Spirit promptings

Repetition is one of the ways the Spirit prompts me. Usually it’s the same or similar message/theme coming at me through various often unrelated sources and people. Follow me.

Co-worker: Made the comment that he had several friends who had tried centering prayer and just got nothing from it.

Cohort in practicum: I went to a centering prayer seminar. I’ve been having 2, 20-minutes times of centering prayer a day since that seminar. She commented, “at the time I am being silence, I don’t feel like anything happens. But I have seen a difference in other ways.” (She did not explain what she meant)

Sister Virginia - spiritual director at my silent retreat: Even though Mother Teresa was dry in her prayers (for 50 years) she continued faithfully to pray. She could have rationalized away her prayer time, saying I don’t feel God or I don’t meet God through my quiet prayer, but rather on the streets and through the people. Instead she faithfully prayed.

Mother Teresa: I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is a friend of silence – we need to listen to God because it’s not what we say but what He says to us and through us that matters. . . Prayer makes the heart large enough until it can contain God’s gift of Himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive Him and keep Him as your own.

Anthony deMello: “Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?” As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning. “Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?” To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.

I am being challenged to be more faithful in my prayer. Even when it’s a struggle to sit in silence and it’s a struggle to clear the conversations in my head, and it’s a struggle for my body to be still. Whatever the cost of the struggle I know that it makes a difference in my life even if I am not aware of how.

It’s the mystery. It’s the process of how I can connect personally to God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. I may not understand it, but I believe it.