How Do We Pray with Our Imagination? We meet new friends and we want to get to know them better. How do we do it? We share our stories. We tell them about our childhood, how we met our spouse or how our great-grandparents moved here. We live in a rational, left brain world with global technology at our fingertips. Yet as human beings, our soul is still fired by color and imagination.
Our minds are storehouses of images and memories and through them God works in our hearts. Praying with our imaginations can create a deeper and more personal intimacy with Jesus, Mary, the disciples and others written about in scripture. Using the imagination in prayer has been a treasured tradition in prayer for centuries. How do we start?
Then pick a story out of scripture. Now we begin to imagine the scene we read about. Feel free to paint this picture in any way your imagination takes you. It helps if we imagine Jesus and his disciples as the real people they were who walked the earth. Imagination - Ignatian Wiki. The Classroom as Holy Ground. Every semester begins the same way. I walk to the door of the classroom and catch my breath. Like an actor walking on stage, the nervousness of a teacher on the first day—or any day—is natural. It is the same now that I am teaching college as it was when I taught high school before joining the Jesuits. The more I teach, however, the more I realize that it is not just nervousness I feel on the first day.
Along with that anxiety is awe, because I am beginning to appreciate how the classroom is holy ground, a place where I can encounter God. St. That love reveals itself primarily in the relationship between teacher and student. Ignatius was convinced that God speaks with each of us in a unique and personal way. Any relationship takes time and work to develop, and begins by first knowing the other. Central to building any relationship is conversation. Ignatius looked for any opportunity to come to know people and to speak with them about God. Such seeds are sown with every conversation. Pray with Your Imagination. By David L. Fleming, SJ From What Is Ignatian Spirituality? Ignatius would never have thought of himself as a highly educated intellectual. He had an advanced degree from the University of Paris, the finest university in Europe at the time. He was well-acquainted with the ideas of leading philosophers and theologians.
He was an excellent analytical thinker. But the mental quality of thought that drove his spiritual life was his remarkable imagination. Ignatius first grasped the importance of the imagination during his long convalescence from his battle injuries. But these daydreams were not idle at all. He continued to make liberal use of the imagination and integrated imaginative prayer into the approach to the spiritual life that he outlined in the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius presents two ways of imagining in the Spiritual Exercises. The second method of imagining is to place ourselves fully within a story from the Gospels.
Following Jesus is the business of our lives. Related Links. An analysis of research and literature on CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION.