{"id":6226,"date":"2012-12-09T15:59:34","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T20:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/?p=6226"},"modified":"2012-12-09T15:59:34","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T20:59:34","slug":"this-prayer-book-is-a-stub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/unequallyyoked\/2012\/12\/this-prayer-book-is-a-stub.html","title":{"rendered":"This Prayer Book is a Stub…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This month, the\u00a0Patheos Book Club<\/a> is reading Catholic Spiritual Practices: A Treasury of Old and New<\/a><\/em>, a collection of description of and reflections on common Catholic spiritual practice. \u00a0The book is essentially a tasting menu; each of the twenty-six meditations is only a few pages long. \u00a0It\u2019s the book equivalent of Lewis\u2019s Wood between the Worlds (or Grossman\u2019s Neitherlands).<\/p>\n

This book alone would not be enough to get you engaged in any form of spiritual\u00a0praxis<\/em>, but you might end up with a\u00a0Catholic Spiritual Practices<\/em>-shelf, full of books you got after having your attention caught by one of the brief essays. \u00a0The editors of the collection did a nice job recruiting priests, religious, and laypeople to introduce these practices. \u00a0In the space allotted, some authors share their personal experiences with a prayer tradition, and others talk about the way a particular discipline has emerged through and shaped Church history. \u00a0Not all of the essayists are Catholic, since some of these traditions are widely appreciated across Christendom, so, sometimes the way that a practice fits into a specifically Catholic theology is left as an\u00a0exercise\u00a0to the reader.<\/p>\n

I was pleasantly surprised at how many of these traditions I\u2019ve encountered (it\u2019s nice to have a vibrant parish with a lot of enthusiastic, talkative people my own age). \u00a0One that has proved affecting for me is the Ignatian practice of the examen<\/a>. \u00a0So, in the spirit of the book I\u2019m reviewing, I\u2019ll give you a short personal reflection in case it sparks your interest.<\/p>\n

After I read The Presence of God<\/a> by Father Anselm Moynihan, O.P., I had a better idea of what prayer was, but not how to do it. You see, at one point, Fr. Moynihan advises:<\/p>\n

The twofold practice of often recalling to ourselves the fact of God\u2019s indwelling in our heart and of continually addressing our intimate, secret conversation to him instead of ourselves, is one of the best means of disposing ourselves for the operation of the gift of wisdom and obtaining from him the experience of his presence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The trouble is, my internal monologue tends to look a lot like this:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So I wasn\u2019t really sure what to do with the advice from the book. \u00a0However, after my baptism, I read The Examen Prayer: Ignatian Wisdom for Our Lives Today<\/em><\/a> by Father Timothy Gallagher. The Examen is a way of reflecting on the day through prayer. \u00a0I started doing it after Mass, and it made it a lot easier to prepare for Confession and to spot moments where I needed to ask God\u2019s forgiveness and aid.<\/p>\n

Noticing sin and uncharity feels a lot like spotting Ugh Fields<\/a> in LessWrong parlance. \u00a0The trick is noticing the thing you\u2019re flinching away from and then turning into it. \u00a0It\u2019s pretty hard to do, since, when you notice something you\u2019ve screwed up, your first thought is usually \u201cI suck,\u201d which isn\u2019t a nice-feeling thought to think. \u00a0So, essentially, you punish yourself for noticing, and train yourself to avoid noticing your sins in the first place. \u00a0(Imagine a company that cared a lot about quality control, but where management freaked out and got angry when employees spotted errors to correct. \u00a0Soon you\u2019d have trained your workers to not bring them to your attention).<\/p>\n

LessWrong tends to recommend rewarding yourself immediately for\u00a0noticing<\/em> the error. \u00a0Give yourself an m&m, pump your fist and say \u201cGo me!\u201d anything to break the conditioning pattern. \u00a0And the circuit-breaking thought that helps me get through the Examen is gratitude<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how I think of it: sin is like a cancer; it grows and spreads through my character. \u00a0Even a small error can quickly become dangerous if unchecked. \u00a0Now, the trouble when coming up with cancer treatments isn\u2019t sussing out ways to kill cancer cells, it\u2019s finding a way to preferentially <\/em>kill them while leaving our healthy cells untouched. \u00a0In a similar way, the real struggle is disentangling myself from my sin. \u00a0There a basically two approaches to the cancer problem: you can find a drug or a treatment that attacks a weakness peculiar to cancer cells (i.e. disrupting their abnormal angiogenesis<\/a>) or you can try to make sure your poisons are administered in a localized way right where the cancer is (targeted\u00a0radiation, nanoparticle-mediated drug delivery<\/a>).<\/p>\n

When I can, I like to do my daily Examen in the church after Mass. \u00a0When I notice a flinch and lean into it, one thing I reflect on is that I\u2019ve just consumed the Eucharist. \u00a0Christ\u2019s body is a part of my body, and, by holding my transgressions in my mind, I\u2019m helping that grace be precisely\u00a0targeted. \u00a0It\u2019s beyond my ability to\u00a0create<\/em> a balm in Gilead<\/a>, but the Examen helps me cooperate with its administration.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month, the\u00a0Patheos Book Club is reading Catholic Spiritual Practices: A Treasury of Old and New, a collection of description of and reflections on common Catholic spiritual practice. \u00a0The book is essentially a tasting menu; each of the twenty-six meditations is only a few pages long. \u00a0It\u2019s the book equivalent of Lewis\u2019s Wood between the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":6228,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,177,1],"tags":[219],"class_list":["post-6226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviewsrecommendations","category-spiritual-practice","category-uncategorized","tag-ignatian-spirituality"],"yoast_head":"\nThis Prayer Book is a Stub...<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This month, the\u00a0Patheos Book Club is reading Catholic Spiritual Practices: A 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