“So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars.”
| Question to Live
What is prayer? Answer the question through the story of your life. |
| Integration Step
As you move through this week, and in your journaling, say “hello” to the day, to experiences, to memories, to grief, to hope, in a spirit of curiosity and tenderness and honesty. |
| Heart of the Matter
The invitation here is to explore the contemplative practice that is prayer, this deep spiritual and human impulse and ritual. Maybe for you this is a familiar, lifelong practice. Even if it is, give yourself a time of discovery. And as a beginning, a starting point, ponder in your journal: answer the question of what prayer is through the story of your life. What is the mother tongue and the spiritual homeland of prayer as you know it, as you’ve experienced it, if it is part of your experience, part of your culture that formed you? Part of the impulse to pray often has to do with need, and is sometimes very present in moments of crisis, urgency, and immediacy. This is honored in prayer in a distinctive way. And the recognition of need is something that brings us to a deep, common language about what it means to be human. This is also about awakening spiritual imagination. Not making things up, but really cultivating this intellectual, intuitive, creative, ritual orientation towards the formation in ourselves of courage and generosity and love, this inner/outer move that is always interwoven in spiritual life that is meaningful and worth pursuing. |
