What are you doing for Lent? Am I the first to ask?  Ash Wednesday is only two weeks from today–a date I’ve been keenly aware of because I’ve been very busy lately putting together our Ignatian Prayer Adventure.  This is an eight-week online retreat that can be completed during Lent and Easter. It’s a version of the Spiritual Exercises.  We’re using materials from The Ignatian Adventure by Kevin O’Brien, SJ.

The retreat actually begins on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday–February 19.  It will continue through Lent, concluding the week after Easter.  Eight weeks in all.

We’ve designed a retreat that you can adapt to your needs and circumstances. You can pray it every day–as much as 30-40 minutes if you have the time, or less if need be.  The Prayer Adventure is full of scripture readings, meditations, reflections, and prayers that you can use however you wish.  It follows the general arc of the Spiritual Exercises.  If you stick with it throughout the Lent-Easter season, you will experience many of the graces of Ignatius’s great retreat.

I’ll join fellow Loyola Press bloggers Paul Brian Campbell, SJ, and Vinita Hampton Wright in offering weekly reflections on An Ignatian Prayer Adventure. We’ll be doing this on our blogs, so you should be sure to subscribe to them: dotMagis, Days of Deepening Friendship, and People for Others.

I’ll have more to say about the retreat in the coming weeks.

Something to think about | Prayer is time taken out of the linear journey of our days, and it is also our most profound reality. When we pray, we move inward to our God center. Then we move out again. . . to our situation in the world. This movement into the center and out again brings about an act of transformation. This is not to say that we will come out of prayer transfigured, like Jesus on the mountain (though our prayer experience may sometimes be dramatic). Nothing so spectacular! Usually there is a subtle, gentle, almost indiscernible change in our way of being that will carry its healing, changing power out through the layers of our lived experience and infuse the Where of our lives with its Kingdom values. This happens every time we pray, whether we are aware of it or not.

Margaret Silf
Inner Compass

This week we are republishing some of the most popular posts from dotMagis.

The other day I came across a passage in a novel that brought me up short. The book is Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.  The writer describes the thoughts of a nine-year-old boy: “His father always talked to him—so he felt—as if he were addressing some imaginary boy, one of those that exist in books, but quite unlike him.  And he always tried, when he was with his father, to pretend he was that book boy.”

These sentences struck me like a thunderclap, and I wondered why.  It’s hardly a novel insight that we often pretend to be someone other than when we really are, or that people often treat us as someone we’re not.  I think the passage struck me because it captures in a few sentences the utter futility of an all-too-common human situation.  Everybody’s playing make believe.  The father has a fantasy of the son he has.  The boy pretends he is that son, knowing he’s not.

Walter Burghardt, SJ, calls prayer “a long, loving look at the real.”  He writes, “What is real? Reality, is not reducible to some far-off, abstract, intangible God-in-the-sky. Reality is living, pulsing people; reality is fire and ice.”  Reality is the real boy and the real father.  Prayer is an end to the game of let’s pretend.

Ruth Workman, a spiritual director,  describes how Ignatian prayer invigorated her prayer life:

Next we were introduced to an Ignatian practice, a prayer of imagination. I was asked to read the passage where Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me.” I was then told to engage my senses. What did I see in that scene? How did it smell? What sounds did I hear? Were there any taste or touch sensations? I was then to imagine myself in that story, participate in it as it was revealed in the Bible, and then allow my imagination to continue to unfold the action and dialogue of the story.

Until this point in my life, my prayer had been filled almost entirely with words. I had been taught the ACTS of prayer–adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication–as a teen and had continued to use this as my model of prayer, along with devotional reading. Suddenly in this Ignatian practice, Jesus and I were having a dialogue rather than my doing all the talking. I had felt like a flower that had been parched in the desert. Suddenly I was showered with sweet, refreshing water.

Here are some exercises to heighten your sense of gratitude.  They were written by my friend Vinita Wright and published in her book Days of Deepening Friendship.

Create a physical space in your life, in which you can focus on and enjoy creation. It could be a single potted plant or window box, a bird feeder, a window that gives a great view of the evening or morning sky. Try to involve all of your senses as you receive and appreciate what God has given you.

Go through a day—or through a single hour—and discipline yourself to attend to each moment as it comes and to note what is praiseworthy in that moment. Try to build this habit of dwelling completely in the moment at hand rather than in the past or future.

Identify some task you have accomplished and come up with a little celebration of it. This can be private or with friends.

Write a poem about one of your significant relationships. Make it a poem of wonder and praise.

Choose a natural process to enter more intentionally. You might try eating much more slowly and mindfully, thoroughly tasting the food. Or you could notice, over the next few nights, what your process is like for falling asleep. Allow yourself to enjoy the natural tension and release of ordinary processes in your life.

Advent begins on Sunday.  You might want to look at some of the very helpful material the team at Loyola Press has put together to help you and your family observe the season.

An Advent Retreat is a printable guide through the Advent and Christmas seasons using Ignatian contemplation and scripture readings.

You can follow an online Advent experience featuring reflections, activities, and links for every day of the season. Check that page every day for a link to that day’s post.

This page on IgnatianSpirituality.com is a complete list of Advent resources from Loyola Press and elsewhere.

Image by aharden under Creative Commons license.

Dorothy Day’s 1934 Letter to an Agnostic is republished in this week’s America Magazine.  In it, she writes about her own struggles with belief and unbelief, sounding this very Ignatian note:

We are taught that our souls never exercise just as our body does, otherwise it will never be healthy and well, and if it is not in a healthy state, of course we feel morbid. And prayer is that exercise for the soul, just as bending and stretching is the exercise of the body. It is intellectual pride, the arrogance of youth which makes the physical act of prayer difficult.

Read the whole thing here.

Rick Malloy, SJ, on what prayer is and is not:

Prayer is not a competition, or a “goal” oriented activity. To pray is to already have “won.” Prayer is much more like making love, or hitting a baseball, or learning to play a musical instrument (sometimes loudly and badly!), then it is like getting a promotion, or achieving a goal, or mastering a skill. Prayer is more like floating on water, than paddling stridently to get somewhere. Prayer is more “Letting Go” than “Holding On.” Prayer is a journey wherein we’re simply “being there” while somewhat paradoxically always being “on the road.”

Read the whole thing.

This prayer by the Jesuit saint Robert Bellarmine puts a new spin on finding God on all things:

What various powers lie hidden in plants! What strange powers are found in stones, especially magnetic stones and amber. What strength do we see in animals, such as lions, bears, bulls and elephants. How clever, although tiny, are ants, spiders, bees and flies. I pass over the power of the angels and the might of the sun and stars, which are far away from us. Finally, how great is human genius, which has invented skills such that we wonder whether nature surpasses art or art surpasses nature! Now lift up your eyes to God, my soul, and reflect on how great is the strength, efficacy, and power of the Lord your God….

Walter Ciszek, SJ, spent fifteen years in prison in the Soviet Union for doing clandestine missionary work.  He describes his prayer:

“Gradually too, I learned to purify my prayer and remove from it all the elements of self-seeking. I learned to pray for my interrogators, not so they would see things my way or come to the truth so that my ordeal would end, but because they, too, were children of God and human beings in need of his blessing and his daily grace. I learned to stop asking for more bread for myself, and instead to offer up all my sufferings, the pains of hunger that I felt, for the many others in the world and in Russia at that time who were enduring similar agony and even greater suffering.  I tried very hard not to worry about what tomorrow would bring, what I should eat or what I should wear, but rather to seek the kingdom of God and his justice, his will for me and for all mankind.

“‘Thy will be done.’  That was the key, but only slowly did I come to experience how perfect a prayer is the Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer….  The human mind could not elaborate a better pattern in prayer than the one the Lord himself gave us.

He Leadeth Me