Touching the Sunrise

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.

Entering Prayer

Offer your prayer to God, desiring that in every way it will give him glory.

Enter into one of the moments where the Gospels record Jesus praying to his Father. For instance, Jesus retiring to the mountains and spending the night in prayer. Draw near Jesus, perhaps kissing the ground upon which he is kneeling.

Imitate as nearly as you can the spiritual sensitivity of Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, in his all-night vigil before the Father… his posture… his grateful amazement… his return gift to his Father of complete surrender to him.

Assume the same posture, the same way of being, with all the way it spills over into your spiritual senses. “Taste” the sweetness of this gaze between Jesus and the Father. “Delight” in the divine communication of love that never ends between Father and Son….

End with gratitude, the gratitude Jesus shows his Father.

Entering the Story

Recall or determine what aspect or event in Jesus’ life that you will be using for your meditation.

Ask for what you desire.

Read the passage from the Gospel or simply recall this event in Jesus’ life. For example, his childhood in Nazareth, the agony in the Garden, his resurrection.

Focus your attention on Jesus. Ask him to reveal himself to you. Notice with your senses what he is experiencing in this mystery of his life.

Immersing yourself in Jesus

Re-read the passage from the Gospel, noticing how Jesus experienced that moment, how he sensed it with all his bodily as well as emotional, mental, intuitive, and spiritual senses.

Don’t try to come up with an intellectual understanding of what is happening in Jesus’ life. Abide, instead, with the Word. Remain within Jesus and his experience. Allow him to reveal to you how he is most deeply experiencing and expressing his relationship with the Father or with others in this moment.

If we were to remain at a simple explanation of Ignatius’ prayer method, it could seem that the point of Ignatian Contemplation is to simply imagine with our five senses, for example, to imagine ourselves using our senses in whatever Gospel passage we are praying with. The problem with this interpretation is that first, a person would need a vivid imagination to pray in this way, and second, this would not lend itself to the general goal of loving Jesus and following him more intentionally, completely, and wholeheartedly. Or, as Ignatius puts it, seeing more clearly, loving more dearly and following more nearly.

Ignatius was a master, instead, at a very contemporary focus on the body as a conduit for contemplation and discernment. This way of praying, as Gemma Simmonds, CJ has written, “can lead to the concretisation of whatever movements the Spirit is prompting, as we reach a deeper understanding of our own senses by experiencing and sharing how the embodied eternal Word uses his. Our imitation of Christ becomes more exact as we feel each sensation with and in him” (Thinking Faith, March 7, 2018).

We can use the senses as a means of prayer and discernment. In a deeply contemplative prayer we can be present to Jesus as he acts through his own bodily senses.

Gemma Simmonds helps us see the power of this contemplative presence:

“It helps to think how often we refer to bodily sensations in order to describe a powerful and instinctive reaction: ‘I had a gut feeling’, ‘I found that hard to swallow’, ‘it took my breath away’. We incarnate within our bodily sensations some of our strongest responses, and in the gospel we see Jesus doing the same. In the English translation of John’s Gospel, we find him deeply moved as Mary weeps for her dead brother Lazarus. The Greek verb indicates the snorting of a horse or the growling of an angry creature. It is a strong bodily reaction indicative of many possible emotions: grief, frustration, anger – a general sense of being overwhelmed by his own feelings and those of others.”

Entering still deeper into the mystery of Christ, allow your heart to taste, to smell, to touch the infinite gentleness and sweetness of Jesus. 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 you stay within Jesus, he will reveal to you how he is feeling in this event or at this point in his life.

Antonio Guillén helps us deepen this in this way:

“Now it is no longer a matter merely of seeing and listening to the scene with the imaginative senses of sight and hearing. At this stage, all the other bodily senses come into play in one’s imagination: ‘to smell and taste with the senses of smell and taste the infinite gentleness and sweetness’, so that one touches with the sense of touch, ‘embracing and kissing the place where these persons tread and sit’ (Exx 124–125). This prayer becomes more a matter of the senses and feelings, and thereby emotionally more constant” (Imitating Christ our Lord with the Senses: Sensing and Feeling in the Exercises, The Way, Jan/April 2008).

In the event or mystery of Jesus’ life that you are contemplating, enter into what is transpiring, as Ignatius says, ‘to smell and taste with the senses of smell and taste the infinite gentleness and sweetness’, so that one touches with the sense of touch, ‘embracing and kissing the place where these persons tread and sit’ (Exx 124–125).

What is it that you notice?

What in Jesus is drawing you?

What in Jesus is speaking to your life’s story right now?

What does Jesus do?

Let the mystery of Christ’s life become present to you. Take much time with this. Let your senses and his be tuned together by the action of the Holy Spirit. Let them play in harmony. Let Jesus’ interior life absorb your inner life so that you become “connatural” with him and your inner world is “taken over” at an intuitive level, being established firmly in the “inner knowledge of the Lord.”

Antonio Guillén explains it this way:

Thus as we pray, we allow the mystery of the life of Christ, which has become connatural with us and present…, to take over and engulf us. No one would deny that this exercise—something at the intuitive and not cognitive level—impregnates the soul and establishes firmly that ‘inner knowledge of the Lord.’ For now the senses and feelings have taken on the same orientation as the reason and the affective will, ‘a more intimate assimilation of what has been contemplated, a sort of impregnation, the spirit’s soaking up what has already been felt’—‘that I might the better love and follow him’ (Exx 104).

Growing in Perfect Understanding

This experience of feeling with Jesus, or enjoying this inner knowledge of the Lord, is a window into what Ignatius called “spiritual consolation.” Ignatius said consolation is when, “some interior movement in the soul causes the soul to come inflamed with love of its Creator and Lord,” it is when the soul strives to love no created thing more than the Creator of all. Saint Ignatius also calls consolation, “every increase of hope, faith, and charity, and all interior joy that calls and attracts the soul to heavenly things and to salvation.”

This prayer changes the way we perceive and experience reality. We learn how to be in Jesus and to imitate him in the way he experienced every aspect of human need and desire…

We reach more perfect understanding when we take quality time to feel with Jesus, as he reveals himself, looking and hearing, touching and tasting, in the Gospel Word. Contemplation of Jesus becomes the path to imitate Jesus.

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.

“To educate our senses and feelings, to become imbued with his way of being and feeling, of resonating with everything that made him resonate, of abhorring everything that he abhorred, of reacting to things and to people as he sed to react, to spontaneously (the goal) feel with Jesus—to be more like him [than ourselves]…” (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).

A gift to take with you

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.

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: Elfran from Cathopic

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.

Ignatius is a master as he leads us to become like unto Christ in the deepest manner possible. He understands human nature so well that like a surgeon he puts his finger precisely where we are deeply conflicted: what we know intellectually for our lives to change is opposed by the murky area of our feelings and desires.

If we were to remain at a simple explanation of Ignatius’ prayer method, it could seem that the point of Ignatian Contemplation is to simply imagine with our five senses, for example, to imagine ourselves using our senses in whatever Gospel passage we are praying with: smelling, tasting, and touching our way through the wedding feast of Cana, for instance, or smelling the Sea of Galilee and touching Peter’s boat at the call of Peter. The problem with this interpretation is that first, a person would need a vivid imagination to pray in this way, and second, this would not lend itself to the general goal of loving Jesus and following him more intentionally, completely, and wholeheartedly. Or, as Ignatius puts it, seeing more clearly, loving more dearly and following more nearly.

Ignatius was a master, instead, at a very contemporary focus on the body as a conduit for contemplation and discernment. This way of praying, as Gemma Simmonds, CJ has written, “can lead to the concretisation of whatever movements the Spirit is prompting, as we reach a deeper understanding of our own senses by experiencing and sharing how the embodied eternal Word uses his. Our imitation of Christ becomes more exact as we feel each sensation with and in him” (Thinking Faith, March 7, 2018).

We can use the senses as a means of prayer and discernment. In a deeply contemplative prayer we can be present to Jesus as he acts through his own bodily senses.

Gemma Simmonds helps us see the power of this contemplative presence:

“It helps to think how often we refer to bodily sensations in order to describe a powerful and instinctive reaction: ‘I had a gut feeling’, ‘I found that hard to swallow,’ ‘it took my breath away.’ We incarnate within our bodily sensations some of our strongest responses, and in the gospel we see Jesus doing the same. In the English translation of John’s Gospel, we find him deeply moved as Mary weeps for her dead brother Lazarus. The Greek verb indicates the snorting of a horse or the growling of an angry creature. It is a strong bodily reaction indicative of many possible emotions: grief, frustration, anger – a general sense of being overwhelmed by his own feelings and those of others.”

We can see from this that “to sense” means more than imagining with our five senses. Instead, when we pray, we are present to the way Jesus “senses” a situation. As we see in this quotation from Simmons, “to sense” includes mental as well as bodily processes, intuition and emotional feelings.

Just think of how a person responds when they are told that someone they love has died in an accident, or, conversely, when they receive into their arms a newborn child. More than noticing they see something, hear something, and touch something, their experience is visceral, intense, moving, transforming, emotional, deeply meaningful. We cannot remain coolly at their side, noticing what is happening through our five senses. No. We are drawn into their experience through sympathy and love. When we are present to Jesus as he “senses” a situation—with all the intensity in Jesus that we can see and hear and touch and taste and smell as he lives a deeply human experience viscerally, intensely, emotionally, intuitively—our feelings and desires attach themselves more closely to him, and we ultimately will make decisions based on Jesus’ values, desires, and demands.

The Spiritual Exercises certainly teach us to pray, but Ignatius says from the outset of the Exercises that their purpose is to rid us of disordered attachments and to “order our lives” (Spiritual Exercises, no 21). In this prayer we gain a deep inner knowledge of Jesus precisely in those areas that are for us the source of confusion and ambiguity: our feelings and desires. In this prayer we are present to the way Jesus’ senses the events in his life so that we gradually re-order our patterns of feelings and desires, our visceral responses and attitudes, our intuitions and emotions, on those of Jesus.

I invite you to a simple exercise I have found helpful in entering into Jesus and Mary “through sensing,” in the experiences of their life. To walk you through it I will use the passage from Scripture for the call of Peter. You can pray the same way with any event or action of Jesus recounted in the Scriptures.

Read the call of Peter as found in the Gospel of Luke:

Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Simon answered, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.” When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him (Luke 5:1-11).

Let’s choose one moment in this narrative: he saw two boats.

It would seem that Jesus had been watching the fishermen as they disembarked and were washing their nets. His attention was drawn to Peter. Yes, the crowds were there and the other fishermen, but he watched Peter. Maybe he watched for a couple hours. Maybe Jesus observed Peter over several days. What is Jesus’ gaze like? What does he see when he sees Peter?

What is Jesus thinking about Peter? What does he feel about Peter as he gets to know him from a distance? What does he begin to like about this burly fisherman? How are his feelings drawn into his Father’s pronouncement at creation: “It was very good.”

Jesus moves closer and now he can hear the conversation among the fishermen. How does Jesus listen to Peter? What does he notice? Is he listening with critical ears or with joy and esteem? Remember, the fisherman had been out all night and had caught no fish. What must that conversation among them have been like? Or was it sullen silence? Or was it exhausted banter back and forth? What was in Jesus’s heart as he listened to them? How did he viscerally react to their conversation, he who was the Word of God made flesh? Let Jesus, as he hears, reach deeply into the disordered way you yourself may listen to others, and let him re-order your life in that place.

Continue in this contemplation in this way, moment by moment.

Jesus watches Peter interact with the other fishermen. Notice what is in Jesus’ heart as he observes Peter. Notice the way he rests his eyes on Peter over a long period of time. Is he praying to his Father while he does so? Is he laughing along with their jokes? Is he sympathizing with their frustration? Is he praying for Peter? How does Jesus experience this moment on every level of his being? Emotionally? Intuitively? Spiritually? Mentally? How does he experience the wind, the sun, the waves on the Sea of Galilee? Let Jesus draw you into his experience so that you can “tune” your own experience to his. Is there a lightness to his spirit? What kind of a person is this Jesus? In time He will show you precisely those places of disorder within you, and by remaining with him he will put them in order.

Jesus walks up and talks to Peter for the first time….

Jesus takes Peter by the hand in a handshake….

Jesus walks with Peter apart from the others….

You could try praying in this way about the following subjects of meditation: how Mary rises and spends the first hours of her day; the house of Nazareth and Joseph’s workshop; the dinner table at Nazareth; the apostles around the campfire in the evening along with Jesus; the moment Mary says, Do whatever he tells you, at the wedding feast of Cana, etc.

Image by Günther Simmermacher from Pixabay

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