Release Self Seeking Prayer : pray in tenderness
After twenty three years in prison in the Soviet Union for doing clandestine missionary work, Walter Ciszek, SJ writes, “Gradually… I learned to purify my prayer and remove from it all the elements of self-seeking. I learned to pray for my interrogators, not so they would see things my way or to come to the truth so that my ordeal would end, but because they too were people of God and human beings in need of God’s blessing and daily grace.”
i do not want to pray
for those who meddle
in my way
i do not want to pray
for those I judge
have gone astray
i do not want to pray
for those whose actions
truth betrays
so… shall I pray
for me instead?
that my meddlers
be dead?
the miscreants
be shed?
the liars
be bled?
woe… then to me
who dare pretend
my righteousness
does not depend
on lion’s share
of greater part
refusing
to tare apart
the missteps and indescretion
of my foes
and own confession
lowering me
to my knees
praying holy
to release
my self- seeking
righteousness
pray then in sweeping
tenderness
Words through Debra Asis, by the grace of Infinite Generativity
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Walter Ciszek, SJ’s quote is found in today’s selection in An Ignatian Book of Days by Jim Manney is a series of daily reflections from the Spiritual Wisdom of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Throughout the book we hear the voices of St. Ignatius as well as many great thinkers and writers, long gone and present day, each uniquely revealing the way of finding God in all things. And that is my intention; to find God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality in whatever presents itself to me each day in 2024.
Each day I read, reflect and write on the selection, hoping to articulate the ways in which I come to know God/Divine Presence/Ultimate Reality via personal experience, impelled by the leading of my inner life.
INVITATION
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All words are generated by grace and the grit of a real human being,
Debra Asis writing challenge
