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This practice invites you to spend time focusing on your breathing and using your breath to help you pray.
Some alternative words for this prayer include:
Breathe in love
Breathe out hate
Breathe in Patience
Breathe our Impatience
Breathe in Joy
Breathe our Stress
Breathe in God’s Spirit
Breathe out fear
What other variations can you come up with?
This simple prayer practice invites you to become aware of each breath, and to create something beautiful.
You will need a pen or pencil and some paper for this practice.
The bigger the paper the more you time you can spend on the practice, a really big piece would mean you may be able to spend an entire week or month on one drawing.
Lectio is the practice of reading scripture over and over again, each time with space to reflect on the word and to meditate on what it might have to offer.
Lectio Divina refers in Latin to the practice of “divine reading.” This form of spiritual reading originated in the Benedictine tradition and involves a deeply personal and prayerful encounter with the presence of God through sacred scripture. Lectio invites us to listen to the word of God with our whole being and our longing to be touched, healed and transformed by the Holy Spirit.
Lectio is a great way to spend time with Psalms…
Read the passage once in a prayerful and unhurried way.
Simply take in the passage during the first reading and allow it to “register.”
Pause for 2-5 minutes.
Read through the passage again in an unhurried way.
As you do listen for a word or a phrase that “shimmers” or reverberates in you. What is the word that attracts, touches, or even disturbs?
Spend some time with that word or phrase.
If you’re doing it in a group or family you may want to spend some time sharing the word or phrase that shimmered in you.
You might allow for some time to paint, draw, mould the word.
Read the passage a third time.
This time you are invited to attend to the way this text connects to your life at this moment.
Consider how it relates to what you have seen and heard this day/week?
How does it speak to what is happening at home, at work, in your leisure time, in their community, in the world?
After the reading take an extended time to explore this connection in thought, in journaling, in art, or in movement.
If you’re doing it in a group or family you may want to spend some time sharing your response.
Is God calling you individually or collectively to any particular response in your present situation?
Read the passage a fourth time.
This time you’re invited to listen for an invitation in the text, to consider if there is something in the text that is inviting something of you.
Take an extended time to explore this connection in thought, in journaling, in art, or in movement.
BIf you’re doing it in a group or family you may want to spend some time sharing your response, what have you heard, what have you discovered?
Close with an extended time of silence, simply resting quietly in the presence of God.
A spoken prayer may complete the silence.
The Ignatian method of reading scripture is an ancient prayerful practice that invites us all to enter the story. Developed by Ignatius of Loyola the process invites the reader to imagine themselves in the story, and as they do to allow God to be in control, to be open to the spirit to guide their imagination.
Read through the story 4 times slowly, each time with different questions.
Time: 20-30 minutes
During the first reading listen to the story from the surface. Ask yourself
Give yourself 2-5 minutes of silence before you read the story again
During the second reading listen for more information,
Give yourself 2-5 minutes of silence before you read the story again
During the third reading Pay attention to more detail and start to place yourself in the story
Give yourself 2-5 minutes of silence before you read the story again
The fourth and final reading Is a time of allowing your imagination to be free, experience the story as the object, person or animal you’ve connected with.
Sit with the story in silence for as long as you need, when you feel its time to finish thank God for opening the story to you and for today.
Find some time today to meditate on today’s scripture readings, here are a few musical tracks that link with the readings for this week.