Someone Else’s Reflections: An Aid To Prayer

Someone else’s reflections are or can be, an aid to prayer. However, they are not your prayer or my prayer per se. Some such aids may provide you with much spiritual food for thought in your own reflection. Yet, mental prayer–prayer with Scripture–involves dialogue with Our Lord.  St. Teresa of Avila tells us “…mental prayer is…nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends…taking time to alone with him who we know loves us.” If you’ll give her this much (after all she is a Doctor of the Church), you may agree that our time in mental prayer is a time for a loving conversation with God. Hence, we need to engage with Him in His Word and respond to Him. That doesn’t happen through simply reading a reflection someone has written.

Someone Else’s Reflections – Spiritual Reading or Prayer?

In a previous post, I provided a brief outline of Lectio Divina–Sacred Reading–a common approach to meditating on Scripture. Essentially, it involves prayerfully reading, thinking about, and talking with God about a passage, and then listening to Him. This is one method of placing a structure around your mental prayer time. It’s not the only approach you can take. For example, using Ignatian “contemplation” places you right in the Gospel scene. Using your imagination, you participate in the scene in whatever manner the Spirit moves you. And then you interact with Our Lord. As you advance in prayer, you’ll find that some adaptations or variations suit your style of prayer better than others. 

Consider, on the other hand, spiritual reading. This normally involves reading books that educate, inform–and form–you or me. Examples might include books on our Catholic faith, on theology, or the life of one or more saints. Books such as In Sinu Jesu, The Fulfillment of All Desire, The Power of Silence, or Consecration to St. Joseph are all examples of works by faithful, orthodox authors your spiritual reading library might include.

More to the point, spiritual reading also can include meditations or reflections on Scripture that others have written. If you subscribe to the Magnificat monthly magazine, you’ll see a Meditation of the Day for each day of the month. These meditations represent someone else’s reflections, but they can add value to you in your prayer with Scripture. Notice that I suggested they can add value–they’re not the end game here.

Taking Advantage of Someone Else’s Reflections

While someone else’s reflections are not the ultimate objective in our prayer time, they can provide a source of enrichment to it. The Flame of Love Movement meditations provides a good example of a succinct, yet robust approach to meditating on Scripture. First, they provide the Gospel passage you’ll be praying with. Next, they provide thoughts to meditate on regarding the passage. Following that, they provide “affections,” or examples of speaking heart-to-heart to God–praying to Him. Thus, they lead you through a simple, yet structured, process that allows you to speak to God about what He’s telling you in the Gospel. If you’re somewhat new to mental prayer, or perhaps experiencing some dryness regarding that day’s Gospel, these meditations can give you a boost.

In a similar fashion, using something like the Magnificat daily meditations can enhance your mental prayer time as well. The content in the day’s meditation, taken from saints and other faithful Catholic authors, may spark some thoughts for your meditation. As well, they may touch your heart and inspire a prayer or two from you to Our Lord. Yet neither of these two examples should stand alone, apart from the Gospels in your daily prayer regimen. The Gospel of the day provides the basis for the helpful meditations that can then expand your prayer experience.

Others’ Reflections Are Not Replacements for Prayer

With many publishers and clergy taking advantage of the internet, you have a wide variety of reflections available to you. I don’t follow most of them, but I’ve seen some of them.  The USCCB posts daily audio and video reflections that run a few minutes in length. Bishop Barron provides a subscription service for his daily reflections, which typically run about 200 words in length. Both of these examples provide insights into the day’s readings. They can enhance your spiritual perspective on the readings. Yet, they will not by themselves, bring you closer to Jesus. They are not designed to do that. Rather, they provide mini-homilies to break open the word. This is so you can better meditate on it. They can lead you to what you might speak to Our Lord about during your prayer time.

Thus, these reflections are not replacements for getting into the Gospel, talking with Jesus about it, and listening for His response. They don’t build a relationship with Him. Another name for mental prayer is relational prayer. It’s about our relationship with Our Lord and Savior. We need to spend quality time with Him to allow our relationship with Him to grow. Someone else’s reflections can enhance our prayer time, but they won’t build that heart-to-heart, the one-on-one relationship you or I desperately need. For that, we need to engage personally, faithfully, and consistently in conversation with God. This requires our direct engagement with Scripture and our taking time to meditate on the Word of God, talking to Him, and listening to Him. He knows us; He wants us to get to know Him intimately, through our time with Him, not just through what others say about Him.

“The only way to pray is to pray, and to pray well is to pray much. If one has no time for this, then one must at least pray regularly…” Abbot John Chapman, OSB