teach me to pray Progress

I have written about the initial Beginners phase. As I said, this is the place most of us spend all our life. I got a wonderful e-mail from an 80 year old sharing that same sentiment.

The struggle with becoming faithful, rooting out sin, mastering desires, establishing a discipline of prayer is ongoing. However, many faithful pray-ers eventually reach a point where they are actually doing the prayer thing regularly and with focus. [Remember, God is also at work. And the goal of prayer is communion with God so it is not about good sounding prayers but sincere prayer seeking God.] At some point a person begins not to simply do but also to understand. This is a special moment.

Enlightenment always feels like a gift. You are working hard and struggling, trying to come to grips with a problem or issue and suddenly all the pieces fall in place and you "get it,"  or get it enough to no longer feel like you are in the dark.

This is not simply the work of reading about or studying spirituality. It is something deeper which comes from being a practioner. It is knowledge in the biblical sense of the word: experience. There are no doubt a hundred different ways of talking about enlightenment. One I really like is 'having the mind of Christ.' One sees and interprets reality from His perspective.

So how do you do it?
Ask God for the gift. In most cases He will give the gift in the midst of your hard efforts.
What are the hard efforts? Here there are numerous techniques. I would like to focus on meditation. In meditation, we mentally enter into serious mind work. For example, analysis. In analysis we pound an idea with endless questions. We draw conclusions. We look for related consequences. We are critical in our thinking, pushing hard to find what assumptions are at work. This is especially helpful in meditating on a virtue (love) or an imperative (have faith in God).

Another is imaginative. We enter into another place and time. We pay attention to detail. We 'look around' and make the event real in our own head. We ask probing questions about others, their thoughts and feelings. This is an excellent way to meditate on Scripture narratives (Jesus heals a blind man).

A third is analogical. It takes a text and tries to dig past the obvious to the underlying, deeper, spiritual meaning. This is a favorite approach of the Ancients, so it is found in our Church Fathers, beginning with St. Paul. I think the Jewish midrash is also another form of this approach. In any case, one grapples with a text by finding types (Mary is Israel or the church) (wood is the cross). One also looks for connections between various texts, some of which are not so obvious.

In the days ahead I plan to do some actual work to illustrate all three. Hopefully (I pray) I will really be of some concrete use to you as I do this. God Bless!