Week Five - Daily Schedule
Theme: Discovering God's deeply personal and intimate love and knowledge of me.
Days One - Five
Grace/Desire: To know and hear God's voice more clearly and to see how deeply God cherishes me as I am.
Prayer Materials for the Week
- Ephesians 2:1-10: My whole life and self are God's work of art. God Himself chose to accomplish this. Sometimes I live as though I were not being called by God.
- Prayer of Consideration: The Way Things Can Be
- Genesis 22:1-19: Here is a story of a person who proved willing to give up the most precious thing in his life.
- Repetition: Look back in on the black holes where nothing happened, or ugly things, and on the volcanoes where you found love of God and light and insight.
- Isaiah 6:1-13: Isaiah finds himself summoned by the Lord God. Who am I to be called by God? I am ready to bring the Reign of God to my world.
Prayer
Almighty and ever-caring God, You are powerful to give life and to take it away. You order all things from end to end, beyond my comprehension, beyond my imagining. Your passionate hope is that every person be saved from selfishness and self-destruction. You want no one to perish, to live forever alone. Instead, You want a reign of love to rise from within our hearts, and embrace each human person and every thing on the earth. I praise You and I thank You that You teach me these things through Christ our Lord. Amen
Days Six and Seven
Grace/Desire: To know and long more deeply for the God who cherishes me and seeks to fill me with deep life.
- Prayer of Consideraton: The First Principle and Foundation
- Romans 7:14-25: Paul found the same contrariness in himself that I find in myself. It is a force in the world. But God in Christ has chosen to defeat that force.
Prayer
Lord, mighty God, You offer me so much. You give me so many days and years, so many strengths and abilities, so many rich things and splendid technological devices, and You surround me with so many whom I love. Teach me this one thing above all, Lord: How I am to choose. Then I hope to return to You as many wonders as You have poured out on me. Through Christ Jesus, My Lord and good brother. Amen.
Another Prayer
Guardian God, guide us in our daily efforts. May the changing moods of our human hearts and the limits which our failings impose on hope never blind us to you. May the faith you have nurtured in us reveal the way of love and give us the promise of peace. We need your Spirit to remove any selfishness that blurs our vision of this faith. - -adapted from a Roman Catholic prayer of worship
The Way Things Can Be
Preparing for Prayer
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.
Grace/Desire: "I ask to and hear God's voice more clearly and to see how deeply God cherishes me as I am."
Address this prayer of desire, first to God the Source of Life, then to God the Source of Wisdom and Goodness, then to God Creator and Comforter; or Father, Son and Holy Spirit; or Father, Jesus, and Mary, the mother of Jesus.
During the period of prayer
Then, enter into the guided meditation. You can do that in many different ways, and nothing constrains you to do it one way rather than another.
- One way that helps some people: Notice how each of the points presented moves you ... positively or negatively. Jot them down and return to them for further consideration.
- Another way that helps: simply spend time on those points that most move you. Using your imagination, explore what more might be revealed and speak to the Lord about what surfaces.
- And a final way: Read over the points several times moving your lips. Let each of the points gently enter your mind, consideration and heart.
Whichever of these ways you use, try to keep involved. For intimate knowledge reaches both into the one known and into the one knowing and deep love of God comes only to the one who knows himself or herself loved even while loving.
Continue, now, with the meditation.
- My life world is a welter of things - things that attract me and draw me; things that repel me and fill me with loathing.
- In some ways, I know from myself which of all things around me are valuable to me. For instance, my lungs absorb oxygen and my digestive system absorbs whatever my body needs to keep living and working.
- But I am a free person. How do I know which choices are really valuable to me? What of all the things I can have or not have will bring me to God and make me happy and helpful?
- Nothing in things themselves automatically makes them the right ones for me. No one of these alternatives can guarantee happiness for any person: to make a lot of money, to have no money at all; to have power and influence, to live as just another citizen; to marry, to live single; to be healthy, to be sickly; to go on living long years, to die very young.
- The fact is that God our Creator and Lord decides which alternative is of value to me and in me to my life world. God attends to me; God elects which of all opportunities and alternatives around me bring me to my authentic self. Some things make me more loving towards God and towards others; other things make me more selfish and less loving even towards my own self. So whether I find a thing attractive or not, I will choose only those things that lead me to God and toward my most authentic self. This seems obvious and simple, but consider what it entails: I will not have a fixed determination always to choose one alternative over others. For instance, I will not make up my mind that whatever comes along, I am going to choose the alternative that lets me make more money than any other. Can I let myself live just to stay exuberantly healthy? Can I put living in a certain place first on my list of concerns? No. I will hold myself in balance until I have decided which concrete alternative will lead me to God and to loving those around me.
- This balance can be a matter of life and death in important affairs. The lawyer who allows himself to have an unbalanced desire to be rich may seize an opportunity to take a large sum of money unjustly. The business partner who ambitions too much may deliberately spread grave lies about a colleague in order to beat him to a higher position that is opening up. Their lack of balance before good things and rich opportunities prepares the way for them to act contrary to their original purpose in life and contrary to their authentic self. And if because of this lack of balance we act in a deadly manner one time, what will stop us from doing it again and again, since we remain unbalanced, until we are truly wrecked persons?
- Obviously, this balanced stance proves enormously difficult. Yet, it seems to be necessary if I am to grow in God's love and to reach the Reign of God with all the saints. Suppose God has been hoping that I would marry, and I insist on becoming a priest and then disloyally leave? Suppose God has put a wonderful spouse in my life and I destroy our love because I choose to make it big in my career? Suppose God has hoped that I would create great wealth for the good of others, and I refuse to work all that hard and end up a night watchman? I know that I am capable of wrecking my own life, as others clearly seem to have done, by determinedly setting my own values and trying to force God to agree with me. I know what lasting harm I can do to others if I fail to live true to my self and to what God hopes in me.
- Who can achieve this wisdom and this balance on their own? I need God's power at
work in me. All things are possible to God.
Conclude the period of prayer:
Have a simple conversation with God about what happened during the prayer, thanking God, asking that the grace/desire you prayed for continues to deepen throughout the day and week. End with the "Lord's Prayer." - adapted from: The Way Things Can Be,Joseph Tetlow, S.J., "Choosing Christ in the World"
First Principle and Foundation
Theme: Discovering, more, that all things, in their own way, reflect God's goodness and love.
Grace/Desire: I want to know and long more deeply for the God who cherishes me and seeks to fill me with deep life.
Preparing for Prayer
- Open to the guided meditation for the day.
- 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.
- Ask for the Grace/Desire being sought this week: "I ask to and hear God's voice more clearly and to see how deeply God cherishes me as I am."
- Address this prayer of desire, first to God the Source of Life, then to God the Source of Wisdom and
Goodness, then to God Creator and Comforter; or Father, Son and Holy Spirit; or Father, Jesus, and mother of Jesus.
During the period of prayer
Then, enter into the guided meditation (three selections are provided). You can do that in any number of ways, and nothing constrains you to do it one way rather than another.
One way that helps some people: Notice how each of the points presented moves you - positively or negatively. Jot them down and return to them for further consideration.
Another way that helps: simply spend time on those points that most move you. Using your imagination, explore what more might be revealed and speak to the Lord about what surfaces.
And a final way: Read over the points several times moving your lips. Let each of the points gently enter your mind, consideration and heart.
Whichever of these ways you use, try to keep involved. For intimate knowledge reaches both into the one known and into the one knowing and deep love of God comes only to the one who knows himself or herself loved even while loving.
Continue with the guided meditation. Below there are three versions. Select the one that most resonates with you.
The First Principal and Foundation (version one)
The First Principal and Foundation (version two)
The First Principal and Foundation (version three)
First Principle and Foundation - Version One
- The goal of our life is to live with God forever. God, who loves us, gave us life. Our own response of love allows God's life to flow into us without limit.
- All the things in this world are gifts of God, presented to us so that we can know God more easily and make a return of love more readily.
- As a result, we appreciate and use all these gifts of God insofar as they help us develop as loving persons. But if any of these gifts become the center of our lives, they displace God and so hinder our growth toward our goal.
- In everyday life, then, we must hold ourselves in balance before all of these created gifts insofar as we have a choice and are not bound by some obligation. We should not fix our desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in us a deeper response to our life in God.
- Our only desire and our one choice should be this: I want and I choose what better leads to God's deepening his life in me.
St. Ignatius as adapted by Joseph Tetlow, S.J., Choosing Christ in the World