Chapters 5 & 6

Sunday, March 13, 2011

CHAPTER 5: Beginning to Pray

1) Do you ever feel guilty about asking God for help? Does
the author’s advice that petitionary prayer is “natural,human, and common” (p. 105) help you feel more comfortablewith that form of prayer?

2) One revelation that Fr. Martin gained from his first retreat (pp. 105–10) is that God wanted to be in relation with him, or, as Ignatius said, that the “Creator deals directly with the creature.”
Do you believe this in your own life?

3) Which of the traditional definitions of prayer (“raising of one’s mind and heart to God,”
“God’s self-communication,” a “long, loving look at the real,” and “conversation with God”) on pp. 113–114 resonate with you?

CHAPTER 6 : Friendship with God

1) The author highlights these words from Psalm 139, “O Lord, you have searched me and known me”
(p. 122). Does it help you, or frighten you, to think about God knowing you so intimately? How do you respond to the idea of a “friendship with God?”

2) Fr. Martin notes that the more common ways of hearing God in prayer is listening carefully to emotions, insights, memories, feelings, physical feelings, desires, and incommunicable experiences. Which of these have you experienced in prayer? How do you try to listen to God in your prayer?

3) In this era of cell phones, laptops, and endless gadgetry, we are, as Fr. Martin writes, “gradually losing the art of silence” (p. 141). How can you create silence in your life?

Meeting 3/16

I will be honest, it was a powerful and intimate meeting and I was having a hard time putting it into words. But then I discussed it with Cheryl and we decided that simply saying it was intimate was enough.

We covered chapters 5 and 6 so a great deal of discussion was about prayer and what it means to have a friendship with God.

Prayer itself is such a personal idea. There are so many ways to pray but what this chapter does is open up your mind to even more ways and by using examples of others. We found, that even in our small group, there were similar and different ways of feeling the presence of God.

Great story by Fr. Martin and a typical reaction, I think!

Some members struggled with Chapter 6 (Friendship with God). The idea of God be personal to each of us is an unusual one sometimes for Catholics who are often made to feel that God is "out there" or that we have to "work" to have God be present to us. In reality, God is always present and waiting for us to "be still and know" that. So there was much discussion about what it required to actually foster the relationship. Honesty, listening, quiet and actually accepting what God may be telling you are part and parcel of creating intimacy. As Fr. Martin points out, the things you do with any friendship; time sharing, honest relation, listening are ways to deepen your relationship with your creator.

As always it was a very enriching discussion. We meet again on April 6th. If there is anything that I missed that you consider pertinent to the conversation please add by comment.