Meeting with God Every Day

The gospels invite us to use our intellect and our imagination to comprehend and even see what God is up to especially in Jesus.  St. Ignatius is famous for encouraging us to use our senses to enter effectively into scripture. He wants us to be moved by it, both emotionally and literally in our perceptions and actions. 

God is very much alive in the actions and movements of people around us and of course in ourselves. Sometimes we/they co-operate with Gods Grace sometimes not. We can find ourselves in them. 

Praying with the imagination means we put aside questions about historical certainty in the text or the accuracy of what we are seeing in our minds eye. There is a place for those concerns but not here, or now. We are invited into the stories as they are presented to us and as they unfold in our own minds and hearts. We offer our faculties to God and ask the Holy Spirit to work with us and within us. We allow ourselves to daydream with a purpose, to receive God’s messages, noticing God at work in our real and messy world, through people like ourselves, individuals, couples, families. 

Each scripture has its own message and storyline which we are invited to enter. You may choose to be a bystander watching the events unfold or you may be moved to see yourself in a specific player in the story. Always spend more time where you are most moved because God is at work in those places. Your imagination may be operating visually or with other senses. Or you might enter intuitively and simply get a feel for what is happening. It’s important not to force something but to trust whatever comes for you. 

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It’s like putting on glasses. Everyone approaches a Bible text or story from their own perspective and for their own purpose — be they a committed believer ‘listening to God’, an academic looking to work out what was going on in Roman society in the early church, or a disinterested agnostic doing a classroom task.