The grace we are asking of God: a deeply felt awareness of how God in all of history and most powerfully in the Word made flesh draws us into the unfolding of the mystery of his love which always is extravagant and which is ever seeking to save us. We desire that in doing this we enter into a process of healing and conversion that we might love Jesus and follow him more intentionally, completely, and wholeheartedly.

Horizons of the Heart is inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius and my own notes from my thirty-day Ignatian retreat in 2022. See an index for the whole series.

“It is through our senses that we feel the ‘touch’ within the heart (Exx 335), and then the heart expands in feelings of happiness, peace and serenity, and in a renewal of spiritual strength, along with desires to ‘move forward’ (Exx 315, 329) (Imitating Christ our Lord with the Senses: Sensing and Feeling in the Exercises: Antonio Guillen (The Way, 47/1-2 (Jan/April 2008), 225-241). St. Ignatius mentors retreatants in this form of prayer in his Spiritual Exercises.

Preparing for Prayer

Begin by relaxing. Take a deep breath, hold it, and then let it out with a sigh. As you do this several more times, intentionally relax the muscles in your face, your shoulders, your arms, your legs. Offer a quiet prayer of gratitude. Rest in your Father’s arms. 

As we begin our contemplative prayer today we are going to focus on the way awareness of our senses and sense perceptions can be a powerful way to quiet our whole being before God. As you pray with this guide, lead longer and longer pauses for silence, stretching the outer limits of your comfort zone just a little each time. 

Begin by noticing what you hear around you…. Then notice what you hear within you…. What two things are you grateful for? 

Next, notice what you see around you…. When you look within you what do you see…. What two things are you grateful for. 

Become aware of where you are sitting. Any physical feelings. Anything you are touching such as the arms of a chair. You might reach out and touch a flower or plant, put your hands around a cup of coffee or glass of wine. What feelings accompany these actions. Physical feelings of touch. Emotions. Connection. What two things are you grateful for. 

Observe your thoughts. Do not judge them or follow them. Just observe that you are thinking. Imagine that you see Jesus on the other side of your thoughts. Or that the Father is reaching his arms out to you, as he stands on the other side of the curtains created by your thinking. As if you could turn a key and turn off the generator, just let your thoughts stop for a moment. Notice the silence, if even only for an instant. 

Settling into Prayer

Ask Jesus that every aspect of this prayer will please him and will give glory to God.

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. (Mt 2:13-14)

Slowly read the passage for your meditation once. Leave some moments of silence and then read it again with the intention of entering into the story, of observing the details of what is happening. Take some time to set the stage and picture the environment in which the story takes place.

When praying with this passage from the Gospel of Matthew my attention was drawn to the dwelling of the Holy Family in Egypt. I noticed a few things about it.

First, it was very quiet and peaceful compared to the noisy bustle outside on the street.

Second, I noticed St Joseph come back from the market with food for the family. I immediately sensed a lightness, even a joy about him. There was no heavy worrying about whether he would be there a long time, if he might miss the sign to go back, whether he might mess up his vocation as the foster-father of Jesus. There was no regret that he and Mary were no far from their family for an undetermined length of time. There was just peace, a peace that radiated from him and gave him a sense of strength. He was someone I could lean on.

Let the story expand from the few verses that are recounted in Scripture to what that would have been like for Jesus or Mary, what they would have experienced or needed or felt, how they lived these events interiorly, how they expressed themselves. With your senses immerse yourself into the event. Is there any way you can be of help to them. If so, imagine yourself entering the story through these actions. Look around for a particular moment that seems to be of greater importance to you, to catch your attention.

The “particular moment” that attracted my attention was in the evening when Mary and Joseph were sitting on the “front doorstep” (whatever that might have looked like back then!). She was leaning her head on his shoulder as they looked out at the stars. I was a little girl and a slipped down beside them on the other side of Joseph. He looked down and then pulled me close, putting his arm around me.

Ask for the grace “to know Jesus intimately, to love him more intensely, and so to follow him more closely.”

Entering into the Mystery

This deeper contemplation of Jesus in the Gospels is an apprenticeship of our feelings and senses in which we are formed in such a way that we feel with Jesus, that our feelings becomes those of Jesus, and our spontaneous reactions of personal promotion and self-protection are gradually curbed and re-invented so that we spontaneously react as Jesus does.

Entering into the mystery of what we contemplate, we humbly allow Jesus to be our Master, to educate our senses and feelings according to the pattern of his own life and teachings. It is a matter of becoming saturated with Jesus’ own way of being and feeling. It is learning how to resonate with everything Jesus resonates with, as we gain this felt understanding through our contemplation, and of rejecting whatever Jesus rejects.

I sensed to the very depths of my being how Joseph and Mary were at peace. They had no fear, no anger at their plans being changed by the Almighty, no worry about getting back to life as it was in Nazareth. They weren’t wondering when they would return, what that would look like, how to prepare. They were simply at peace.

Entering still deeper into the mystery of Christ, allow your heart to taste, to smell, to touch the infinite gentleness and sweetness of Jesus or Mary. Allow your spirit to soak up what has been felt and known in this contemplative prayer.

As you do this your mind’s activity will fade into the background, and the mystery you are intuitively contemplating will begin to take over and engulf you, planting within your spirit an inner knowledge of the Lord.

You will at some point begin to intuitively sense the difference between the way Jesus spontaneously feels, speaks, and acts in a situation and the way you yourself feel, speak, and act in similar situations in your own life.

As I sat beside them I could feel the “non-peace” within me. I’m always two steps of myself and at least three ahead of God. I have contingency plans in motion just in case. I need to be at an appointment or the airport two hours in advance to feel calm. I agonize over what is going to happen and what I should be doing…. People tell me how peaceful I am. I guess I hide it well, but next to Joseph and Mary, I see that my heart does not rest in God, in trust, in stillness.

I allowed memories to arise about how this has been a part of my life in a particular way these past three years. I compare the way I am feeling with  the way I sense Mary and Joseph feeling as we all three look up at the stars.

I see Joseph look down on me, hug me closer, then say, “Everywhere the Lord himself leads us is good.” Just that. One sentence. Then we all went back to looking into the heavens, so vast, and still, and beautiful. There was a sweetness there on the front doorstep. I soaked it in with great pleasure, seeing how beautiful Mary and Joseph are, so pliant and trusting in God’s hands. I could sense the delight God had in them. I soaked in their absolute childlike certainty that God was leading them. I liked these feelings more than my worried inner harassment.

I entered into the way Mary and Joseph used their eyes, their ears, their touch to take in the sweetness and power of a loving Father.

Rest in that awareness as Jesus helps you to resonate with what he resonates with. As you enter into his feelings and the way he uses his senses, you will gradually lose interest in your own spontaneous reactions, defenses, and self-promotions. Jesus will bring you to his way by attraction, sweetness, and beauty. He will make you feel safety, belonging, and hope.

Colloquy

Allow an image or object that encapsulates all these experiences to form in your mind. Take some time to speak with God about the meaning or significance of this object.

As I allowed the experiences of this meditation to soak into me, washing away my own spontaneous reactions with the attractive loveliness of those of St. Joseph, the image that encapsulated them all was that of a feather. A feather has no weight and thus floats gently wherever the wind takes it.

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit,” said Jesus to Nicodemus (Jn. 3:8).

I spoke with Jesus about the meaning of this image given to me in prayer. As I discerned whether to accept a request or write an article or propose an idea, I stopped and reflected on that image of the feather. How would St Joseph go about these decisions? How would he take part in meetings? What would be different if I adopted the lightness of a feather in the way I expressed myself? …

Ask Mary, Joseph and Jesus to show you one specific gift they wish to give you. Receive it and remain in stillness and quietly relaxed presence under the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Reviewing the Graces of Prayer

When you finish praying, write down the main gifts and discoveries from this time of intimate contemplation. What is one concrete thing you can do to solidify these gifts in your life.

Image credit: Thilipen Rave Kumar from Pexels