The Way Things Are

Preparing for the Period of Prayer

  1. Be aware that you are in the presence of the Living God, the One who beholds you with compassion and delight and who is relentless in seeking to bless you with all that is good.
  2. Ask for the Grace/Desire being sought this week: "That I may see more clearly the constancy and faithfulness of God's tremendous love, goodness and generosity to me.."
  3. Address this prayer of desire, first to God the Father, then to Mary, the mother of Jesus, then to Jesus, himself, or to God the Source of Life and Goodness, God the Word of Wisdom, and God the Comforter and Consoler.

During this prayer

Any part of the reading where you find tremendous meaning, and any section where you find nothing but dust and boredom - you need to return to these until you know you have done with it. Then go on to another.

Continue now with the guided meditation below.

  • Consider first that God the Lord creates all things at every moment. We tend to focus on "the Big Bang" at the very beginning, or on evolving life. But God continues to create at each moment.
  • Even as we grow and mature, God continues creating me out of nothing, momently. His passionately creative love burns at the core of all my self, my Origin.
  • God creates me in the concrete, not in general. God chose my time and place, my parents, my gifts. God keeps shaping my humanness and my personhood and myself.
  • God creates "out of love," which means that God wants to share His love, to have others to love and to be loved by. I am intelligent and free so that I can love, as God my Maker loves.
  • In calling me to live my special qualities and characteristics, God planted deep in my self an original purpose - the concrete expression of God's hopes in and for me. My life is to discover in myself that original purpose - what my concrete self "adds up to" - and to live it out.
  • If I grow to be the person God has been hoping I would become, I manifest God's power at work, God's glory. For the glory of God is a human person fully alive. If I know who God is and who I am, and live out that knowledge, I will praise God in the morning and thank God in the night, and intend to fulfill God's hopes for myself and for my life world.
  • All creatures have such an original purpose. I am so to live among created things as to reach my own, using or not using, enjoying or not enjoying others, depending on whether they help me express my original purpose.
  • Yet even in this order and harmony, the Creator courteously leaves us with freedom. We are to choose whether to keep the rightness and justness and order. Where we choose not to, we wreak havoc on the earth. God surely knows this. But God's hope has always been that humankind would live out the recognition that God always comes first, and enact that recognition in creating our life together in order and in love.
  • God's will is our peace. Not the peace of silence and death, but the quietly humming peace of a dynamic, wonderfully orderly love. This is what God hopes for on the earth.

Conclude this prayer period as suggested below.

Ending This Prayer

  1. As you are coming to the end, think about what this all means to you: to your personal history, your life world, you life, your self.
  2. Finally, end this way: consciously gather up your thoughts and turn to God our Lord. Think of God as "You." Tell God what you thought about, and feel in God's presence what you have felt. What would you give to God? What do you want of God?
  3. Conclude with a prayerful reading of Psalm 139.