Igna­t­ian Contemplations 

How Do We Pray with Our Imagination?

We meet new friends and we want to get to know them bet­ter. How do we do it? We share our sto­ries. We tell them about our child­hood, how we met our spouse or how our great-grand­­par­ents moved here.

We live in a ratio­nal, left-brain world with glob­al tech­nol­o­gy at our fin­ger­tips. Yet as human beings, our soul is still fired by col­or and imag­i­na­tion. Our minds are store­hous­es of images and mem­o­ries and through them God works in our hearts. Pray­ing with our imag­i­na­tions can cre­ate a deep­er and more per­son­al inti­ma­cy with Jesus, Mary, the dis­ci­ples and oth­ers writ­ten about in scrip­ture. We can take the famil­iar sto­ries we know and let them flow through our own imag­i­na­tion and see where the Lord guides it.

Using the imag­i­na­tion in prayer has been a trea­sured tra­di­tion in prayer for cen­turies. It prompt­ed St. Fran­cis of Assisi to encour­age peo­ple to cre­ate nativ­i­ty scenes at Christ­mas, to imag­ine the Holy Fam­i­ly as peo­ple like we are. Four hun­dred years lat­er, St. Ignatius of Loy­ola used imag­i­na­tive prayer as a key part of his life-tran­s­­for­m­ing Spir­i­tu­al Exercises.

How do we start? First, we get set­tled in a com­fort­able chair and in a qui­et place where we won’t be dis­tract­ed. Our first ges­ture might be to open our hands on our lap, and to ask God to open our hearts and imaginations.

Then pick a sto­ry out of scrip­ture. Read through it once slow­ly and put it down. Now we begin to imag­ine the scene as if we are stand­ing right there. What is around me? Who else is there? What do I hear in the scene? If I am in a house, what nois­es are in the house or in the street out­side? What are the smells I can pick up?

Now we begin to imag­ine the scene we read about. Who is in it? What con­ver­sa­tion takes place? What is the mood – tense? joy­ful? con­fused? angry?

Feel free to paint this pic­ture in any way your imag­i­na­tion takes you. If we wor­ry about his­tor­i­cal accu­ra­cy, it can be a dis­trac­tion that takes us away from prayer. This isn’t scrip­ture – this is let­ting God take our imag­i­na­tions and reveal to us some­thing of the inti­mate life of Jesus or oth­ers. If, in our prayer, Mary pulls the tod­dler Jesus onto her lap to tie his shoes or zip his coat, we can let it hap­pen that way. We don’t want to fret about the his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate kinds of food served at a din­ner or what kind of car­pen­ter tools Joseph might have real­ly had in his work­shop. Here is an expe­ri­ence of prayer that lets our imag­i­na­tions free them­selves from any­thing that lim­its them. This is God reveal­ing him­self to us.

It helps if we imag­ine Jesus and his dis­ci­ples as the real peo­ple they were who walked the earth. St. Ignatius imag­ined that the first per­son Jesus appeared to after the Res­ur­rec­tion was his moth­er and he encour­ages us to pic­ture Jesus appear­ing at home to Mary, watch­ing the joy and emo­tion in the scene.