Rummaging for God: Praying Backward Through Your Day
Do It. Take a few minutes to pray through the past 24 hours, and toward the next 24 hours, with that five-point format. Consequences
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Take a few minutes to pray through the past 24 hours, and toward the next 24 hours, with that five-point format. Consequences. Here are some of the consequences flowing form this kind of prayer. 1. There is always something to pray about. For a person who does this kind of prayer at least once a day, there is never the question: What should I talk to God about? Until you die, you always have a past 24 hours, and you always have some feelings about what's next. 2. The gratitude moment is worthwhile in itself. "Dedicate yourselves to gratitude," Paul tells the Colossians. Even if we drift off into slumber after reviewing the gifts of the day, we have praised the Lord. 3. We learn to face the Lord where we are, as we are. There is no other way to be present to God, of course, but we often fool ourselves into thinking that we have to "put on our best face" before we address our God. 4. We learn to respect our feelings. Feelings count. They are morally neutral until we make some choice about acting upon or dealing with them. But if we don't attend to them, we miss what they have to tell us about the quality of our lives. 5. Praying from feelings, we are liberated from them. An unattended emotion can dominate and manipulate us. Attending to and praying from and about the persons and situations that give rise to the emotions helps us to cease being unwitting slaves of our emotions. 6. We actually find something to bring to confession. That is, we stumble across our sins without making them the primary focus. 7. We can experience an inner healing. People have found that praying about (as opposed to fretting about or denying) feelings leads to a healing of mental life. We probably get a head start on our dream work when we do this. 8. This kind of prayer helps us get over our Deism. Deism is belief in a sort of "clock-maker" God, a God who does indeed exist but does not have much, if anything, to do with his people's ongoing life. The God we have come to know through our Jewish and Christina experience is more present than we usually think. 9. Praying this way is an antidote to the spiritual disease of Pelagianism. Pelagianism was the heresy that approached life with God as a do-it-yourself project ("If at first you don't succeed . . ."), whereas a true theology of grace and freedom sees life as response to God's love ("If today you hear God's voice . . .") A final thought. How can anyone dare to say that paying attention to felt experience is a listening to the voice of God? On the face of it, it does sound like a dangerous presumption. But, notice, I am not equating memory with the voice of God. I am saying that, if we are to listen for the God who creates and sustains us, we need to take seriously and prayerfully the meeting between the creatures we are and all else that God holds lovingly in existence. That "interface" is the felt experience of my day. It deserves prayerful attention. It is a big part of how we know and respond to God.i i Hamm,Dennis,S.J., America, Vol. __, No., Directory: CollaborativeMinistry CollaborativeMinistry -> Quiet History, Unquiet Peoples: The “Tribal Question” in Assam CollaborativeMinistry -> Forest issues, forest dwellers and emerging situations CollaborativeMinistry -> General Congregation 35 CollaborativeMinistry -> Women in electoral process of india- under representation in decision making process Download 40 Kb. Share with your friends:
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