Sacred Space (Daily Office)
Something to think and pray about this week
How do I pray?
Many of us were taught as children to pray. So, if challenged, we could reel off, not without a certain pride, the Morning Offering, Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and even the Act of Contrition and the Hail, Holy Queen.
But now that we are older, prayer has perhaps become more shapeless, tattered at the edges, distracted. An older Jesuit, whom I revered, once confessed, ‘Either I’m praying all the time, or I’m not praying at all!’ For him, formal prayer and living for God had merged and become one.
So I no longer want to be asked: ‘How do you pray?’ The only discernible form I can find in my prayer comes at the beginning. The middle is a muddle, and the end can be a fade-out rather than a respectable conclusion. But I start my prayer-time by asking God ‘How do you see me?’ And I notice that I keep getting drawn back to a line in Jeremiah.‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you’ (31:3). This is the Good News, the gift that keeps me going for the day. First and foremost I am ‘the beloved of God’ (Romans 1:7).
This truth changes everything. It is impossible for me to escape such love, no matter how mediocre I have become or how deeply I have fallen. And loving others becomes a bit easier when I become aware of their deepest truth. No matter how disguised, each of them is also a beloved of God" (Irish Jesuits).
Some of you have been using Pete Scazzero's Daily Office. Once you have gone through that and are looking for another Daily Office to help you practice the presence of God, you might consider this site called Sacred Space put out by a group of Irish Jesuits. Jim Neudorf shared it with me, now I am sharing it with you.