The Psalms are a natural place to experience contemplative prayer. The psalmist has a posture of confidence, reverence, and total surrender before the Lord, punctuated by silence (selah). Can we allow the text to read us? What is revealed in the silence?
Scripture Reading
In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety.
Psalm 4:8 NLT
Episode #9. Exhausted with hearing your own constant chatter when you pray? Do you sometimes feel that your prayers are a one way conversation? Tiny yet profound, AJ Sherrill’s book Quiet: Hearing God Amidst the Noise, offers practical tools for deepening our experience of contemplative prayer. If you have never encountered contemplation as a Christian practice, get ready to hone some stillness and simply be with God. For some it will be a challenge, for others it will feel like a homecoming. Join the conversation with Tanya and Dawn as they plumb the depths of this refreshing book.
The Conversation
“Contemplative spirituality… is not a spirituality that closes the imagination, but opens it up. It transforms prayer from talking to God, to a practice of being with God”.
AJ Sherrill
Episode #2. This episode Tanya and Dawn are diving into contemplative prayer with a conversation about Richard Rohr’s Simplicity, and the accompanying scripture reading: The Letter to the Ephesians. Father Richard is a brilliant author and communicator, in touch with the current moving of the spirit and deeply steeped in the complex history of the Church. If you have never encountered this transformative leader you are in for a treat. So brew some coffee, get out your journals, or gather a friend or two, but get ready for inspiration and new ideas. We have a link to reflection questions based on The letter to the Ephesians, Simplicity, by Richard Rohr and the Gift Girls’ Faith Book Club’s conversation.
“The great blind spot of European and American Christianity is that we can’t see that the gospel isn’t aimed just at the individual, but also at society.”
-Richard Rohr-