience purified from sin and full of merits accomplishes spiritually in our inmost being.
Sedatus of Beziers
At the beginning of a new yearly cycle, the liturgy invites the Church to renew her proclamation to all the peoples and sums it up in two words ‘God comes.’ These words, so concise, contain an ever new evocative power.
Advent calls believers to become aware of this truth and to act accordingly. It rings out as a salutary appeal in the days, weeks and months that repeat: Awaken! Remember that God comes! Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, now!
Pope Benedict XVI
At the beginning of a new yearly cycle, the liturgy invites the Church to renew her proclamation to all the peoples and sums it up in two words ‘God comes.’ These words, so concise, contain an ever new evocative power.
Advent calls believers to become aware of this truth and to act accordingly. It rings out as a salutary appeal in the days, weeks and months that repeat: Awaken! Remember that God comes! Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today, now!
Let us pause a moment to reflect: it is not used in the past tense, God has come, nor in the future, God will come, but in the present, ‘God comes’. At a closer look, this is a continuous present, that is, an ever-continuous action: it happened, it is happening now and it will happen again. In whichever moment, ‘God comes.’ The verb ‘to come’ appears here as a theological verb, indeed theological, since it says something about God’s very nature. Proclaiming that ‘God comes’ is equivalent, therefore, to simply announcing God himself, through one of his essential and qualifying features: his being the God-who-comes.
COMMUNION
Perhaps the hardest thing to remember about Christmas is this. “It celebrates the incarnation, not just the nativity. The incarnation is an on-going process of salvation, while the nativity is the once-for-all-historical event of Bethlehem. God continues to take flesh in our midst, in the men and women and children who form his body today. And the birth we celebrate is not just the past historical event but Christ’s continuing birth in his members.
-Fr. Andrew Greeley
It might be easy to run away to a monastery, away from the commercialization, the hectic hustle, the demanding family responsibilities of Christmas-time. Then we would have a holy Christmas. But we would forget the lesson of the Incarnation, of the enfleshing of God–the lesson that we who are followers of Jesus do not run from the secular; rather we try to transform it. It is our mission to make holy the secular aspects of Christmas just as the early Christians baptized the Christmas tree. And we do this by being holy people, kind, patient, peaceful, loving, praying people, no matter how maddening is the Christmas rush.
-Fr. Andrew Greeley
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Paul Evdokimov*
“To hear the voice of the Word we must know how to listen to His silence and to find it in ourselves.” *
*all quotes are from Ages of the Spiritual Life by Paul Evdokimov, St Vladimir’s Press, St. Vladimir’s Press, NY, 1998
AWAKENING
The spiritual life does not come from below, from human fabrication, from our desires or longings. We do not invent it for our consolation. The spiritual life comes from above. God inaugurates it by the gift of his presence. The initiative of God who knocks is answered by the eagerness of the human being who waits with all his heart for this to happen. We hear and open the door of our soul, prostrate ourselves before this Visitor, and sit down with him at the banquet table.
ILLUMINATION
The emptiness of a roaming, uncentered spirit causes dispersion of its energies. Conversely, spiritual masters teach the silence of the heart and the recollection that is opposed to all dissipation of thought.
We go back to prayer to uncover the source of sin: to break pride and to make humility the unshakable foundation of the human spirit. The soul desires to find its origins and asks to be recreated, to allow itself to be unmade and remade by having its elements purified.
MERCY
Repentance is the ever more acute awareness of the love of God and of our inadequate response. It is not an act that can be finished, but a constant state of soul which deepens the nearer it approaches the end.
The Eastern Church conceives of salvation from a therapeutic point of view. She sees in it, before all else, a healing of death by eternal life. It avoids juridical terminology and expresses redemption itself in biological terms. It is not so much a correction of sin as it is a reparation of nature in Christ.
In the morning place your intellect in your heart and remain all day in the company of God. In other words, bring together the fragmented elements of your being, and thus regain integrity of spirit. An ancient prayer asks: “By your love bind my soul that from its many moods, a single soul may spring forth.”
COMMUNION
“Pray for those who do not know how to pray, who do not wish to do so, and especially for those who have never prayed.”
Patriarch Justinian
According to the Gospel, time is short. This world as we see it is passing away. Now that the Bridegroom has been taken away, we can no longer enjoy the world and live in the penultimate values of existence. Since Pentecost, we qualitatively live in the last times. This situation suggests a great liberation from the cares of the world in order to make our waiting active.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Julian of Norwich
AWAKENING
O Thou great Shepherd of Thy sheep, who hast sought us and found us and doth evermore hold us secure, give us grace to seek Thee, who willeth to be found, and rest in Thee in perfect trust and love.
God, out of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself: for Thou art enough for me. If I desire anything less, I find myself in want. In Thee alone I have all. To Thee be glory and honor, dominion and power, now and ever more.
ILLUMINATION
O Good Jesus, give me Thy love that I may love Thee, for I have no power to love save through that dear love that comes from Thee.
MERCY
O God, who hast made my soul Thy dwelling place, help me to know myself even as also I am known of Thee, and have mercy on me, a sinner.
Almighty and most merciful God, who seeth the contrariness of my heart and yet doth love me, cleanse me, heal me, fill me with Thyself and make me to be what Thou didst create me to be.
PREPARATION FOR COMMUNION
O Most Loving Lord, who willest us to come to Thee in perfect trust and love and with thanksgiving, fill me with Thy mercy and grace and unite my soul to Thee so that my will, my life, my all shall be hid with Christ in Thee.
COMMUNION
My dearworthy Lord, who hast made my soul Thy dwelling place and will never leave me, I ask Thee to rule me, govern me, enclose me, and make me one with Thee in perfect charity.
UNION
Lord Jesus Christ, who didst suffer great anguish on the Cross for me, grant me grace to accept with joy all the little pains and needs that come to me in this life because Thou doth count me able to share the sorrows of the world. Let my soul find rest in Thee, who art my peace and my very life
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from St. Seraphim of Sarov*
“Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved.”
St. Seraphim of Sarov
AWAKENING
O Thou great Shepherd of Thy sheep, who hast sought us and found us and doth evermore hold us secure, give us grace to seek Thee, who willeth to be found, and rest in Thee in perfect trust and love.
God, out of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself: for Thou art enough for me. If I desire anything less, I find myself in want. In Thee alone I have all. To Thee be glory and honor, dominion and power, now and ever more.
ILLUMINATION
O Good Jesus, give me Thy love that I may love Thee, for I have no power to love save through that dear love that comes from Thee.
MERCY
O God, who hast made my soul Thy dwelling place, help me to know myself even as also I am known of Thee, and have mercy on me, a sinner.
Almighty and most merciful God, who seeth the contrariness of my heart and yet doth love me, cleanse me, heal me, fill me with Thyself and make me to be what Thou didst create me to be.
PREPARATION FOR COMMUNION
O Most Loving Lord, who willest us to come to Thee in perfect trust and love and with thanksgiving, fill me with Thy mercy and grace and unite my soul to Thee so that my will, my life, my all shall be hid with Christ in Thee.
My dearworthy Lord, who hast made my soul Thy dwelling place and will never leave me, I ask Thee to rule me, govern me, enclose me, and make me one with Thee in perfect charity.
COMMUNION
One desiring salvation must always have a heart inclined towards penitence and contrition. With such a contrite spirit a person can avoid all the artful tricks of the devil, whose efforts are always directed towards disturbing the spirit of a person. By this disturbance he sows tares. But when a person struggles to have a meek heart and to keep peace in his thoughts, then are all the wiles of the enemy powerless; for, where there is peace of thought, God Himself resides.
Let us pray: And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil
They who have acquired love for God go through this life as if they did not exist. For they consider themselves strangers to all that is visible, and await with patience that which is unseen. They are wanderers and newcomers on earth, striving towards God in soul and mind.
Let us pray: For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Mother Teresa*
“To possess God, we must allow him to possess our souls.”*
*all quotes are from Mother Teresa’s Total Surrender, Servant Books, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1985.
AWAKENING
God calls all men and women to this disposition of heart; to pray always. Let the love of God take entire and absolute possession of your heart; let it become to yur heart like a second nature; let your heart suffer nothing contrary to enter; let it apply itself continually to increase your love of God by seeking to please him in all things and refusing him nothing; let it accept as from his hand everything that happens to it.
ILLUMINATION
The first step ‘to becoming’ is to will it. St. Thomas says that, “sanctity consists in nothing else than a firm resolution, the heroic act of a soul abandoning herself to God.” To resolve to be a saint means I will despoil myself of all that is not God. I will strip my heart and empty it of all created things.
Our human nature stays with us from beginning to end. We must work hard every day to conquer ourselves. We must learn to be meek and humble of heart. Let us try to give everything to Jesus: every word, every moment. Jesus, use my eyes, my ears, my feet! My resolution must be firm: to become a saint.
MERCY
One thing is necessary for us: MERCY. MERCY is nothing but humility in action. It is a place where I allow Jesus to take away from me everything that divides, that destroys. It is our humble recognition and acceptance of our sinfulness, helplessness, and utter nothingness, and the acknowledgment of our neediness before him, which expresses itself as hope in him, as an openness to receive all things from him as from our Father. Only in mercy can we come as sinners with sin, and leave as sinners without sin.
One thing Jesus asks of me: that I lean on him; that in him and only in him I put complete trust; that I surrender myself to him unreservedly. Even when all goes wrong and I feel as if I am a ship without a compass, I must give myself completely to him. I must not attempt to control God’s action; I must not count the stages in the journey he would have me make. I must not desire a clear perception of my advance upon the road, must not know precisely where I am upon the way of holiness. I have asked him to make a saint of me, yet I must leave to him the choice of the saintliness itself and, still more, the means, which lead to it.
COMMUNION
I belong to him. Because I belong to him, he must be free to use me. I must surrender completely. I must let Jesus use me without consulting me. We must “Give whatever he takes and take whatever he gives.”
UNION
Zeal for souls is the effect and the proof of true love of God. To convert and sanctify is the work of God. If we really love God, we cannot but be consumed with the desire of saving souls, the greatest and the dearest interest of Jesus.
Persuaded of our nothingness and with the blessing of obedience, we attempt all things, doubting nothing, for with God all things are possible. We allow our good God to look after the future, for yesterday has gone, tomorrow has not yet come, and we have only today to make him known, loved, and served.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from John Cassian*
“One is not far from true awareness when one begins to understand one’s ignorance. One is very close to knowledge when one clearly recognizes the questions to be asked.”*
*all quotes are from John Cassian’s Conferences, Paulist Press, 2002.
AWAKENING
Purity comes to those who are made perfect not by the words of those who teach them but rather through the virtuousness of their own acts. If your concern is to reach, by a purifying grace, the light of spiritual knowledge then be enflamed first of all by the longing for this blessedness of virtues concerning which is said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Mat. 5:8).
“When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you”. (Mat. 6:6)
We pray in our room whenever we withdraw our hearts completely from the tumult and the noise of our thoughts of our worries and when secretly and intimately we offer our prayers to the Lord. Without opening our mouths and in perfect silence we offer our petitions to the One who pays no attention to words but who looks hard at our hearts. We pray in secret when, in our hearts alone and in our recollected spirits, we address God and reveal our wishes only to Him and in such a way that the hostile powers themselves have no inkling of their nature.
ILLUMINATION
“Come to my help, O God; Lord, come to my rescue”. (Psalm 70:1)
Our prayer for rescue in bad times and for protection against pride in good times should be founded on this verse. The thought of this verse should be turning unceasingly in your heart. This is the terrified cry of someone who sees the snares of the enemy, the cry of someone besieged day and night and exclaiming that they cannot escape unless their protector comes to the rescue. If things go well for us in spirit, if there is joy in our hearts, this verse is a warning to us not to grow proud, not to get puffed up at being in a good condition which, as it demonstrates, cannot be retained without the protection of God for whose continuous and speedy help it prays. Someone forever calling out to their protector is indeed very sure of having him close by.
MERCY
Forgive us our debts as we forgive those in debt to us. Mat. 6:12
He has made a way and a route by which those praying to Him may call on Him to exercise a kindly and indulgent judgment over them. He bestows a means to soften the verdict on us. We urge Him to pardon us on account of the example of forgiveness we ourselves offer when we say ‘forgive us as we ourselves have forgiven’. Someone, therefore, having forgiven his own debtors will trust in this prayer and will be assured as they ask pardon for the sins they have committed.
COMMUNION
As God loves us with a love that is true and pure, a love that never breaks, we too will be joined to Him in a never-ending unshakable love, and it will be such a union that our breathing and our thinking and our talking will be ‘God’. And we will come at last to the goal which the Lord prayed to be fulfilled in us: ‘That they may all be one as we are one, as I am in them and you in me so that they are utterly one’ (Jn 17:22-24).
UNION
And these will be the signs of God being all that we love and all that we want. He will be all that we are zealous for, all that we strive for. He will be all that we think about, all our living, all that we talk about, our very breath. And that union of Father and Son, of Son and Father, will fill our senses and our minds as well
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from Bernard de Clairvaux
“Know yourself and you will gain a helpful fear of God. Know God and you will love God.” *
* all quotes are from Talks on the Song of Songs, by Bernard de Clairvaux 2002, Paraclete Press, Brewster, Mass.
AWAKENING
“We have escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped” (Ps. 124:7). This is the essence of spiritual contemplation. We are freed for a moment from ordinary concerns. Our perception moves beyond our immediate needs. We say with the Psalmist, “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove. I would fly away and be at rest. I would flee far away and stay in the desert. I would hurry to my place of shelter, far from the tempest and storm.” (Ps. 55:6-8)
ILLUMINATION
A prayer is sweet when only God witnesses it. It is unstained, pure, with the blush of modesty upon it. It is sincere.
MERCY
I have no desire to rush impudently into high places. I want to make progress one step at a time. Modesty brings God pleasure. Recognize your limitations and do not reach for spiritual things beyond your grasp. Fall down on the ground before Christ. Take hold of his feet. It is still to soon too even look up toward his face. Wait until you hear him say, “Your sins are forgiven.”
AFTER CONFESSION
Our own mistakes may be overwhelming, but God’s forgiveness is greater than our guilt. His mercy is greater than any sin. While it is important to be sorry for your sins, it is a mistake to be preoccupied with them. Keep God’s love in mind. This will help spare you remorsefulness. Sweeten your bitter herbs with a little honey. Remember that God’s desire is to relieve the bitterness of a broken spirit. He draws us back from despair. He comforts us and makes us stronger.
COMMUNION
“I held him and would not let him go till I had brought him to my mother’s house, to the room of the one who conceived me” (SS 3:4). Jacob wrestling with God, said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me” (Gen. 32:26). The Bride is more persistent than the patriarch. She will not let go of him at all—not even for a blessing. “I don’t want your blessing. I want you!”. “Whom have I in heaven but you? And being with you, I desire nothing on earth” (Ps. 73:25)
UNION
I feel his presence and then I remember that he was with me. But I have never been able to put my finger on the exact instant when he arrived or departed. “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (Jn. 3:8)
How then did I know he was in me? I couldn’t miss it! It affected me in an undeniable way. My heart was softened and my soul roused from its slumber. He went to work in me. He cleared and cultivated the soil of my soul. He planted and watered and brought light to dark places. He opened what was closed and warmed what was cold. It was the warmth of my heart that made me know he had completely flooded my being. Personal flaws became unimportant. Every desire was controlled. My slightest intention to do better was met with kindness and mercy. I have seen a fraction of his glory and it is awesome.
CLOSING PRAYER (read together)
My Lord, I turn to you. Help me make your great name even greater. Let your oil increase. Let it overflow among outsiders
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from the writings of William Law
“What I most of all wish for myself is a good heart that stands continually inclined towards God.”*
-William Law
*all quotes are from The Devout Life, by William Law, 2001, Continuum, London, Engl.
All our salvation consists in the manifestation of the life and spirit of Jesus Christ in our hearts. This alone is Christian redemption. This alone redeems, renews and regains the first life of God in our souls. Everything besides this is self-will, and however coloured it is, it is only our old man, following its own deeds.
ILLUMINATION
You have no other way of walking as Jesus walked or depending on him, but by wholly giving up yourself to that which he was—to patience, meekness, humbleness and resignation to God. Embrace every meekness of love and humility with the same eagerness as you would fall down at the feet of Jesus Christ, for it is he and his power of salvation who is active in you through these means.
No sooner is the finite desire of the creature in motion towards God, but the infinite desire of God is united with, and co-operates with it. When therefore the first spark of a desire after God arises in your soul, cherish it with all your care, giving all your heart to it. Get up and follow it gladly as the wise men of the East followed the star from heaven that appeared to them and led them to Jesus.
MERCY
Christ must first come as a discloser and reprover of sin. It is the infallible proof of his holy presence within you. Own his power and his presence in the proper spirit of repentance and then he who wounded will heal, he who found out the sin will take it away, and he who showed you your den of thieves will turn it into a holy temple of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
God cannot do all, until all is expected from him; and all is not expected from him until, by a true and good despair of every human help, we have no hope, or trust, or longing after anything but God.
BEFORE COMMUNION (read together)
O heavenly Father, infinite, fathomless depth of never-ceasing Love, save me from myself, from the disorderly workings of my fallen, long-corrupted nature, and let my eyes see, my heart and spirit feel and find your salvation in Christ Jesus.
AFTER COMMUNION (read together)
O God, who made me for yourself, to show forth your goodness in me, I humbly beseech you to manifest the life-giving power of your holy nature within me; help me to such a true and living faith in you, such strength of hunger and thirst after the birth, life and spirit of your holy Jesus in my soul, that all that is within me, may be turned from every inner thought, or outward work that is not your heavenly working in my soul. Amen.
UNION
Inwardly we have a seed of the Holy Spirit given into the birth of our soul, a seed that has all the riches of eternity in it and is always wanting to come to the birth in us and be alive in God. Outwardly we have Jesus Christ, who is always casting forth his enlivening beams on this inner seed, to kindle and call it forth to birth, doing that to this seed of Heaven in us which the sun in the firmament is always doing to the seeds in the earth.
Contemplative Liturgy
with meditations from the letters of Abbot John Chapman (1865-1933)
“Pray as you can, and do not try to pray as you can’t. take yourself as you find yourself, and start from there.”*
* all quotes are from Spiritual Letters,
by Abbot John Chapman, 2004, Continuum, New York, NY.
AWAKENING
The basis of everything, the support and motive power, in fact everything that counts most, is found in prayer, and prayer understood in its most vague, formless, irrational, but most tremendously real form. It seems to be nothing—waiting, wondering, dreaming—and yet, by its effects on our lives, we see it to be everything. It drives us on, and leads us to the state in which we can actually accept the realities of our faith.
ILLUMINATION
The only way to pray is to pray; and the only way to pray well is to pray much. If one has no time for this, then one must at least pray regularly. And if circumstances do not permit even regularity, then one must put up with the fact that when one does try to pray, one can’t pray—and our prayer will probably consist mostly in telling this to God.
God knows best. He knows what we do not know, which is what He means to make of us. And so He will work at us in His own way. We don’t understand what He is doing to us, so confidence in Him is necessary. It is a form of humility to put our unlimited confidence in God.
MERCY
Earlier God had helped us so that we thought we were able to unite with His will. We were grateful for this grace and expected it to continue and to increase in the same form. But it doesn’t. It continues mostly by revealing to us the many ways that we are not yet really united to God’s will. Hence this second state consists in a continual perception that we are wanting, that we are half-hearted in our faith and that we continually miss the mark of who we should be.
AFTER CONFESSION
Take your own imperfect state as God’s will and embrace it. You will get detachment from yourself only by giving yourself to God and accepting yourself as you find yourself to be. Put up with yourself and receive your own imperfections and weaknesses as the cross you have to bear. It is not easy to do, but it is in reality a perfect act of love to God.
COMMUNION
We have to be exactly in God’s will—united actively and passively with what He has arranged for us to be and to do, so that at every moment we are quite simply in touch with God because we are wishing to do what He wants of us, and to be as we find He wishes us to be. There is no other perfection than this.
UNION
The object of prayer is to arrive at loving. As for distractions, you must simply accept them as God’s will. We must resign ourselves to them. We must wish to have the prayer that God gives us and no other. A distracted prayer, a desolate prayer, a happy prayer—we must take everything as it comes. For our union with God consists in doing and accepting His will, moment by moment all through the day. Nothing else matters.
One can certainly do more to convert the world by keeping very close to God and growing in union with Him, than by any outside work, though it seems difficult to believe this at times.