Spiritual Exercise

Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (book review)

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If you identify as one of these people, this book may be for you:

  • Contemplative
  • Meditative
  • Pursuing Spiritual Formation

Chances are the terms Centering Prayer or Welcoming Prayer are new to you. They were to me, which drew me to the book.

The first three sections of the book include 10 chapters teaching the method, tradition, and psychology of centering prayer.

The final section focuses on inner awakening and introduces welcoming prayer in chapter 13. That chapter by far was the most resourcing. This tool is meant to help surrender be an underlying attitude and practice for meeting daily life.

The welcoming prayer follows a three-step process:

  1. Focus and Sink In: Focus on how emotions or physical pain are being experienced in your body. Stay present without analyzing.
  2. Welcome: By welcoming the emotion or pain, you are not attempting to eliminate it but disarm it.
  3. Let Go: Two ways to go about this. 1) Short: “I let go of my anger,” or “I give my anger to God.” 2) Litany using the following formula: “I let go my desire for security and survival. I let go my desire for esteem and affection. I let go my desire for power and control. I let go my desire to change the situation.”

This quote sums it up quite well:

Here now, is the right place for you to wrestle before the divine face. If you remain firm, if you do not bend, you shall see and perceive great wonders. You will discover how Christ will storm the hell in you and will break your beasts. -Jacob Boehme

I don’t know about you, but I welcome the image and reality that the hell in me doesn’t have to be battled alone. I challenge you to try the welcoming prayer in the next 48 hours. Remain firm. Don’t bend. Welcome the beasts.

God Has Competition

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Here’s a common question I’ve been asked over the years: “I don’t seem to hear from God like many people say they do. Why?”

There could be several answers to that question, but allow me to answer it with a question: “What other voices in your life is God competing against?”

I believe God desires to speak to us, to communicate with us constantly. When we stop to consider who else desires to speak to us, it’s rather eye-opening, explains how important it is to lend our ear to the voices that matter.

To answer the “what other voices” question, here’s a suggestion. Get out a piece of paper or open a digital notetaking app. Make these three headings at the top: Spiritual, Physical, Digital. Then start listing the voices attempting to speak into your life under each heading.

Be brutally honest. For example, don’t avoid listing all spiritual voices that desire to speak into your life. To deny the existence and working of demonic forces actually shows they are ahead of you. Acknowledging their existence provides a means for God to speak to you as your protector and defender.

As for the physical heading, focus on human relationships. Again, be brutally honest. Include the good and the bad voices that have some level of authority in your life. List them all. This list should be pretty lengthy if you consider them all. By the way, go ahead and list yourself. You probably listen to you more than anyone else.

That third category, digital, may seem weird to consider. Basically, all things visual and audio are speaking into our lives simply by their presence. From TV to movies to apps to music to texts to emails to blogs to videos, list them all.

Finished yet? What’s that list look like? How does that help frame God’s competition?

What I have found in my listening for God is the need to silence his competition.

The fewer voices speaking the better odds He will be heard.

The fewer voices speaking the louder His voice seems.

The fewer voices speaking the easier to attune to the one that matters most.

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

Praying Your Desires

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James points out a couple of issues in prayer in chapter four.

You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. (James 4:2, CSB)

Issues: Lack of right motive and lack of asking

What if we addressed both issues simultaneously? Here’s a suggestion how:

  1. Write down your top five desires
  2. Ask God to check your motives behind each desire
  3. Edit the list as needed
  4. Then pray over the list

I did this exercise today. Here’s what I realized:

  • What I listed as my desires were not things I have regularly been praying for
  • The act of writing down my desires while asking the Holy Spirit what he thought about them made checking my motives easier and, as a result of having already invited him into the exercise, made prayer a normal, flowing, and immediate outcome

Give yourself fifteen minutes to try this exercise this weekend and see how yours goes. Let’s go after praying our desires.