Material in Exploring Silence pages of the website is in process of development
This material can be used in several ways.It has been shaped with a small group in mind and for five sessions of about 90 mins each session.
But it may also be used:
- by an individual seeking to bring prayer to life and life to prayer
- with a friend to help a conversation
- the exercises lend themselves to adaptation for prayer workshops
- to support a series of talks on prayer
- at gatherings of informal worship.
Each session has the same simple pattern.:
Starting Prayer – Reflection on Experience – Sharing– Experiences from the Church – New Directions – Ending Prayer.
The value of this material is not so much as what is written here, but in what happens to the people who choose to engage with the exercises suggested for each session.
Each person should have a copy of the material.
As usual with small groups, the work is helped by:
- providing a comfortable place
- the furniture arranged so that people can easily see one another
- each session starting and ending on time
- social time, coffee and so on, happening before or after the working time.
The leader of the group will need:
- at the first meeting, to remind people of the purpose of the course and to invite people to introduce themselves if necessary
- on later occasions, to be alert to the need to welcome newcomers or to bring to the group news of any absentees
- to see that any simple equipment needed for the work is to hand
- to draw in people who are willing to share in the leading of the course – perhaps by bringing along an object to focus the prayer, or leading the prayers or sharing in the reflective parts of each evening.
There are suggestions about timings for each session.This will vary according to local need, but it is wise to see that all the material is covered.
It will be import for people to realise that listening to and valuing the experience of others, while not necessarily agreeing with them, is the key to using this material effectively.
Suggestions for designing the starting prayer:
Have a simple central prayer focus.A lighted candle, either on its own or with a picture or another object is ideal.A different person each week could bring along an object for the prayer focus; they might wish to share why they have brought it. One week the focus might simply be a space with no focusing object at all..
This short period of prayer might include a simple chorus, for example, a Taize chant; some silence and might end with, “Lord, what we know not teach us, what we have not give us and what we are not, make us, for Jesus Christ's sake.” or other appropriate words.
After the first week, this section might include an invitation to people to share something striking from the days since the last meeting, or to share something from their journal.This will need to be handled sensitively; no-one need share but everyone is given an opportunity to do so.
Someone different week might week might wish to lead this part of the evening.
piece gives following piece gives the flavour of Perspectives on Prayer and is offered for personal repflection:
Praying our experiences is the practice of reflecting on and entering honestly into our everyday experiences in order to become more aware of God’s Word in them, and to offer ourselves through them to God.We pray our experiences when we use the content of our lived existence as the content of our prayer.Our memories and desires evoke the concrete happenings of our past as well as our plans and hopes for the future.All this is the very stuff of our prayer.
We find exactly the same process going on in and through the experiences of the People of God in the Bible.God became known to those men and women through the concrete experiences of their lives, their journeys, slavery, planning, murmurings, hopes, battles, life in the land of promise, exile, return to Jerusalem, and above all in Jesus and in the outworking of the experience of people coming into relationship with the living Lord in the early Church.
God does not suddenly begin to deal in a different way with us.Our everyday experiences are the place where God meets us.“Telling it the way it is” to God, be it anger or joy, frustration or confusion, is the first movement towards God in this way of prayer.
We can deepen this by bringing our experiences alongside the experiences of the whole People of God throughout the centuries.All this experience, the story of a faith community, is available to us in the bible and in the Church.As we allow this living story of God’s dealings with humankind to impact on our experience and interact with our story, we shall more readily discern where God is working in our lives.From that discernment can flow consolidation, or challenge, choice and change .
An adaptation from Chapter 1 Notions of Prayer from “Praying our Experiences” by Joseph Schmidt Publ: Christian Brothers Publications, Winona, Minnesota, U.S.A.
