Prayer meetings
Prayer for Jan 2009 - Nov 2009
Date: Every 3rd Friday of the month (16/1, 20/2, 20/3, 17/4, 15/5, 19/6, 17/7, 21/8, 18/9, 16/10, 20/11)
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Parish building Room 8, Church of Sts Peter and Paul
Disclaimer: information from this page is quoted from various sources and put together here.
Prayer is a time for us to foster a communion with Someone who is always present within us, a time spent simply being “with him who we know loves us”. The prayer consists of several readings, simple songs, and a period of silence. Readings are chosen from Scripture and the lives of saints. Simple songs help us to pacify our minds and gradually draw us into the encounter with God in utter silence: “the Father spoke one Word, which was his Son, and this Word he speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul”.
During the prayer there will be a long period of silence. Contemplative silence “creates the space for God to transform us from within so that our human, limited and imperfect ways of thinking, loving and acting are emptied and transformed into divine ways. But what is wrong with our human ways of thinking, loving and acting? They are limited and are often distorted and manipulated by motives of which we are totally unaware. Human beings have a wonderful facility to divorce the spiritual realm from daily life. In church we can be as holy as the angels but when we step outside we can be little devils. Sometimes what we do or say in prayer can have little impact on how we actually live but we will convince ourselves that we are right. This is why we need contemplation. It is not a reward for great virtue but is what makes it possible to be virtuous.
In formal prayer, contemplation is where we let go of our limited ways of knowing and loving for a short period and allow God to act in us without interference. So we are invited to simply rest in God beyond words, beyond thoughts, beyond our activity. When or if this silence becomes contemplation in the strict sense of the word is best left in God's hands. However in the silence we slowly learn a new language which transcends our poor limited human words and then silence becomes far more eloquent than many words. Little by little, we discover the living flame of Divine love, so tenderly rooted in the depths of our being.
Prayer can make us feel overwhelmed by God’s great love for us, and give us feelings of peace and consolation. This is important in the first steps of our journey but we wish to go beyond seeking spiritual sweetness for ourselves, because “contemplation, when it gets to a certain degree of intensity, diffuses some of its excess on action. By contemplation the soul draws directly from the heart of God the graces which the active life must distribute.”
The test of whether our experience of God is authentic is how we live in daily life: how we treat other people, whether we seek to serve others or to serve ourselves. To help us in the concrete practice of charity in everyday life, texts will be chosen from the writings of saints who lived out the Gospel in concrete, specific and practical ways, for example St Thérèse of Lisieux and the Imitation of Christ.
We hope that this encounter with the wonder of a love will awaken the dormant contemplative energies in us and ultimately bear fruit in little and concrete acts of charity towards the people whom God has entrusted to us.
About the songs from Taizé
To open the gates of trust in God, nothing can replace the beauty of human voices united in song. This beauty can give us a glimpse of “heaven’s joy on earth”, and an inner life begins to blossom within us. Meditative prayer from Taizé is a singing that goes on and on and that continues afterwards in the silence of one's heart. The songs, often drawn from Scripture, express the essentials of the Christian faith using just a few words. As the words are sung over many times, this reality gradually penetrates our whole being. And these simple songs then enable us to keep on praying when we are alone, by night and by day, sometimes in the silence of our hearts when we are at work. In this way prayer and daily life are united.
Themes
Some of our themes for this year:
Bear with one another
Bear with one another 2
Bear with one another 3
Bear with one another 4
Divine providence
Earthly vanity
Forgiven in advance
Give without limits
Give without receiving
Hidden Jesus
Hidden Jesus 2
Indifference to human judgement
Indifference to human judgement 2
Intellectual poverty
Lent 1
Lent 2
Offering to merciful love
Spiritual poverty
Suffering
The shadow of a great name
Thirst for our love
Unjust accusations
Roster
20 Feb - Kevin & Wendy
20 Mar - Desiree
17 Apr - Sandra
15 May - Mary