Key takeaways
The test of all our prayer is this: Does this help me grow in love, or doesn’t it. (Love of God/Jesus, and/or love of neighbour)
Steps to prayer
- Step 1: realise God loves you.
- He is watching
- He is attentive to you
- He knows you, and he’s paying attention to you.
- Step 2: let Him love you.
- Don’t dismiss His love
- Don’t disqualify His love
- Don’t say we earned his love
- He loves us because of who He is, not because of who we are!
Note: prayer is not a technique. If too tired, just turn up.
Method of meditation – St. Ignatius
- Choose a Gospel passage where Jesus is interacting with people
- Engage all your senses
- What do you see?
- What do you hear?
- What do you feel/taste/smell?
And here you are with Jesus. Now, here’s what happens. This is what happens every single time, if you pray like this. It changes everything. Why? Because you get to know who Jesus is.
The story of the crucifixion is my story.
Remember the whole point of prayer is love. The whole point of the birth, life, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus was his love for you. Keep that in mind as you move forward in your time of prayer.
Every saint who ever lived prayed. You were made to be a saint, so you need to pray.
No prayer life = no personal relationship with God.
Faith = knowing God is present when turning up for prayer.
Faithfulness = showing up ourselves.
Fr. Mike advice – just show up for 15 minutes per day for the rest of your life.
Fear is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord (CCC 1831). Fear of the Lord is this: I realise there’s a God who is a person, or Trinity of persons, and he wants to be close to me. (This is the same God we worship and serve at Mass every day – angels cover their faces so they don’t see him). This is the One you will receive into your mouth in the Eucharist, and angels. Ant even look at him in the face.
Chapter 1 highlights
Personal relationship
- God’s whole plan is to bring us into a covenantal relationship – a covenant where two people give themselves to one another.
- God fulfills all the OT covenants in Jesus.
- If we want a personal relationship with God, we have to talk to God, and we need to listen to Him.
Prayer
- The only way to have this personal relationship is to pray.
- Catholics are not taught how to pray, they are taught how to repeat.
- Prayer is not a technique, not about saying the right words. It’s about communicating, and it’s personal.
- When going into prayer don’t look for feelings.
- If we treat prayer like a technique, then we will always have the “I’m too tired” words at the end of the day. This means we are trying to accomplish or prove something.
- In prayer you don’t have to accomplish or achieve, just surrender.
- As you enter into prayer, remember that you are not trying to get God’s attention. You are communing with the God who already shed his blood to get your attention!
Steps to prayer
- Step 1: realise God loves you.
- He is watching
- He is attentive to you
- He knows you, and he’s paying attention to you.
- Step 2: let Him love you.
- Don’t dismiss His love
- Don’t disqualify His love
- Don’t say we earned his love
- He loves us because of who He is!
Chapter 2 highlights
On taking Prayer personally
- Every saint who ever lived prayed. You were made to be a saint, so you need to pray.
- No prayer life = no personal relationship with God.
- Step one of taking prayer personally is knowing God is present. The second step is being present yourself.
- Step one: we have faith that God is present.
- If we’re going to pray, we need to have that conviction when we pray that God is there.
- Faith = knowing God is present when turning up for prayer.
- Step two: we have faithfulness, and we show up ourselves.
- Faithfulness = showing up ourselves.
- Fr. Mike advice – just show up for 15 minutes per day for the rest of your life.
- Why be faithful to prayer? Not because you’re getting something. We don’t get something out of every prayer.
- We pray because Jesus asks us to pray. So his presence and our presence have to meet. Our faith that he is there and our faithfulness to being there, too, have to meet.
- We’re called to be saints, and we can’t become saints unless we pray. The most important thing you can do with your day is to talk to God.
- give him fifteen minutes every day. And during those fifteen minutes, here’s what I want you to do. Look up the Gospel every day and pray with it, read it.
- When it all comes down to it, we get one life. The most important thing we can do with that life is to have a relationship with God.
Chapter 3 highlights
- Fear
- Fear of the Lord is this: I realize there’s a God who is a person, or Trinity of persons, and he wants to be close to me. He is so good and he wants to be close to me.
- Think about this. The God that we’re serving at every Mass, the God we’re worshipping every day—angels cover their faces so they don’t see him.
- This is the One that you will receive into your mouth in the Eucharist—and angels can’t even look at him in the face.
- If you fear the Lord, you’re going to love the Lord. And the more you love the Lord, the more you’re going to fear the Lord.
- Fearlessness
- If we’re going to have a personal relationship with the Lord, we also need fearlessness.
- One who fears the Lord does not fear bad news.
- If you fear the Lord, you’re going to love the Lord. And the more you love the Lord, the more you’re going to fear the Lord.
- If we’re going to have a personal relationship with the Lord, we also need fearlessness.
- One who fears the Lord does not fear bad news.
- Do you realize that as Catholics, your inheritance is to be able to come into God’s presence with fearlessness?
- True Christian fearlessness has nothing to do with bringing anything to God except your own weakness.
- St Therese – “Jesus, you know me. You know how weak I am. I’m so sorry. Look how funny I am. I’m about to see you face-to-face hours from now, and I just snapped at my sister. I’m so sorry. Please, Jesus, make up for my own weakness, because I can’t do it on my own.”
- if we want to have personal relationship, if we want it to be more than this impersonal thing, here’s what we need to do: we need to let God be God.
- So often we come before God as if we are saying, “God, you don’t know how bad I am.” And he stops us and says, “Stop. You don’t know how good I am.”
- To be overwhelmed by God is to say, “God, I don’t have anything to give, but you’re so good. I’m going to stand here. Unless you put the robe on me, I don’t have anything to offer. God, I’m going to stand here and let you put a ring on my finger. I’m going to stand here as long as you love me.”
- The infinite, unfathomable, omnipotent Creator of the universe has welcomed you into his presence and entered into communion with us, so we truly have nothing to fear in this life. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (see Romans 8:37)! If we truly “fear” the Lord, we need not fear anything else, even our own weakness. As you allow your fear of the Lord to set aside all other fears in prayer, meditate on Hebrews 4:16: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.”
- The infinite, unfathomable, omnipotent Creator of the universe has welcomed you into his presence and entered into communion with us, so we truly have nothing to fear in this life. Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ (see Romans 8:37)! If we truly “fear” the Lord, we need not fear anything else, even our own weakness. As you allow your fear of the Lord to set aside all other fears in prayer, meditate on Hebrews 4:16: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.”
Chapter 4 highlights
we have to realize there is a tremendous difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus.
He is filled with joy because he knows Jesus, he doesn’t just know about him. So we must pray.
These three elements of the desert are part of the battle of prayer. They are three elements of becoming a mature Christian: the dryness, the distractions, and the discouragement.
Prayer is a battle
- One of the things it says is that “prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part” (CCC 2725). It’s a gift of grace. So that means God does it; he’s the giver of the gift. He invites us to this prayer. And prayer is a determined response on our part. We have to fight to do it. I love the next line: “Prayer always presupposes effort.”
- Prayer is a battle. It always presupposes effort.
- We talked about how the first step of prayer is knowing God loves you and the second step is letting him love you. I thought that letting him love me would be like slipping into the hot tub, that the radiation of the Lord’s presence would be like warm water.
- I realized that actually prayer is less like slipping into a hot tub and more like jumping in the pool and doing laps.
- the reason why prayer is a battle is because God wants maturity for us, and maturity always passes through the desert.
The desert
- Why does God lead you into the desert? Because the desert purifies your heart.
- This is why God leads us into the desert. It’s why we have to go into the dryness: so we realize that those things that we think will make us happy don’t make us happy. Those things are not what our hearts were made for. Prayer is a battlefield for the heart.
- So why does God lead us into the desert? Why does maturity pass through the desert and through dryness and difficulty? Because it has to. Because if God doesn’t take away some of those things that make prayer easy, we will not love him for himself, and instead we’ll just love the stuff he does for us.
- So when you experience dryness, that doesn’t mean you did something wrong. It means that God’s saying, “Listen. I’m going to purify your heart. I’m going to let you love me for my own sake, not for the gifts that I give.”
- The wilderness, the desert, is where you will be made into a saint. The wilderness, the desert, is where God leads you to win the battle for your heart.
Distractions
- Part of the battle of prayer is dryness, and another part of the battle is distractions.
- When we have distractions in prayer, a question we can ask is, Have I invited these distractions into my life? Did I do this to myself? Because sometimes we do that to ourselves.
- Sometimes, we do this, don’t we? Right before we go into prayer, we feed our minds with all these different thoughts and therefore enter into prayer completely distracted. So one thing we can ask ourselves when we’re battling with distraction in prayer is, “Wait, did I just do that to myself?”
- So the next time you feel distracted in prayer, ask yourself, Have I brought this into my life? What do those distractions reveal?
Discouragement
- In the battle of prayer, we have dryness, we have distractions, and we also have our own vulnerabilities. That’s the third difficulty in prayer—our wounds.
- realize that sometimes God lets you endure the discouragement. He lets you live with the wounds. Why? Because sometimes, God wants your heart more than he wants your healing. And sometimes, it’s those discouragements that lead you toward him more than ever.
Chapter 5 highlights
We need to know Jesus, not just know about him.
Method of meditation – St. Ignatius
- Choose a Gospel passage where Jesus is interacting with people
- Engage all your senses
- What do you see?
- What do you hear?
- What do you feel/taste/smell?
And here you are with Jesus. Now, here’s what happens. This is what happens every single time, if you pray like this. It changes everything. Why? Because you get to know who Jesus is.
I promise you, if you do this, if you pray like this, the days going to come years from now when you say, “Man, ever since I started praying like this, my life has never been the same. I don’t just know about jesus – I know him. I don’t just love the idea of Jesus – I love him”.
The whole point is love. The point of praying is not stringing together beautiful ideas. It’s not having great insight into God. It’s not just knowing more about God. The test of all our prayer is this: Does this help me grow in love, or doesn’t it.
The story of the crucifix
Mel Gibson makes an appearance in the Passion of the Christ, but only his hands. He is the one driving the nails into Jesus’s hands and feet. That’s the only appearance that Mel Gibson makes, and he said it’s because that’s the only contribution he had to the story.
The story of the crucifix is completely personal. But the only part I contributed to the whole story is that I drove in the nails and I crucified my God.
As often as:
- I reached out to take something that didn’t belong to me, I nailed his hands to the cross, so he couldn’t reach out and take anything he wanted
- I crowned myself and said “you know I’m going to live my own prideful life. I’m going to do my own thing in vanity”, I put a crown of thorns on my god, on my king.
- I went off and lived my own life, walked the other way, I fixed his feet to the cross so he could not go anywhere.
The story of the crucifix is my story. It is my autobiography. But the other part is His contribution. He let me do it, in order to save my life.
The point of this is not to make us feel guilty. It’s to take it personally so we grow in love. The reason we pray, is to grow in love for God.