The 5 "P"s of Prayer

Can You Remember 5 "P's" Of Prayer?

1. Passage from Holy Scripture (choose one): Before beginning your prayer period choose a short passage of 5 to 10 verses from the bible. This is very important. Never omit this before your prayer period, either the evening before or in the first few minutes before you begin to pray. Choose a passage that you want especially to listen to, to taste and savor and relish. It may be a favorite psalms or parable or miracle story or section of one Our Lord's sermons. It should fit your mood and your need. Put a marker in the page and keep it ready. You may or may not come back to it before your prayer period ends.
2. Place: Find a private spot where you can be alone with God. This is important. Sometimes it is good to be in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament but if people are in the chapel with you and you feel like stretching out your arms, if you feel like throwing back your head or looking up, if you feel like sighing or complaining or crying or dancing or singing, you will not do it. But you can do this when you are alone; you should feel free to do this. Otherwise you are inhibiting yourself. You must not be inhibited when you respond to God's presence. So, pick a quiet place where you are alone and can uninhibitedly speak and react to God's presence without drawing attention from others.
3. Posture: At the beginning of private prayer, take time to settle yourself peacefully. You do not pray as an angel or disembodied spirit or as an intellect; but you pray as a man or a woman. Men and women have bodies and bodily posture is important in prayer. Do you pray better when kneeling? Then kneel. Do you feel more receptive and open to God's presence when sitting? Then sit. Our founder, St. Ignatius, was a mystic who seemed to prefer lying down during his prayer and he recommends that we try it, too.

Experiment with various postures till you find one most conducive for responding to God's presence. This may vary from day to day and within the same prayer period. Try, for example, lying on the bed or sitting in a comfortable chair with feet propped on a stool and arms resting on the arm rests or on your lap with palms up; or sitting in a hardbacked chair with palms facing up or down on your lap, with head back and jaw relaxed; or standing (perhaps leaning against something) with head comfortably back; or sitting at a table or desk with arms resting on it; or kneeling with arms resting on a support or outstretched, etc. Different postures fit our different moods and needs.

4. Presence of God: Respond to God's presence. Peacefully remind yourself how present He is to you. Feel, e.g. the cloth of your clothes or the desk in front of you and admit to God, "Yes, You love feeling into me and texture into it. You love sight into me and color into it. You love hearing into me and sound into it. You love life into me, You are in me. Thank you for living in me, for loving goodness and sonship/daughterhood into me." This takes a little time, but it should always be done and never rushed. You should not hurry that part of your prayer, even if it takes up the whole time. You may feel like saying,"Thank You, I love You, too." In these moments God's special communication may come with that deep personal sense of His presence. Sometimes He makes His presence felt (experienced) by us. And when He does, let it continue; let this experience hold or carry you, just as water holds up a floating body. Stay with it until it fades. Do not move away from it or change or rush the experience or overreact with too many unnecessary words. We tend to "junk-up" our prayer with too many words. Perhaps a simple repetition of "My Lord and My God," or "Abba, Father" will do. If it fades, continue the reminders that you have of His presence.
5. Passage from scripture (return to it and listen to it): There may be no time left to read the Scripture passage you selected. If so fine. But when you try to respond to God's presence in a grateful, and loving and adoring way, if nothing seems to happen, if you feel dry and desolate, do not be discouraged or judge this as a sign of failure. Rather, the dryness may be God inviting you to listen to Him as He speaks to you in Holy Scripture. Always have the Scriptures available when you are at prayer; never be without them. When nothing seems to happen after trying patiently and peacefully to respond to God's presence, when you feel He is not communicating Himself, turn to the place you selected in Scripture and give Him a chance to communicate Himself to you. Listen while He talks, because Scripture is the living Word of the living God; it is living now because God is alive now and He hasn't changed His mind in what He said through the inspired writers. It is more important to listen this way to God than to speak.

Very slowly with attention whisper or read aloud (not silently) God's words. Pause between the phrases so that the echo and meaning of the words can sink into you slowly like soft rain into thirsty soil. You may want to keep repeating a word or phrase. If you finish the selected passage, go back and slowly repeat it (just as we repeat the chorus of a song).
Why whisper or speak aloud the words of Scripture? Because this engages our attention more fully through eyes, ears and voice. Often when I read something in silence, my eyes focus on the words while my imagination and attention wander far away.
Praying with Scripture this way is an experience of listening to God. Do not try to make application or search for profound meanings or implications or conclusions or resolutions. These usually "junk-up" our prayer. Be content to listen simply and openly as a child who climbs into it's Papa's lap and listens to a story.
When the time is up, thank God for speaking to you. Realize that Father, Son and Spirit live on in you as you move away to continue the rest of your day.
These are my suggestions for permitting God to communicate Himself to us. Even if we have lived long years of half- distracted, half-tepid, half-hearted attempts at praying, it is never too late - even if we are 107 years old. Try it. Taste and see for yourself. I promise that within a very short time, God will make a real mystic out of you if you give Him this opportunity and remain faithful to it. By mystic I mean a very normal, healthy, ordinary, everyday sort mystic graced with the kind of prayer that God longs to communicate to us.
Perhaps I should clarify the word mystic. By mystic I mean any conscious union of God with humans, initiated and sustained by God; it is an experience which we cannot make, earn, or be responsible for. You cannot initiate or sustain it yourself. Sometimes even when we do not put very much effort into prayer, God seems very present. He fills us with His consolation. It's a wonderful experience. We feel loving and more loved ourselves. And the next day we may put in more effort than before, but nothing happens; ashes seem to fill our heart; there is no taste for prayer, even though we hunger for it. God seems a thousand miles away. It may not be that we do anything wrong. Rather, God is teaching us. He is teaching us that we cannot make, earn, deserve, or force this sort of experience. It is freely given: a mystical experience.
There are many words to describe this experience: consolation, peace, joy, and a feeling of greater faith, and hope, of being more loving. It is initiated by God. He is anxious to communicated in this way. Then, why doesn't He do it more often, if He is so anxious? One reason is, God cannot abide with or reward error or falsehood. Before He can console and communicate Himself to us, we have to remove obstacles and make it possible for Him to come into our lives. He will not force His friendship on us. One of the prerequisites is that we be convinced, not merely intellectually, but deep down in our inner selves that this is something we cannot make, steal, earn, deserve. This is totally and freely given. We can only dispose ourselves to receive it. We can prepare ourselves for it and be deeply grateful when it comes. When it comes we can humbly say, "Why me? I don't deserve this: but I am grateful for it." That is mystical experience. And it is not always as estatic as it might sound; most often it is very quiet, peaceful, a simple inward assurance that God is with me and I am loved by Him. It is really not very definable at all.
Mysticism par excellence is the Incarnation, that union of the human and Divine, initiated by the Divine, in Jesus the Man-God. All other mysticism is but a participation more or less in the reality of the Incarnation. It is a sharing in it, and that is what God wants. He became a man in order to share His Divinity with us.
The kind of person God wants you to be, the kind of grace and prayer he is offering to you and desires so much to give you, is to enable you to be a profoundly prayerful person, a genuine contemplative all day long, no less in manual work or in suffering than during the Divine Office or at the Sacrifice of the Mass. Private prayer is essential to this. My effort in private prayer does not earn the grace; that is, if I set aside time for it, that isn't going to guarantee it automatically. We don't put in a nickel's worth of human effort and get back a nickel's worth of mystical experience. But we should faithfully give time every day to private prayer, and this in turn enables us to find God in all other things. It makes our liturgical and community prayer better. It makes our work and social involvements more of an experience with God. Our work, in turn, which is an experience with God, feeds our desire for prayerful union with God and enables us to pray better when we do have ten or fifteen minutes or half an hour of private prayer to spend with Him alone. The two feed on and nourish each other.
All of us can be prayerful in this way. God wants us to be and is longing to make us prayerful. If we respond to Him, each of us will become prayerful in a very unique way. Each of us is unique, our response is unique; God's love and presence to us is also unique