Daily Reflection – Building Prayer Into Your Relationship
Daily Reflection – The Power of Prayer
Morning Offering – Prayer is a Surge of the Heart
“For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.”
— St. Therese of Lisieux
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Meditation of the Day – Prayer is the Duty of Every Moment
“Prayer is the duty of every moment. We ought always to pray, said our Lord. And what He said, He did; therein lay His great power. Action accompanied His words and corresponded with them. We must pray always in order to be on our guard. Our life, both of body and soul, our natural and supernatural life, is like a fragile flower. We live surrounded by enemies. Ever since man rejected the Light that was meant to show him the way, everything has become for us an obstacle and a danger; we live in the shadow of death.”— Dom Augustin Guillerand, p. 9
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Morning Offering – The Fruit of Silence is Prayer
“The fruit of silence is prayer, the fruit of prayer is faith, the fruit of faith is love, the fruit of love is service, the fruit of service is peace.”— St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta
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The Prayer Process
In this session, I am going to teach you how to pray with the Prayer Process. It is a simple process you can use every single day to guide your conversation with God. It is designed to be very simple yet deeply personal.
The Prayer Process:
1. Gratitude
2. Awareness
3. Significant Moments
4. Peace
5. Freedom
6. Others
7. “Our Father”
Minute Meditation – Working with Creation
It is in work that we find the test of our relationship to the creation because work is the question of how we will use the creation. For Wendeell Berry, work done well brings us into a wholeness and cooperation with the creation in which we can find health. Bad work destroys the connections that make life possible. For Berry good work is like a prayer—it is an act of both gratitude and return. Good work accepts the gifts of creation and uses those gifts to further their givenness. There are seeds that lie for decades in the soil, waiting for the right conditions before springing to life. Good work is that which creates the conditions for such life to burst forth from the whole of the creation.
— from the book Wendell Berry and the Given Life by Ragan Sutterfield
//Franciscan Media//
Minute Meditation – True Spiritual Wisdom
Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. We have for too long insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous. I am increasingly convinced that the word prayer, which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, is, in fact, a descriptor for inner experience. That is why all spiritual teachers mandate prayer so much. They are saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” We will understand prayer and inner experience this way throughout this book. As Jesus graphically puts it, prayer is “going to your private room and shutting the door and [acting] in secret” (Matthew 6:6). Once you hear it this way, it becomes pretty obvious.
— from the book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality by Richard Rohr
//Franciscan Media//
Morning Offering – Never Give Up Prayer
“Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.”
— St. John of the Cross
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Minute Meditation – The Cloister of the World
Clare provides the “roadmap” of prayer for evangelical life precisely because she lived under a monastic rule while ardently desiring evangelical life. To really cling to what she believed in, she had to consolidate its meaning for herself and those who followed her. The monastic path to God is quite different from the evangelical path. It emphasizes divine transcendence rather than immanence, the ascended Christ rather than the crucified Christ, spiritual union with God rather than the physical expression of divine love. The monastic quest includes the silence and solitude of the cloister to seek God whereas evangelical life, with its focus on the Incarnation, means that God is to be found in the cloister of the world.
— from the book Franciscan Prayerby Ilia Delio, OSF
//Franciscan Media//