C21 Prayers

The Ignatian Examen

The examen, or examination, of conscience is an ancient practice in the church. In fact, even before Christianity, the Pythagoreans and the Stoics promoted a version of the practice. It is what most of us Catholics were taught to do to prepare for confession. In that form, the examen was a matter of examining one’s life in terms of the Ten Commandments to see how daily behavior stacked up against those divine criteria.

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Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

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Centering Prayer

Centering prayer is a remarkably simple method that opens one to God’s gift of contemplative prayer. Its practice expands one’s receptivity to the presence and activity of God in one’s life. It is a distillation of the practice of monastic spirituality into two relatively short periods of prayer each day.

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The Seven Sorrows for Today

I first learned about the Seven Sorrows devotion through my obsession with art depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary. While I was used to the joyful image of the Mother and Child, I was mesmerized by its tragic counterpart.

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Stations of the Cross

From the earliest days of the church, a favored devotion of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem was to retrace the via dolorosa, the “path of sorrow” that Jesus walked on his journey to Calvary. St. Francis of Assisi is credited with developing the practice of replicating the Way of the Cross by an artistic depiction of its “stations”—each scene along the final journey of Jesus. You now find Stations of the Cross around the walls of most Catholic churches.

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