Ignatian prayer changed my life, and I'll tell you why at the end.

Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and this is Ascentra Presents.

We had a great crew of people go through OCIA this year, right? Just this massive group, but one of the questions they would bring up again and again is, how do I pray? I thought, oh my gosh, that's a great question. Because regardless of whether someone was baptized earlier in their life or we got to baptize them at Easter, a lot of people just don't know how to pray. There's so many different ways to pray.

We've talked about the pirate. whether someone was baptized earlier in their life or we got to baptize them at Easter,

a lot of people just don't know how to pray. There's so many different ways to pray. We've talked about the pirate prayer here on this channel. We've talked about other ways to pray. Lexio de Vina. There's a way to pray that I don't know if we've shared on this channel before. It's called Ignatian prayer. It goes back to a guy named St. Ignatius of Loyola. It's a very simple way to pray, but it is a powerful way to pray. It engages the senses. It engages the imagination. It engages God's word. Here's some steps to Ignatian Prayer. Now, obviously, if there are some Jesuits who are watching this, they'd be like, this is like first grade level Ignatian Prayer. So go watch some Jesuits tell you how to do Ignatian prayer. They're better at it.

It's not a technique, but it's kind of there's some steps here. First, as always, we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us. And one of the things, I'm always so moved by our students, whenever it's like, hey, Joe, would you pray for us? Or you lead us in a prayer? Jennifer, would you start us off in a prayer? A lot of times they'll say, okay,

and they will always pray the same prayer.

Come Holy Spirit, teach us how to pray.

And I think,

oh, that's so good. So first step, ask the Holy Spirit, just guide you in your prayer.

Trusting that God is going to guide whatever there is. Okay, great. Number one, ask the Holy Spirit

to guide you. Number two, pick a scripture, a scene typically from

the Gospels. This is one of the best ways to go from the Gospels. Let's take, for example,

here's the scene in the Gospels where Jesus gets into Simon Peter's boat to preach from the

from the boat and then he says, go out into the deep for a, it's like for a catch. And Peter says,

Lord, we've been working hard all night, but at your word, I'll do it. And so they lowered their

nets. They have a big catch of fish. Okay, maybe something like that. Because there's a lot of

action happening. There's a lot of scenes. So Holy Spirit, help. Second, read through the scene.

Third, pause. Sometimes it helps if you close your eyes.

And what you're going to do in this is you're going to go back in your mind over the scene

and you're going to add one sense, one of your five senses.

You're going to add the sense of sight.

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