The Taize chant was soft. Slowly the choir began to implore the Spirit to descend on the ten adults to be baptized at the Easter Vigil.
Veni, Sancte Spiritus…
I closed my eyes. The chant moved through the congregation, rising stronger. The concelebrating priests gathered around the catechumens as the assembly invoked the Holy Spirit.
Veni, Sanctae Spiritus…
Warmth. Tears. O God…
It wasn’t a prayer. It was joy. Pure joy. Amazing wonder….
The gift of understanding is infused in the soul with sanctifying grace, by which the intellect, under the illuminating action of the Holy Spirit, grasps revealed truths with penetrating and profound intuition.
The “plus” of the gift of understanding is a simple intuition of truth, a type of infused contemplation. Our intellect is incapable of seizing the infinite, even though it lives of faith. The gift of understanding surpasses our human way of comprehension and enlightens us in a divine way. By the gift of understanding we “experience” what is true, we grasp the divine mysteries with the understanding of the Spirit himself in a way that produces a profound effect in the soul. It is a swift, deep penetration which makes us understand the inner meaning of the revealed truth.
By this gift we can understand the hidden meaning of Sacred Scripture. We can grasp the spiritual realities of created things. St. Thomas stated: “In this very life, when the eye of the spirit is purified by the gift of understanding, one can in a certain way see God.” As a result, we begin to see all things through the prism of faith, almost guided by divine instinct.
Here are two ways you can dispose yourself with the help of grace for the activation of the gift of understanding:
The Holy Spirit is the friend of recollection and solitude. Jealously preserve times of spiritual rest and intentional silence. Invoke the Holy Spirit frequently.
Be faithful to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit and the movement of grace within. Avoid thoughts, words, and actions that would sadden the Holy Spirit, and second every movement of the Spirit within you until you can say with Christ: “I always do what pleases him” (John 8:29).
Prayer
O divine Spirit! I beg you with confidence to illumine me. Reveal to me the divine greatness and the divine mysteries, so that I may adore and acknowledge them. Reveal to me what you wish of me so that I may correspond with complete fidelity. O loving Spirit, sustain me in this fidelity until death. Amen.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting or even pardoning an offense. It means changing our response to the offense. Some ways to practice what I call “everyday forgiveness” are: forgive yourself, forgive the “stupid stuff” that happens every day, forgive the people and institutions that have hurt us, forgive the unmerited suffering that seems so unfair like an illness or failure. Instead of bitterness, choose to offer compassion and empathy to the person or institution or event that wronged you.
People who forgive tend to be more satisfied with their lives and to have less depression, anxiety, stress, anger, and hostility. People who hang onto grudges, however, are more likely to experience severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as other health conditions. That doesn’t mean that they can’t train themselves to act in healthier ways. We talk about a method of forgiveness that you might try.
As a young sister, I remember being deeply impressed by the prayer of Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity which was shared with us during a community retreat. I had no familiarity with the writings of this Carmelite saint who had lived in Dijon France in the early 20th century, but this most beautiful of prayers became a building block of my own spirituality from that moment to this day.
Elizabeth of the Trinity grounded her spiritual life and teaching in intimacy with the presence of the Divine Persons who live in the innermost part of our soul. God is present in us, she learned because he creates us at every moment. Through baptismal grace we become a spiritual temple in which the Holy Spirit, along with the Father and the Son, come and make their abode in us.
She wrote to a friend:
Did I tell you my name in the Carmel is Marie-Elizabeth of the Trinity? To me, this name means a special vocation. I love this mystery of the Trinity so much. It is an abyss in which I am lost. I am Elizabeth of the Trinity, that is, Elizabeth fading away, losing herself, letting herself be seized by the Three (Souvenirs, p. 70).
This special vocation became the whole meaning of her life:
This presence of God is so good! It is there, in my deepest self, in the heaven of my soul, that I love to find him, since he never leaves me. God in me, I in him, that is my life (Souvenirs, p. 69).
Have you ever wondered what to say when you pray to God? Does the idea of making an hour of Eucharistic adoration seem far beyond you? Do you wish you had a simple way of praying even in the midst of your busy day?
If we could speak with Elizabeth of the Trinity she would teach us to withdraw into the center of our soul and rest there. To simply say a few words to the Holy Spirit, such as, “Lord, the one you love is sick,” which were the words that Mary and Martha addressed to Jesus when Lazarus was dying. To quietly allow the Divine Persons to communicate with one another right there in your soul, not intruding with your own words and ideas and petitions. To bow before God who abides within you as Moses took off his shoes and knelt before the burning bush from which God spoke.
She wrote so many letters helping her friends and her mother to enter into the treasured abiding place of God within. “Make my soul…Your cherished dwelling place, Your home of rest. Let me never leave You there alone, but keep me there all absorbed in You, in living faith, adoring You.”
It belongs to the gift of wisdom to contemplate the divine. Through a special instinct and movement of the Spirit we penetrate the very life of the Trinity, as Elizabeth of the Trinity helps us understand. Those who experience the power of the gift of wisdom understand the words of the psalmist, “Taste and see how good the Lord is” (Ps 34: 9). The word taste means that there is a certain delight that is more than just feeling or excitement. There is an impulse that is truly divine that gives our hearts an ineffable joy that seems to be from heaven itself. Indeed, the gift of wisdom is surpassed only by the beatific vision which will be ours in eternity.
Souls that are under the Holy Spirit’s gift of wisdom love God because he is infinitely good and loveable. They love God for his own sake, not for any human motive of self-interest. Because they see God within them, they see God also in all things, in the smallest detail of their life, and in a special way in their neighbor. It is the gift of wisdom that allows us to see Christ in the poor, in those who suffer, in the heart even of the “enemy.” They are happy to deprive themselves, putting the interests of others before them.
When the Spirit actively operates within us with the gift of wisdom, we do not judge things from a purely natural and human point of view. When things don’t develop the way people want them to, it is not surprising that they accuse others for deliberately or inadvertently being the cause of their problems. Truly spiritual people, wise people, evaluate things, even unfortunate or contrary events, from God’s point of view and in a supernatural light, with a spirit of equanimity.
Here are two things you can do to dispose yourself for the activation of the gift of wisdom:
Make a habit of asking God to show you where he is at work in all the events of your life. Even if you cannot understand what is happening, make an act of faith that God, who is within you, holds you safe in his hands.
Make God the center of your life. Minimize things in your life that you don’t need anymore and refocus on what God wants to do with you and in you. Through acts of love for God and service to others, fan into flame a more intentional charity.
The prayer to the Trinity of St Elizabeth of the Trinity
O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me to become utterly forgetful of myself so that I may establish myself in you, as changeless and calm as though my soul were already in eternity. Let nothing disturb my peace nor draw me forth f from you, O my unchanging God, but at every moment may I penetrate more deeply into the depths of your mystery. Give peace to my soul; make it your heaven, your cherished dwelling-place and the place of your repose. Let me never leave you there alone, but keep me there, wholly attentive, wholly alert in my faith, wholly adoring and fully given up to your creative action.
O my beloved Christ, crucified for love, I long to be the bride of your heart. I long to cover you with glory, to love you even unto death! Yet I sense my powerlessness and beg you to clothe me with yourself. Identify my soul with all the movements of your soul, submerge me, overwhelm me, substitute yourself for me, so that my life may become a reflection of your life. Come into me as Adorer, as Redeemer and as Savior.
O Eternal Word, utterance of my God, I want to spend my life listening to you, to become totally teachable so that I might learn all from you. Through all darkness, all emptiness, all powerlessness, I want to keep my eyes fixed on you and to remain under your great light. O my Beloved Star, so fascinate me that I may never be able to leave your radiance.
O Consuming Fire, Spirit of Love, overshadow me so that the Word may be, as it were incarnate again in my soul. May I be for him a new humanity in which he can renew all his mystery.
And you, O Father, bend down towards your poor little creature. Cover her with your shadow, see in her only your beloved son in who you are well pleased
O my `Three’, my All, my Beatitude, infinite Solitude, Immensity in which I lose myself, I surrender myself to you as your prey. Immerse yourself in me so that I may be immersed in you until I go to contemplate in your light the abyss of your splendor!
What would it be like to encounter Jesus face to face? To witness the moment of the annunciation of the angel Gabriel to Mary? To see him walking on the water in the midst of a storm? To feel the joy of Mary Magdalene at the Resurrection?
Ignatian contemplation is a method of prayer that involves using our imagination to bring scripture to life. The Word of God comes alive when we pray in such a way that we feel ourselves to be present at an event that is occurring before our very eyes, seeing what is happening, observing how people are engaging with each other, hearing what they are saying. When we pray this way we deeply enter into the person Jesus (or Mary or St Joseph or one of the apostles), so much so that a word or a gesture from them can affect us personally, touching us in a way that changes us from this point forward. “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). 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.
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.
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. Perhaps it is a look on Jesus’ face, an attitude of Mary or Joseph, the feel of the touch of the Master as he heals, the compassion you see in Jesus’ eyes as he looks out over the crowds or the joy he feels when he watches them eating after he has multiplied the loaves, the reaction of the apostles when they hear Jesus tell them to take up their cross and follow him.
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.
For example, we know that Jesus calls us to take up the cross and follow him. We want to take up our cross and follow after him. But when faced with the cross our spontaneous feelings say, “Absolutely not!” and we end up running the other way, even though we desire to follow Jesus even to Calvary. This Gospel prayer affects us more deeply than our knowledge and what we want to do to follow Jesus. It begins to engulf us with the sentiments and spontaneous reactions of Jesus himself so that we are transformed into Jesus from the inside out. When our thoughts, our desires, and our spontaneous feelings all want the same thing, we will truly imitate Jesus at every moment of our life.
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.
As you begin to enter more deeply the mystery of the event you are contemplating, gently consider in turn with your senses of sight, hearing, tasting, and touching, the images, sounds, smells, flavors and physical feelings associated with what is occuring. You may notice that one of your senses may dominate the way that you imagine a moment in your prayer, so allow this sense to “lead” you into the events of your prayer — and toward other sense memories.
Amor Santo via Cathopic
Allow these sense images to surface in your consciousness without trying to control or interpret them as they emerge. Simply find pleasure as these images and feelings come to you and you quietly soak in the range of memories and meaningful impressions.
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. Wonder at the mercy of God as you see it pouring itself out on this earth in Christ. Deeply feel how infinitely sweet it his kindness. Ignatius would have us even use our sense of touch, ‘embracing and kissing the place where these persons tread and sit’ (Exx 124–125). 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.
Gradually you will begin to intuitively sense and affectively taste God. Even your bodily senses will take on the image of Christ himself as he teaches you how to feel as he feels in different situations, to gaze on others with the dispositions of his heart, to touch the presence of God radiating even in the most difficult situations of your life, to taste the sweetness of his grace moving within you.
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.
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.
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.
hen we’ve been hurt by others we may struggle with feelings of anger at being treated unjustly, fear of what will happen next, guilt over our part in what may have happened, and the seeming impossibility of reconciliation. And yet, as we stay up at night replaying what has happened, we may wonder at the cost of not reconciling:
The relationships broken. The difficulty of the situations we will be put in. Losing love, support, companionship, opportunity.
Have you been there? I know you have. And so have I. Many times.
In this series on forgiveness let’s find a way through the pain, learning how to navigate the swirl of inner chaos with the help of the saints, Scripture, and some spiritual activities that will make taking the leap into forgiving seem more desirable and possible.
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.
Prayer is often characterized as a conversation. A dialogue. A meeting of hearts. I believe that Ignatius, however, is hoping that as we experience the contemplative power of the Spiritual Exercises we will come to know—with a deeply felt, an affective understanding, a deep experience—how we are drawn into the unfolding of the mystery of God’s love in Christ.
A conversation or dialogue or encounter or meeting…. These are important and helpful images so that we remember that prayer is two-sided. Through them we learn that in our relationship with God we must speak and we must listen. We must give and we must receive. We must bring our lives to the table with God, so to speak, and allow him to have his way with our life. We don’t run the meeting or set the terms for the encounter. We are brought into something surprising. We discover the love we have tried to “think” ourselves into understanding when God gets into the driver seat of our relationship.
Experiencing within myself how Jesus is sensing and feeling during a situation recorded in the Gospels, shows me a new way of feeling.
Ignatius also has an image for the prayer he is hoping that we grow into as we make the Spiritual Exercises. It is called Application of the Senses. So far we have encountered this in one respect. We enter into the meditations using our five senses: we see ourselves in the mystery we are contemplating. We hear what is happening. We taste and savor the mystery that is unfolding before us. We touch and are touched.
The goal for Ignatius is not that we pray with this method, or any method, correctly. The purpose of our encounter with God in contemplation is that the text we are meditating touches us deeply, comes alive, and affects us personally so that we will choose to love and serve God more. In prayer we are transformed by God in the deepest point of our being into a more clear and perfect reflection of his own Son, the Word made Flesh, Jesus. Antonio Guillen describes it this way:
One has to bear in mind that any ‘contemplation’ already has an element of feeling that is much more prominent than in a ‘meditation.’ Whenever we take to ourselves a gospel text in such a way that we feel ourselves to be present at an event that is occurring before our eyes, ‘seeing the persons, hearing what they say and watching what they are doing’ (e.g. Exx 194), then the text becomes alive, so much so that we hear a word and see a gesture as if it affected us personally. 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).
This clearly opens up for us a new dimension to what we desire in Gospel contemplation. “The Exercises are grounded in what Ignatius calls ‘sensing and tasting things interiorly.’” This tasting of spiritual things renews our strength and shows us more deeply how to imitate Christ our Lord.
“In week two of the Exercises especially, the senses are seen as an instrument of prayer and discernment. Being present to Jesus as he acts through his own bodily senses we come to share more deeply in his human experience and self-understanding.”
I have begun to see Gospel contemplation as a time when my senses and feelings are being mentored by the Word of God. Interacting with Jesus and Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul, experiencing within myself how they are sensing and feeling during a situation recorded in the Gospels, shows me a new way of feeling, one different from the feeling informed by my egoism or selfishness. I gradually take on Jesus’ way of feeling, Mary’s way of sensing, or Joseph’s way of experiencing challenging situations.
Image Credit: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, Caravaggio (1571-1610), public domain
Touching the Sunrise 