prayer – Page 3 – Spiritual accompaniment

Acknowledging our sins at mass: The Confiteor

July 27, 2024

At Catholic masses, we acknowledge our sins at the beginning of mass:

The Confiteor

I confess to almighty God,
and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned,
in my thoughts and in my words,
in what I have done and what I have failed to do,
through my faults, through my faults, through my most grievous faults;
therefore I ask the blessed Mary ever-virgin,
all the angels and saints,
and you my brothers and sisters
to pray for me to the Lord our God

–

We all know that we’re imperfect – part of “The human condition.” Lately, I’ve been commenting “If anyone is wondering about human sinfulness, just turn on the evening news” (i.e, human sinfulness is reported on daily!).

Our human imperfections are not viewed universally as caused by sin or by human brokenness. Some would argue that while we humans aren’t perfect, calling us sinful has an unnecessary harmful emotional effect; some counter-argue that an alternate and better route to improved well-being is that human effort is all we need to overcome our imperfections: social training, psychological and social supports, a good family environment, and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Thes things, in and of themselves, are all important and good (and, arguably, not enough).

Again…..turn on the evening news. We humans do plenty wrong. The longer I sit in pews, the more convinced I am that we’ve inherited a sinful nature (Adam and Eve, the apple….). However, this view isn’t one for keeping us down (“I’m unredeemable, horrible!”). Rather, there’s freedom. When we surrender and allow God to work in our lives, God redeems us. Allowing God to transform us is an unequivacal path to becoming better people.

Several years ago (2016), I surrendered in prayer to allow God to do whatever he wanted in me. This occurred after a re-conversion experience in which I felt God’s love….. Yet, part of me was apprehensive. “What’s God going to do to me (or in me?)?” In hindsight, this fear was ridiculous. God is love, God loves us, God wants the best for us. What exactly did I think that a loving God was going to do “to me” or “in me?” Now that I’ve had some time following that surrender, I’m seeing the result of God working in me. I am becoming happier and I am starting to be nicer to other people. Pretty good results.

As time unfolds, I am also finding deeper meaning in confessing The Confiteor at mass. Confessing publicly that we have sinned is an acknowledgement of our human imperfection and an education into who we are and Church teaching. Further, such public confession has social value. When we acknowledge together that we are all sinners, then we have to forgive one another – none of us holier (above our neighbor in the pew next to us), nor can we condemn the person in the pew next to us. Further, we call others to pray for us while we also pray for everyone else. The Confiteor is a great prayer!

Join A Parish Catechist’s Zoom call on Tuesday evening at 7:00 pm Pacific to discuss topics of faith – such as the Nicene Creed and The Confiteor. Small group sharing is one of the ways we broaden and deepen our faith. You are welcome: Zoom sign in passcode is 898 322 8983 .

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). Also, your support ($$) to help sustain this blog is welcome.

Living faith: challenging, rewarding, becoming who we should be

July 11, 2024

We occasionally meet someone who has clearly become the person they were meant to be. I know such a person right now – aspiring to be like them helps push me forward in living my faith, to put faith concepts into practice.

Truly being a person of faith isn’t merely about sitting in a pew on Sundays.

Certainly, sitting in a pew is part of “showing up.” The pews are part of where we learn – a gateway into faith, so to speak.

Whether we are truly living our faith is about whether we engage when attending church combined with what we do outside of church.

This was articulated well by Bishop Frank Schuster (Seattle): “God doesn’t want to be an app that we pull up occasionally. Rather, God wants to be our operating system that runs our lives.”

What does it mean to have God be the operating system that runs our lives? Simply put, God is only going to be the operating system that runs our lives when we assent to allow this.

Assenting to allow God be our operating system means:

Learning about God and faith, to the limited degree that we can (another Seattle-area priest, Fr. Tim Clark, verbally observed that our efforts to understand God and describe God really only “get around the edges…. Think of God as a circle, with our efforts to understand God and describe God as sometimes touching some parts of that circle).
Assenting that it’s God who is the ultimate reality, that we are junior parties to a relationship with God, that we are meant to follow God’s lead.
Developing a prayer-centered relationship with God. Just as our relationships with people require communication and social interaction, having a relationship with God requires communication and social interaction – which happens in prayer. More on prayer here.
Truly letting God into our hearts. “It is no longer I, but God who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). We often don’t do such a great job of transforming our lives on our own. Allowing God to shape us is crucial to becoming the people we are meant to be.
Loving the people around us. Christ was asked, which of the commandments is greatest? He responded in Matthew 22:34-40: “The greatest commandments are…love the Lord your God….and….love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
“Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Galatians 16:14). There’s a lot to unpack here. If we hold up everything we think and do to this standard, we can spend our entire lives getting closer to living the loving lives we are meant to live.

Interested in an improved prayer life? Reminder: faith sharing groups about our prayer lives are starting on Zoom with A Parish Catechist on Saturday, July 20 (8:00 am, Pacific Time). More info here (including a Zoom link) – we would love to have you join in!

Into the mist…..List: welcoming God into our daily lives

June 6, 2024

“The Greek Fathers liken man’s encounter with God to the experience of someone walking over the mountains in the mist: he takes a step forward and suddenly finds that he is on the edge of a precipice, with no sold ground beneath his foot but only a bottomless abyss.”

The Orthodox Way (Revised Edition, page 13), Bishop Kallistos Ware

The passage above is my favorite quote from the Orthodox tradition.

Beginning in October, 2016, I was gifted with an extended period of contemplative prayer (more of that story is told here). I didn’t have words at the time to describe what I was experiencing. Not only did I not have words to describe the experience, no human words were needed in prayer during that period. I experienced that prayer can simply be – in the type of rich abundance written about by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross – “being with God.” Later, I heard a Seattle priest talk about experiencing “an encounter with God” he had in his twenties while living in the U.S. Southwest. Ah, the words to describe my prayer experience from 2016 and extending for a time: an encounter with God.

The extended prayer encounter I experienced began with a responding to a prompting of the Holy Spirit. We all occasionally feel an emotional tug encouraging us to act. Sometimes we respond. In 2016, I responded.

I’ve come to recognize since 2016 that we can all see the opportunity to be loved by God. Related to this, we can also continually learn to better love the people around us (Matthew 22: 34-40: “The greatest commandments are…love the Lord your God….and….love your neighbor as you love yourself”).

Just as I took time to learn to do photography – and thereby recognized that a misty day was a great time for the photo of Seattle’s Green Lake shown above (with “Duck Island” in the background, where my maternal grandmother learned to swim), we can all look for opportunities for “the experience of someone walking over the mountains in the mist: he takes a step forward and suddenly finds that he is on the edge of a precipice, with no sold ground beneath his foot but only a bottomless abyss.” Those moments – those steps – are moments of grace offered to us by God. Yet, we can be open to those moments of grace.

Ways of being open to God’s grace:

Make regular time to participate in your faith tradition.
Read writings of the mystics. A few reading suggestions are offered here.
Make time to step away from busyness. Westerners, for the most part, live in “busyness”. We need to “do this, go there, run from one life experience to another.” In so doing, we ignore our inner life. We ignore any emotional ugliness or challenges that we’d rather ignore. We also lose the opportunity to resolve “the ugly stuff” and we lose the opportunity to be with God. We reduce the opportunity to notice the “emotional tugs” that are promptings of the Holy Spirit inviting us into encounters with God.
Make time for prayer and solitude.
Be reflectively observant about what goes on around you and of what comes out of prayer and solitude.

Prayer: two-way communication (interesting in an MRI)

May 21, 2024

Daily prayer is a critical component of a faith-filled life. There’s a saying: “There can be no faith without prayer” (source uncertain). Within a theistic vision of faith, a life of faith must involve a relationship with the divine. Our relationships with the people in our lives are defined by relationship: social interactions. This also applies in our faith life – there can be no spiritual life without a relationship with God. Thus, a relationship with God through prayer.

Relationships are two-way. I like the analogy of comparing prayer to a phone call (it might be Fr. Mike Schmitz, “Bible in a Year” who put forward this analogy). We don’t sustain relationships with the people in our lives by phoning someone and saying, “I’m calling to tell you X” – then hanging up. Rather, a phone call is a give-and-take, two-way interaction. Prayer is the same way. We don’t just send our communication to God in a one-way phone call. We both communicate to God in prayer and also rest in stillness to allow God to present to us.

This two-way nature of communication with God came to mind yesterday morning. I normally view prayer-based two-way-communication-with-God as “me communicating with God in a style that suits my prayer style, while God’s response is to be present with me in prayer.” That concept was “tested” yesterday morning. I was at a medical clinic getting an MRI. I knew I was going to be in the MRI tube/machine for about an hour and wouldn’t be able to move. Perhaps five minutes into the MRI, I realized “This would be a good time for prayer. I’m rendered unable to do anything other than to lay perfectly still while I’m in this machine. Prayer would be a good use of my time. ” So, I started to pray. I wasn’t thinking of imploring God’s aid; rather, this could be a good time to simply spend time with God. A brief moment after I started to pray, a perfectly audible voice asked me – plain as day – “Are you okay?”

Smile, irony….. The perfectly audible voice asking me “Are you okay” was the MRI technician speaking through the MRI’s microphone to ask if I felt physically comfortable in the machine.

“Yes,” I replied with a smile (“This is an ironic moment of communication,” I thought), “I am okay.” (….well…. I want my test results, but…yes….In this moment, I am okay…”).

There are many ways to pray:

Talking to God as we would talk to a friend (either verbally or through what’s often called “mental prayer”)
Simply being present with God, resting-in-God’s-presence as I’ve heard this called (we can do this anywhere)
Lectio Divina (a method of praying the scriptures reflectfully)
Attending church services (church is itself a form of prayer)
Religious singing (“Those who sing pray twice”)
Contemplative prayer (for example, learn about this form of prayer through an organization called Contemplative Outreach)

Interested in reading more about prayer? A couple of great books include:

Clinging: The Experience of Prayer (Emilie Griffin)

The Tradition of Catholic Prayer (The Monks of Meinrad Monastery)

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Book Review: The Gift of Peace

May 20, 2024

The Washington State Library for the Blind sent my mother an audio copy of Joseph Cardinal Bernardin’s book The Gift of Peace. My mother liked the book, so she ordered a print copy for me. I hadn’t heard of the book or the author; I wasn’t entirely sold on reading it….. Once I started reading the book….well… I’m sold.

This book of personal reflections includes reflections about prayer that resonate with my own experience and/or provide further encouragement in prayer:

“….it [an intro to a particular style of prayer] certainly introduced me to the importance of prayer and the fact that prayer is not a one-sided practice. Rather, prayer involves speaking and listening on both sides. [page four]” Blogger note (i.e., Kim Burkhardt): I find my best experience with prayer to be when I am simply quiet and allow God’s presence to be present.
“I decided to give God the first hour of my day, no matter what, to be with him in prayer and meditation where I wold try to open the door even wider to his entrance. This put my life in a new and uplifting perspective; I also found that I was able to share the struggles of my own spiritual journey with others. [page six]” Blogger note (i.e., Kim Burkhardt): I likewise found that active prayer makes it possible for me to share “the struggles of my own spiritual journey with others.”
“To close the gap between what I am and what God wants of me, I must empty myself and let Jesus come in and take over. [page 16]”
“[Jesus] wants me to focus on the essentials of his message…..Essentials ask us to to give true witness and to love others more. Nonessentials close us in on ourselves. [pages 16-17]”.

I am finding this book to be transparently, refreshingly self-revealing about the human journey in faith. A worthwhile read.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Book Review: Gerald May’s The Dark Night of the Soul

May 6, 2024

Gerald May's book: The Dark Night of the Soul

Teresa of Avila and her protege John of the Cross – two 16th-century Spaniards – are my favorite mystics and two of my favorite faith writers. When I began reading their books in 2017 or 2018, they articulated my own (more modest!) experience with contemplative prayer.

Since then, I have tried to explain to people that John of the Cross’s book Dark Night of the Soul is not about tribulations or depression. It’s not.

More recently, I came upon Gerald May’s book of the same title. Gerald May is a physician, psychiatrist, and writer of faith books). Gerald May, in his book, accessibly explains John of the Cross’s ideas in today’s language. I am grateful that he makes John of the Cross’s ideas more understandable to people than I have been able to present.

Treading into the Spiritual Depths: The (not depressing!) Dark Night of the Soul

In his book Dark Night of the Soul, John of the Cross writes about how the sometimes unviewable-to-us aspects of our inner faith journey are part of where God works within us to transform us (rather than this title being about a depressive view on things!). Attentiveness to our inner journey can allow us some small glimpse of when this (at least somewhat) unviewable aspect of our spiritual growth is being wrought within us – particularly if we have an active relationship with God in prayer.

Gerald May’s book of the same title speaks to this idea about “The Dark Night of the Soul”: “May emphasizes that the dark night is not necessarily a time of suffering and near despair, but a time of deep transition, a search for new orientation when things are clouded and full of mystery. The dark gives depth, dimension and fullness to the spiritual life.”

While John of the Cross’s book Dark Night of the Soul is not about suffering, modern day writer Gerald May does touch on the fact of suffering from a useful perspective on page nine of his book Dark Night of the Soul . His is a perspective that occurred to me in some fashion several years ago: “….suffering does not result from some divine purgation….Instead, suffering arises from the simple circumstances of life itself.”

Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross’s books are very worth reading. Gerald May’s book is also worth reading.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Surrender – a perennial need

March 23, 2024

I wrote a post in July titled Surrender in Prayer. In that post, I wrote “Despite our western ideas about individual autonomy and self-agency, us permitting God’s agency to mold and shape us is liberating. God loves us, wants good for us and our world, and and has capacity for transformational good beyond our comprehension. There is no room for a negative outcome when we allow God to work within and through us.”

Surrendering to God’s will needs to be ongoing. The people who can stay in a perpetual state of surrender to God’ work in their lives – well, some of them are saints! They get the ongoing joy found in Acts 17:28: “For it is in him that we live and move and have our being.”

I live at times in Acts 17:28 – sometimes longer periods of time, sometimes shorter. Then, there are times when I get caught up in life’s challenges, fears, etc. It happened again yesterday. I arrived home in an emotional fit about one of life’s challenges. A few weeks ago, I spoke to a priest (who reads this blog) and mentioned some kind of discomfort about another challenge – he told me that I need to follow my own advice that I write about in this blog! Hmf!! ….I was then awake at 1:30 this morning fretting about the current life challenge. Embarrassingly, it took me until 5:00 am to come back to “surrender this in prayer.”

God loves us. When we surrender, God provides us with strength and turns us into better people. “I can do al things through Christ who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:13).

I see ways in which God has made me a better person in recent years. I look forward to God continuing to transform how I live in the world – (re) surrender required on my part.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Book Review: Martin Laird’s ‘Into the Silent Land’

February 28, 2024

I was recently given a copy of Martin Laird’s Into the Silent Land: Christian Practice of Contemplation.

As a contemplative pray-er, I find this book refreshing. Rather than only being a how-to book on the mechanics of how to pray contemplatively, this is the type of contemplative prayer book I look for: a description of what happens when we do a deep dive into contemplative prayer. It is – to paraphrase a speaker I heard once – the “poetry of our lives” that demonstrates the animation of one’s prayer life when prays contemplatively. Such poetry – it seems to me – helps lead readers into the experience of contemplative prayer via surrender into what we read in the books’ text.

A few “poetry of our prayer lives” excerpts:

“Silence is an urgent necessity for us: silence is necessary if we are to hear God speaking in eternal silence; our own silence is necessary if God is to hear us” (page 2).
“This book…proceeds from an ancient Christian view that the foundation of every land is silence (Ws 18:24), where God simply and perpetually gives himself” (page 6).
“…the grace of Christian wholeness that flowers in silence….dispels (the) illusion of separation [from God]” (page 16).

This is a short book, but it takes a long time to read – its’ contents are contemplated rather than merely read. It contributes meaningfully to one’s prayer life. This is a book I will keep.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Lent in 40 days: Day One

February 14, 2024

Welcome to Lent. A Parish Catechist looks forward to journeying with you for the next 40 days!

Major liturgical seasons of the Christian year include:

Advent: four weeks of anticipating Christmas
Christmas Day: Always on December 25
Christmas Season: Christmas Day until Epiphany (January 6)
Lent: 40 days of anticipating Easter (starts on Ash Wednesday)
Easter Day: The first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox (therefore, a date between late March and late April)
Easter season: the fifty days between Easter Day and the day we celebrate Pentecost
Pentecost: The day when Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles following Christ’s Ascension

This year, the beginning of Lent (i.e., Ash Wednesday) – due to Easter being a moveable feast – coincides with Valentine’s Day (February 14).

Just as Mardi Gras famously occurs the day before Ash Wednesday – a day of plenty before we begin 40 days of fasting, prayer, and alms giving – some Catholic schools planned ahead this year to celebrate Valentine’s Day on February 13.

What kind of fasting are you planning for Lent this year? Some restaurants know to offer “Fish on Fridays” during Lent to attract fasting guests. Food is famously a way to fast during Lent. We eat less, give up foods such as no-meat-on-Fridays or giving up sugar. What matters spiritually is that we abstain from something that we personally find difficult to give up. For several years, I couldn’t give up chocolate during Lent. I had to take a look at why I was so attached to chocolate (and how that was impacting my health!). We are to attach ourselves to God, not to earthly things. For many people, reducing the use of technology (such as phones) can be an earthly thing that is hard to set aside – reducing phone usage could be a good Lenten discipline.

What kind of enhanced prayer activity are you planning for Lent this year? Prayer is about having an active relationship with God. It is famously said that “There can be no faith life without prayer.” A Parish Catechist blogged in January about the value of prayer and how to approach prayer (please feel free to give that post a read). Lent is a great time to build up a regular prayer practice.

What kind of alms-giving are you planning for Lent this year? The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) have this to say about almsgiving during Lent: “The foundational call of Christians to charity is a frequent theme of the Gospels…. During Lent, we are asked to focus more intently on ‘almsgiving,’ which means donating money or goods to the poor and performing other acts of charity. As one of the three pillars of Lenten practice, almsgiving is ‘a witness to fraternal charity’ and ‘a work of justice pleasing to God.’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2462).” There are many types of social and economic need in our communities. Please consider being charitable in a way that makes a difference in your local community!

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).

Transformation in Christ: Representation in Imagery

January 31, 2024

When I saw the iconography shown above – at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church’s chapel in Seattle – I was drawn to it. Then, drawn back to it again and again. This iconographpy depicts Anastasis: Jesus descending into Hades to retrieve Adam and Eve between his own death on Friday and his resurrection on Sunday. Compelling. I am still coming back to this imagery.

This imagery gets to the heart of Christianity. Christianity is about God’s love for us, God’s grace in our lives, our surrender to allow God to transform us into the people we are meant to be. W are meant to be God’s daughters and sons who live in God’s love and who love one another.

I had already encountered God’s loving grace – starting at an Irish-language mass in 2016 (that story is told here) – and have continued moving through a faith transformation… including when I came across the Anastasis image above. We humans surrendering to God’s transformative grace is redemptive – when we experience this, we then want to grow in faith. As a result of such experience, I am now learning to talk about God’s transformative nature (I’m such an introvert that I’m having to take workshops to “come out of my shell” and more outwardly demonstrate what I’m learning and experiencing).

More recently, I came upon French artist James Tissot’s depiction of Jesus praying alone at night on a mountaintop:

James Tissot's painting of Jesus praying

This image of the illuminated Christ is also compelling. Jesus is shown illumined on a mountain top in prayer, illumined in his relationship with God the father. Further, God transforms us through Christ. God the father transforms us – transforms our faith experience in prayer. This is an image through which I yearn to continue experiencing God’s transformative grace. How can one not want to grow in faith – connect with God’s love for us – when seeing this depiction of Christ illumined in prayer? ”It is in him that we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Prayer gets to the heart of having a faith in we have a relationship with God and allow God to turn us into the people God wants us to be. I wrote more on prayer in my recent monks-in-training post.

Kim Burkhardt blogs at A Parish Catechist and The Books of the Ages (and a member of the Association of Catholic Publishers). If you are a new visitor, it would be great to have you follow this blog (thank you!). If you know someone who would like this blog, please share it with them (thank you!). You can also support this blog by clicking here when you are going to shop on Amazon (that lands A Parish Catechist a commission on Amazon sales).