The Better Part – A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer

The Better Part: A Christ-Centered Resource for Personal Prayer
by Father John Bartunek, LC

No one who is learning or desires to learn to pray more deeply and meditate more effectively on the person and work of Christ should go without this book. It offers a basic but at the same time sufficiently comprehensive overview of how to meditate in the Christian tradition (no New Age or Hindu/Buddhist influences here.)

Beyond the solid instruction on meditation method, Father John provides us with meditations through the four Gospels and group study questions at the end of each of the 303 meditation units.

Table of Contents (Partial):

Gods Idea of Prayer

• Christian Prayer – Eminently Christ-Centered
• Christian Prayer – Intensely Personal

Types of Prayer

• Vocal Prayer
• Meditative Prayer
• Contemplative Prayer
• Meditation vs. Spiritual Reading

Four Step Structure of Meditation

1. Concentrate
2. Consider
3. Converse
4. Commit

Difficulties in Prayer

• Sloth and Distractions
• Solving the Difficulties
• How Do I Know I’m Praying Well?

If you want to deepen your relationship with Christ by learning to meditate on Christ and his teaching through timeless and authentic Catholicism, this is the best way I know to start.

Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him

Dan

Time for God – Book Recommendation

Someone once said that true genius is not in understanding complexity but in the ability to communicate complex issues in simple terms that anyone can understand. Father Jacques Philippe accomplishes in a very short easy read what most require volumes to explore and explain about the spiritual life, and specifically the life of prayer.

Father Philippe begins this fantastic book by laying the foundations of the heart of Christian mental prayer and  meditation – God’s grace. He then provides a very clear and helpful contrast between Christian prayer and conflicting spiritual traditions that have recently made their way into Catholic spirituality. Through the remainder of the book he does a masterful job of drawing from the rich depths of the Carmelite tradition (St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, etc.) to provide a meaningful review of key principals of meditative prayer.

If you are seeking to better understand mental prayer, contemplation, how to deepen your own prayer life, how to overcome struggles with prayer, you can’t go wrong with Father Philippe’s faithful and coherent treatment of these topics.  This really is a must read for both spiritual directors and those seeking greater depths in their prayer lives.

Major topic headings for the book:

• Mental Prayer is Not a Technique but a Grace
• How to Use the Time of Mental Prayer
• The Development of the Life of Prayer
• Material Conditions for Mental Prayer
• Some Methods of Mental Prayer

To purchase this book and support this site, click here.

Seek Him – Find Him – Follow Him

Dan

PS: You might wonder why I have this book categorized in “Centering Prayer” and “PsuedoSpirituality.” The reason is that the book provides the most concise, coherent, and charitable treatment of the modern synthesis of Catholic and non-Christian prayer practices.

A Simple Guide to Christian Meditation

To serve you in your commitment to prayer this Advent season, Father John has provided a simple introductory guide to Christian meditation.

Each day you should reserve some time – 5, 10, or 15 minutes can be a good start – to spend in quiet, heart-to-heart conversation with Christ. This is called Christian meditation. The goal of this kind of prayer is to deepen your personal relationship with Christ, praising God and receiving his grace, and to identify yourself more and more with the purpose of your life: to live in communion with God through the fulfillment of his will. As you develop the habit of this prayer, you will find ways to personalize the method. To begin, however, and in order to overcome the distractions and dryness common to those starting off on a more demanding life of prayer, the following structure has shown to be of great utility.

Be sure to choose a time and place conducive to the silence and attention required; most spiritual masters recommend that we do our meditation early in the day, before the thousand cares of this busy world tangle us up in their knots. They also recommend that we do it at the same time every day, and in the same place, somewhere quiet, where we know that interruptions and distractions will be limited. More important than the time and place, however, is the commitment to make meditation part of your daily spiritual fare, no matter how busy you get or little you feel like praying.

Your meditation can be divided into 4 steps – the four “C”s: Concentrate, Consider, Converse, Commit.

Concentrate

This simply means focusing your attention on God, on his presence, on your relationship with him. You renew your faith, your love, your hope in him. You ask him for the particular grace you are seeking in this time together with him. You recall that he created you and is interested in you – so much so that he sent his Son to save you and established the Church to guide you to your eternal home. This first step of your prayer means concentrating on your true center: your identity as a creature, a beloved child of God in need of his grace.

Consider

In the second step of your meditation you take a passage from Scripture, or from a spiritual book, or the Catechism, of the writings of a saint, or even a sacred image or a beautiful natural landscape (you work out what kind of material is best for you through experimentation and the guidance of a spiritual director) and you read it over. You reflect on what it means, what it tells you about God and his ways and his plans, and what it means for you personally, in your particular situation and state in life. In this stage you ponder in your mind and heart some truth or aspect of God’s revelation, you apply it to your life and make it your own. Sometimes asking questions can help your consideration: what is the meaning of the passage? What are its key words? What is going on here? How would I express it in my own words?

Converse

Here is the core of the meditation: a heart-to-heart conversation with Christ about the passage you have been considering and the insights that the Holy Spirit has been giving you. This intimate, personal exchange is what separates Christian meditation from other merely psychological exercises that don’t move beyond concentration. Here is the mark of true prayer, where you respond to the Word of God with words of your own, expressing your admiration, your gratitude, your love, your confusion, your need – whatever the consideration stirred up in your soul. You also give him time and room to speak to you. He often chooses to do this not with words or even ideas, but by moving your will, by directly touching your heart. (Try not to get hung up on hearing him explicitly every day, but you should be able to look back over several days or weeks and recognize his action in your prayer life.) As you converse, in the silent depths of your heart you open yourself to God, offering your life and inviting him once again to come and show you the way to a living communion with him. All the other steps of the meditation are directed to this step, so if you only need a brief moment of concentration and consideration in order to enter into heartfelt conversation with the One who loves you, don’t dawdle on steps one and two. Normally, however, we need to gather our attention in order to be able to hear and respond to the Word of God, and steps one and two help us to do that.

Commit

Finish your prayer by letting it affect your life: commit yourself to do something concrete today as a result of the time you spent with our Lord, whatever you think the Lord is asking of you or whatever you think would please him. Whether it means making an extra visit to a chapel to spend more time with him, or asking someone to forgive yesterday’s temperamental outburst, or visiting someone who is in the hospital, or calling that person who needs a call – something concrete, measurable, real; something about which you can say at the end of the day: yes, I did that, or no, I didn’t. This insures that our prayer life doesn’t become a mere psychological sedative or an exercise of vanity. As you offer this commitment to the Lord, thank him for his presence and the graces he has given you during this time of prayer, ask pardon for your distractions (especially if you invited them or gave in to them out of laziness or lack of faith), and finish by entrusting the fruits of your prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary through reciting a Hail Mary.

End with the sign of the cross, and then go forth to glorify God by fulfilling his will out of faith, hope, and love.

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC

For a more in-depth treatment of Christ-Centered Christian Meditation, check out Father John’s book, “The Better Part.” Click on the ad below and you can pick up a copy specially discounted for our readers.

The fruits of my meditation are not clear – what should I do?

Q: I have a question about preparing for meditation. I have been deeply blessed by the insight you and have provided with respect to meditation recently. I wonder if what I am seeking as a fruit of meditation is too lofty. Why? Because it doesn’t change day to day and I don’t perceive that I am making much progress. Is it normal to seek the same fruit for weeks at a time or longer? In this case, essentially, the fruit desired does not change day to day and the exercise becomes a bit repetitive. Is this an indication that I would do better to seek fruit that is lower on the tree?

A: This is an excellent question. Here’s the deal. Usually, those who are beginning the spiritual life change their fruit often. Those who have been striving consciously and conscientiously for holiness for a longer period of time tend to grow in spiritual simplicity as time passes. This involves having a clearer idea of one’s spiritual state. That in turn involves knowing one’s own weaknesses and tendencies better. When that happens, all of our spiritual work takes on a more unified character, and the fruit we seek in prayer tends to be the same for longer periods. Sometimes, it even happens that you try to switch fruits, but the Holy Spirit won’t let you, and you keep coming back to the same thing, even when you were consciously trying to go somewhere else! By focusing on the same fruit for longer periods, the soul actually drinks more deeply of the knowledge of God, of some particular characteristic God’s love that the soul needs most.

In fact, it is often a good idea to fix the “fruit” of your daily meditation as a part of your program of life, so that you don’t flit around according to whims and distractions.

A gold prospector will look all over the place for a rich vein of gold – panning streams, exploring caves, tapping into rock faces… He just can’t settle down in any one place, because he is convinced that there is a rich store of gold somewhere nearby. But as soon as he finds the mother lode, he sinks down a deep shaft and stays put, mining it diligently until every last flake of the precious metal has been extracted.

That’s a bit what it’s like for the soul that God is leading to deeper spiritual wisdom. At first, the thirst drives the soul after every possible virtue – humility, charity, purity, fortitude, contrition… But gradually the Holy Spirit shows us a more detailed profile of our own spiritual needs, and guides us to that “aspect” of God, of the Gospel message, which will meet that need most effectively. I am sure that if you think about some of the saints you are familiar with, you will see how this works. I once visited a church in an ancient little hill town in Italy and talked to the parish priest there (I think he was older than the church). He told me that he only meditated two things: Calvary and Heaven. Calvary filled him with mourning for sin, and Heaven filled him with joyful hope – these were the fruits God wanted to see flourish in his soul, and he was delighted with them.

That said, there is room for variation on another level, that of the specific resolution that you make at the end of the meditation. As we finish our daily meditation, we should look forward to the day ahead, and try to see, with God’s help, a particular, concrete action that we can commit to as a way of living out in our life whatever we were meditating on. Often this resolution is one of the points of the program of life, and sometimes, especially if our daily life is predictable and stable, the same resolution will come to mind day after day, or even week after week. But at other times the circumstances of daily life will provide new opportunities or challenges. In this case, our resolution can vary, even though the fruit stays the same.

For example, if the fruit I am seeking is greater confidence in God’s goodness, my resolution may be something as simple as: “Today when I feel anxiety because of my financial difficulties, I will make a spiritual communion.” But when the financial difficulties go away or diminish, my resolution may end up being something like: “Today when I get stuck in traffic I will turn off the radio and praise God for the beauties of nature that I see on the side of the highway.”

Yours in Christ, Fr John Bartunek, LC

How can I better prepare for prayer and meditation?

Q: Father John, in the first part of your book, The Better Part, you mention something about preparing for tomorrow’s meditation the night before. I also heard that mentioned by a priest giving us a talk during a retreat. Can you explain this a little bit more? What do you mean, exactly, and is that something just for religious and priests, or should I be doing it too?

A: It seems to me that your question is being asked in direct response to the nudging of the Holy Spirit. You have noticed references to the “preparation of points” (as spiritual writers often refer to it) in two different contexts, and it has made you curious. That’s usually how the Holy Spirit tries to get our attention. I will do my best to give you some clarity.

Reasons for Getting Ready

Let’s start with an analogy. If you are going on a car trip to a place you have never been before, what’s the first thing you do? You look up the directions (unless you have a GPS, that is, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you don’t). And as you look them up, you jot down the key landmarks: get onto I-95 going north, take exit 78 towards Clintonville, turn right at the Gulf station… Once you start your trip, you keep the direction handy, referring to them now and again as you head towards your destination. They do not take the place of your journey; they are an aid to a smooth journey, one in which you don’t get lost.

The “preparation of points” for our meditation is like jotting down the directions for your meditation. It’s a longstanding practice used not only by priests and religious, but also by lay people – by anyone who is striving for greater depth and consistency in their life of mental prayer. It’s based on an extremely realistic principle, namely, that we rarely (if ever) find ourselves in the perfect circumstances for prayer. Usually, in fact, mental prayer is quite demanding. Not only do we have to keep our worries, agendas, and to-do lists on the back burner during the meditation (and they tend to throw tantrums when we don’t pay attention to them), but often we also have to battle against physical tiredness or discomfort, external noise, and even the wily distractions of the devil. This helps explains why persevering in prayer is challenging. It also helps explain why so many well-intentioned Christians never advance beyond the most elementary level of mental prayer – the onslaught of obstacles impedes their forward progress. The preparation of points is one proven tactic to help us deal more effectively with all these obstacles.

Brass Tacks

Here’s how it works. In the evening, or at night before you go to sleep, take five minutes to prepare for your next day’s meditation. Do it the night before, even if you won’t be doing your meditation until midday or tomorrow evening (though it is highly recommended to try and get our meditation in before we launch into the day’s busy-ness). During those five minutes do the following:

• Gather the materials you will need for your meditation, e.g., your notebook or spiritual journal, your crucifix, plus whatever book or text that you will be meditating on (your Bible, a missalette, a book of meditations…). Getting all this together the night before helps assure you will be able to get started without delay when tomorrow’s meditation time comes along.

• In your notebook or journal, jot down (it helps immensely to write things down at this point, even if you only write down key words – it focuses your mind now, and it will help focus your mind tomorrow, when the distractions or tiredness try to sidetrack you) the “points” of your meditation.

• The first point (and the most important one to call to mind the night before) is usually the fruit you are seeking in your meditation. This is tied in with your program of life, with the needs of your soul, with the virtues you are focusing your spiritual work on. For example, my fruit could be “to deepen my conviction that God is my Father who loves me with an everlasting love.” Sometimes the fruit can be stated in the form of a petition: “Lord, help me to see and to believe more firmly in your love for me.” This is the grace you are seeking in your meditation. It is in light of this grace that you have chosen whatever book or text you are using to help your meditation, and the other “points” that you may want to jot down are drawn from that text. You can read quickly over some or all of the text you will be meditating on, and if something strikes you, write down a key word – this is a “point” of meditation. If nothing strikes you, you can still write down some thoughts that will help get you into your meditation the next day. For example, you can write down an intention: “Offer this meditation for Jerry, who has surgery this week.” Or you can write down a reminder: “Finish the meditation by praying Psalm 22 slowly, using it to renew my confidence in God.” The points of meditation, when we write them down, become points of reference during the meditation, anchors that keep us focused as the waves of distraction and exhaustion pull us in a hundred different directions.

• As you jot down your points, try to avoid being to elaborate. You aren’t supposed to do the meditation the night before, just get the ingredients ready. Then, after you say your night prayers and turn off the light, as you go to sleep you can call to mind the points that you have prepared. This gives your subconscious a chance to work in favor of your meditation. Sometimes, key insights will come to you as you drift off, insights that will become the centerpiece of tomorrow’s meditation.

That’s it; it’s that simple. I could try to describe in greater detail the many benefits that accrue to those who make an effort, even a small one, to prepare their meditation points. But the simple fact that this practice has been common and recommended by the Church for at least the last five hundred years should be convincing enough. And besides, it’s more interesting to try it and see what the Holy Spirit does for you personally, rather than slogging through the description of someone else’s experience and then, perhaps mistakenly, trying to reproduce it detail by detail for oneself. But even so, I am sure we will all be interested to hear how it goes, if you decide to give it a shot. God bless you!

Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC