Hey everybody, welcome to the Bridgetown Daily from Monday, April 6th.

Pray you had a great weekend and are feeling well rested and ready for the week ahead.

And even if that's not true, the sun has come out important.

Thank God, I feel like, all right, I can do this with sunshine.

Hey, today is the beginning of Holy Week.

And as I was praying about the Bridgetown Daily last week, I had an idea, what if for

Holy Week, we ran a week-long kind of mini-series on contemplative prayer.

And here's my logic.

My personality type in particular is bent toward anxiety.

And all of us right now, I think, no matter what your personality is, are dealing with anxiety

at some level.

We need now more than ever to come back to our breathing, to the here and the now and

above all to God.

And the best way I know how to do that is through contemplative prayer.

Now for those of you that are new to Jesus or prayer, what is contemplative prayer?

Well, it's a category of prayer, St. John of the Cross who has been called the great

cartographer of the spiritual life.

He was this kind of 16th century Spanish mystic and a sagesist teacher of contemplative

prayer.

And he once said, quote, our greatest need is to be silent before this great God.

For the only language he hears is the silent language of love.

Contemplative prayer at its most basic is exactly that silent love.

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