Prayer: Oxygen for the Soul

by Jacques Philippe, Anne of Jesus (editor), Joumana Khalil

Every era of spiritual renewal begins with a renewal of prayer.

Where do we find the answers to the challenges of our time? Fr. Jacques Philippe asserts that the answers – which can renew the Church and save the world – can be found in the “living contact with the mystery of God in prayer.”

Drawing on quotes from the saints, scripture, and the Catechism, the authors “communicate the thirst for an encounter with God in prayer” and “provide the means to persevere faithfully in the practice of meditation.”

In this short book packed with spiritual wisdom, you’ll gain practical knowledge to help awaken your desire for personal prayer and truly encounter our living God,

Why we should pray – even when it’s full of poverty, pitfalls, and dark nightsAwakening your thirst for God’s love – and recognizing his thirst for yoursOvercoming obstacles to receiving God’s graceThe high-stakes role of prayer in spiritual combatStrategies for salvaging a “failed” prayer sessionWritten to encourage and nourish the life of prayer, this book has been adapted to apply to anyone interested in fostering a deeper relationship with God.

FR. JACQUES PHILIPPE and SR. ANNE OF JESUS collaborated with other members of The Community of the Beatitudes to create this book. The Community of the Beatitudes is a Catholic community, found in twenty-six countries, which consists of what they call “one spiritual family of sisters, brothers, priests, and lay people, married or single, who share a fraternal life, a life of prayer, and mission.” Their goal is to live a life of holiness through the Beatitudes given to us by Christ in his Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.

Genres: Religion

Kindle Edition

Published May 23, 2024

About the author

Jacques Philippe was born into a Christian family on March 12, 1947 in Lorraine, France. After studying mathematics in college, he spent several years teaching and doing scientific research. In 1976, he met the then recently-founded Community of the Beatitudes and answered the Lord’s call to follow Him through this vocation (see below for more information on the Community of the Beatitudes). He then spent several years in Jerusalem and Nazareth immersing himself in the study of Hebrew and the Jewish roots of Christianity. In 1981, he traveled to Rome to study theology and canon law and also began his work as a spiritual director, working in the formation of priests and seminarians of the Community. In 1994, he returned to France, where he assumed various responsibilities including spiritual direction, the development of training in the Community, and participation in its General Council. He has also preached retreats regularly in France and abroad and has consolidated his principal retreat themes into five books on spirituality. In recent years, he has devoted himself primarily to spiritual direction, preaching retreats, and working for the development of the Community in Asia and Oceania, where he travels frequently.

Reviews

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the greatest services we can render to people today is to awaken in them the desire for personal prayer.
Every era of spiritual renewal began with a renewal of prayer.
It is he who makes us desire and to fulfil our desires. Saint Therese of Liseaux
Physical thirst reflects the deepest need of the human soul: the thirst for God.
In the Bible, the well is the place where love stories are woven.
The life of prayer and enables us to enter into the heart of our beloved, and to find the well deep within ourselves, where we can meet the beloved, enjoy his beauty and rest and his shadow.
Prayer for meditation becomes mutual expectation, shared silence, a dialogue of love.
Meditation is pure dialogue of love.
Prayer is to our soul what rain is to the soil. Saint John Vianney
But for Grace, to bear fruit, it is up to us to welcome it, unceasingly with faith, humility, gratitude, and determination; in a word, with love.
Prayer is not just one Grace among many, but one from which all the rest flows.
Teresa of Avila: “prayer is the door to those great favours which he has bestowed upon me. Once the door is closed, I do not see how he will bestow them.”
Fidelity and being present to God guarantees the capacity to be present to others and to love them truly.
Saint Mother Teresa: the more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls.
Prayer is a matter of friendship.
Fidelity, in the life of prayer is first and foremost, a decision and a personal response to the question, “do you love me?”
Teresa of Avila describes the life of prayer with the image of a garden that we must water. The garden is our soul. The gardener is God. He clears the undergrowth and sows the beautiful plants. Then he entrusts us with their care. Our task is but to water. Plants represent virtues; the water represents the graces received in prayer.
The master of creation hands over his work to us with great love and trust, and calls us to collaborate with him: a relationship of friendship and trust in which the primary initiative is always that of the master, but in which, without the response of the disciple, the work will not be completed, the work cannot fully unfold.
The grace of prayer serves to increase our capacity to love.
Stop swimming and turn onto our backs to float and let the water take us where it will. In that sentence water represents grace.
A lively faith, animated by love enabling you to do everything from no other motive than that of pure love. St. Louis De Montfort
Good prayer brings us closer to God, transforming us a little by little. For our prayer to be good, it must be an act of faith hope and love.
All methods of prayer are good as long as the fundamental disposition of the heart is an attitude of faith hope and love.
Act of faith: “I believe that God exists, that he loves me, that it’s worth spending time with him.”
Faith brings us into real contact with God. St. John of the Cross said “the greater the faith of the soul, the more closely it is united with God.”
When we experience aridity in prayer, we shouldn’t worry, but welcome it as an invitation to practice faith in a pure way, and remember that what really puts us in touch with God is not the intensity of emotions, but the determination of faith.
Faith sets us free to persevere in aridity.
When the intellect receives enlightenment on the richness of the mysteries of faith, this is grace.
Our intelligence needs to learn humility, to recognize its limits, to let go of any pretension to control and dominate. That’s why God sometimes places us in the dark. But then faith comes to our rescue: “I don’t understand, but that doesn’t prevent me from believing, hoping, and loving.”
St. John of the Cross speaks of faith by which we love God without a clear comprehension of him.
Faith set us free: free to joyfully welcome the light God gives us, but also free to walk in darkness, abandoning ourselves to God.
The aridities and obscurities encountered in the life of prayer are painful, but they enable us to become adults in the faith.
This path of faith is not intended to de Ultimate value or destroy our human faculties, sensibility, and intelligence, but to purify them and make them fit to reach the one who is their ultimate object.
Accepting dryness and obscurity in prayer will make our sensitivity finer, more capable of tasting God, and will also make our intelligence more penetrating to contemplate the grandeur of his mysteries.
With respect to God, the more the soul, hopes, the more it attains union with God. St. John of the Cross.
For our prayer to be true it must be an act of faith, hope and love.
Prayer is an act of hope because when we start praying we’re counting on God.
There can be no life of prayer without a certain experience of poverty.
Prayer lead us deeper and deeper into God’s light.
Humility, and hope: accepting what we are, accepting the cruel revelation of our limitations and faults, but using them to learn to put all our trust and hope in God alone, rather than in our abilities and achievements.
Throw ourselves into God’s arms with blind trust in his mercy and power.
Fidelity to prayer is a school of humility and hope.
Saint Terese of Liseaux: love our littleness, love to feel nothing, then we will be poor and spirit, and Jesus will come to us.
The deepening of our prayer life is generally accompanied by a simplification of methods and a more passive presence on the part of the praying person.
The attitude of empty hands and spiritual childhood is the attitude of receptivity.
What if I dare to trust God, who knows me better than I know myself, and doesn’t need long explanations to understand what’s in my heart? What if I took a little interest in what’s in his heart?
Receptivity opens us up to what God alone can do in us, and for us.
Silent prayer: the practice requires a certain method to be followed, involving, for example, the following elements: devoting time to it every day, begin with an interior preparation and an invocation to recollect oneself and place oneself and the presence of God; reading a text from scripture or a spiritual book; imagining and reflecting on the text to draw from it, inspiration for the intelligence; drawing up feelings to excite the heart and the love of God; making concrete resolutions for application in life. A prayer follows, entrusting these resolutions to God, and asking him for the strength to put them into practice, concluding with Thanksgiving.
Prayer books or cards help people engage in and persevere in the path of prayer. They show us how to proceed concretely in prayer, and how to avoid the inner emptiness and laziness that can sometimes threaten us. They train the soul to frequent God.
Prayer is destined to become gradually less active and more passive, not so much an activity of humans as an attitude of receptivity, where it is God who operates in the soul.
We become reluctant to meditate and instead are compelled to stop talking and thinking, and to be still in simple, loving attention to God‘s presence, without words, ideas, or distinct images.
The phenomenon of dryness and powerlessness or inability to meditate is generally a good sign: the Lord wants to give the person the grace of a poorer, simpler, more receptive prayer, which will ultimately be the source of great progress, for it is now God, who is at work.
Drought is not necessarily a sign of this new stage. Two other signs are needed: That the person has no desire to distract himself with anything other than God and that he feels a kind of inclination where the soul takes pleasure in being alone, and waits with loving attentiveness upon God, without making any particular meditation, in inward peace, and quietness and rest, and without acts and exercises of the faculties – memory, understanding and will – at least, without discursive acts, that is without passing from one thing to another; the soul is alone, with an attentiveness and a knowledge, general and loving, as we said, but without any particular understanding, and adverting not to that which it is contemplating.
Contemplation is a simple, poor prayer, more receptive than active; a loving attention of the heart to the presence of God.
Begin by settling into the present moment, by putting yourself truly in the presence of God, in an act of love and faith, and a great desire to take advantage of this immense gift we’ve been given, that of having an encounter with the Lord.
Spending time with God is always a gift, and we should thank him warmly for it. Even if we weren’t very present, he was, and certainly did something in our hearts.
How to pray: do what does as good, what helps us to be attentive to God‘s presence, to welcome his love, which nourishes our faith, our hope, our charity.
Teresa of Avila: mental prayer is nothing but friendly intercourse, with frequent, solitary converse, with him who we know, loves us. It is a personal, silent form of prayer and which we express and deepen our intimate relationship with God. Where we pour out our heart to God with supplication, thanks, listening, meditation, contemplation, and so on.
Worship is the most fundamental human relationship with God.
Worship is the attitude of man who perceives his fragility and smallness, and at the same time the immensity and infinite greatness of God. One is overjoyed to find himself face-to-face with some thing that infinitely surpasses him, and who’s beauty and majesty fascinates him. He finds deep joy in having something to admire and love that surpasses all understanding and all beauty.
To worship is in fact to consent. It is letting God be God.- Fr. Cantalamessa
The etymological meaning of the word adore in Latin means to bring to the mouth, to kiss. To adore, is to stand humbly before a majesty, that intimately surpasses us, but which we can nonetheless approach, a God who allows himself to be encountered, whom we cannot only venerate, but also love. To adore is to feed on God.
The highest act of worship is silence. The closer we come to God, the rarer words are spoken, for we sense how powerless they are to express a mystery that only silence can truly honor.
Eucharistic adoration is always a grace for the worshiper, a source of life for the whole church, and a way of hastening the coming of the kingdom for the whole world. When we are deprived of all personal satisfaction in prayer, we must be content to be like a candle, freely consumed in God’s presence.
Prayer is a personal dialogue and favours silence and an interior life. Liturgy is communal, a public prayer of the church, that is lived according to a right made up of gestures, words, and songs. Yet prayer and liturgy complement, serve, and call upon each other.
Prayer and liturgy share the same dynamism and the same purpose: Relationship and union with God.
Saint Teresa of Avila called prayer “nothing but friendly intercourse, and frequent, solitary converse, with him who we know loves us.”
Liturgy is a meeting of God‘s children with her father, in Christ and the Holy Spirit; this meeting takes the form of a dialogue, through actions and words.
Silence in the liturgy is necessary for the dialogue between God and man: we respond, by singing, and praying, to the God who addresses us, but the greatest mystery, surpassing all words, summon us to silence. – Joseph Ratzinger.
The liturgy: shared silence becomes shared prayer. Liturgical silence is akin to the silence of prayer. It is made up of recollection, inner peace, attention to the essential, and in dialogue with the Lord.
The liturgy, as participation in the prayer of Christ, addressed to the father in the Holy Spirit, and as celebration of the mystery of Christ, is the source and end of all prayer. Christ and all his mysteries is at Centre, leading us to the Father.
The various elements of the liturgy reveal more deeply, the meaning of the mystery being celebrated, assist and understanding the psalms, and prepare for silent prayer. Lectio Divina is when the word of God is so read and meditative that it becomes prayer.
The quality of our prayer life, our inner prayer, influences the way we live the liturgy.
Prayer thus fosters liturgy that is worship and spirit and in truth.
Just as time spent in prayer gradually invites the whole of our existence with a spirit of prayer, time devoted to the Eucharist and the liturgy of the hours, also gradually transform our whole life into a liturgy.
Any authentic liturgy tends to spread, to extend throughout the day, to invade every available space, in time, in place, and above all in the hearts of those who pray. Authentic liturgy, always bears fruit beyond itself. It rubs off on life, tending to transform the whole of it into a ceaseless liturgy. -Don Andre Louf
Authentic prayer, always bears fruit beyond itself. It rubs off on life and tends to transform the whole of it into ceaseless prayer.
The Divine Office, as the public prayer of the church, is the source of piety and nourishment of personal prayer.
The one who acts for the kingdom does much. The one who prays for the kingdom does more. The one who suffers for the kingdom does everything. -Frantisek Cardinal Tomasek
There is no other way of Christian prayer than Christ. Through the Cross of Christ, the father accepts our prayers as the father and the parable embraces the prodigal son.
The cross and the resurrection are inseparable.
It is in this participation of Christ that we make our prayer life fruitful.
When Saint Teresa of Calcutta hears Christ say “I thirst” in the “I thirst” of the poor man, the cross invades her soul, and her adoration moves tirelessly from Christ on the cross in the Blessed sacrament to Christ on the cross in the poor man.
For we welcome the fruitfulness – painful as all childbirth – that the cross brings to our prayer and our adoration. If we unite our small every day crosses or the great trials of our lives with the cross of Christ, then we echo Saint Paul, who said “it is no longer who I pray, but cries to prays in me.“ Galatians 2:20
Participation in the cross infuses us with the fruits of humility, gentleness, goodness, peace, and profound joy, even in the midst of external storms
Every time the church invokes God’s blessing on our world, she accompanies her prayer with the sign of the cross: “in the name of the father and of the son of the holy spirit.“ Through the cross, our prayer encounters God‘s blessing .
Submit to God’s plan for the fulfilment of his will.
Are we paying enough attention to giving our soul what it needs to stay awake and fervent in God’s desire? The less we pray, the less we want to pray.
A frequent cause of spiritual laziness is the flight from the cross: seeking too much comfort and ease, human satisfactions, not accepting the annoyances and difficulties of life, and refusing all the little sacrifices by which the soul is strengthened.
In the passage from meditation to contemplation, one enters a form of prayer in which human activity is much reduced and simpler, more receptive than active. Prayer becomes simply a general, loving attention to God, with no particular emotions or representations to support it.
Dryness is sometimes a problem that needs to be remedied, but it can also be a great grace, the gateway to contemplation – to a new way of looking at things; a simpler, more receptive prayer, and which God secretly communicates himself to the soul and enriches it with great goods.
The knowledge of God does not dwell in a body that loves comfort. Saint Isaac the Syrian.
The Christian life causes to engage in genuine, spiritual combat.
Prayer is the best way to be united with God.
The fruitfulness of our apostle will largely depend on the quality of our prayer.
Christ was tempted in the desert and end Gethsemane. His weapons? The word of God and surrender to the father.
The important thing is to know how to discern spirits: to recognize and understand the subtlety of God’s action within us, and to nourish it, rejecting that which does not come from him.
God allows spiritual warfare only, insofar as it can make us grow and unite us more closely to him.
Joe was tempted only with God’s permission, and the fruit was of immense blessings, a true rebirth for Job, just as prayer is for us.
Prayer is a surge of the heart, it’s a simple look toward heaven, a cry of gratitude, and love and trial, as well as joy; finally, it’s something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and me to Jesus. St Therese of Liseaux
We are heirs to a pattern of prayer that we assume is perfect: to gather in silence before God for consistent period of time, during which we experience an outpouring of good feelings, and we make good resolutions. Anything outside this picture, we surmise, is not “prayer.”
Interior prayer means surrendering ourselves into God’s hands.
Prayer means taking our place on the holy mountain, where our God awaits us, and listening to him so we can be led to victory. Exodus 17:8-9.
Prayer means abiding in God and turning to him joy and in distress, and Sehn and Grace, and misfortune and in blessing.
Therese recounts an unbearable noise that distracted her during prayer time: I tried to unite myself with a good Lord, to forget the little noise. Everything was useless. I felt the sweat which flooded me, and I was obliged to simply make a prayer of suffering, but while suffering, I sought the means to do it not with annoyance, but with joy and peace, at least in the intimacy of my soul. So I tried to like the unpleasant little noise; instead of trying not to hear it - an impossible task – I focussed on listening to it well as if it had been a delightful concert, and all my prayer (which was not that of quietude) was spent offering this concert to Jesus.
Whether it is a prayer of well-being or suffering, of praise or desire, the Saints invite us to abandon our defenses, our views, and our ideas in order to embrace our life as it is, and offer it to Jesus so that he can offer it to the father as he is. The Saints tell us that the essential thing is our willingness to follow Jesus, to persevere in our desire to be his, and to unite ourselves in him, in body, soul, and spirit.
The Lord invites us to rest in his heart, in the face of life’s harsh trials and endless crises.
To pray with no other weapon, other than faith, hope and love, is the prayer that God, who scrutinize his hearts and minds, accepts.
What completely modifies me is prayer with firm hope of future blessings. Saint John Climacus
Faith must rise above abandonment, and lead man to keep his trust in God, in his mercy and solicitude, despite all the tribulations he goes through.
The compassionate father does not take away their trials, but gives them

[Daniel Sonntag · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful

This little book on prayer was perfect to get me back on a praying path. Heart-opening descriptions to help me along.

[Marian Bart · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is what happens when even a genius gets stuck into a group project. It’s not untrue, but it is stilted and repetitive and less encouraging than it means to be. Pretty artwork on the cover.

[Hana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each chapter is from a different author commenting on different methods or thoughts on prayer. It is always wonderful to read the reflections and thoughts from Jacques Philippe.

[Gonzaga Escauriaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Como todo lo que he leído de Jacques Philippe, es un libro muy bueno.