Welcome to The Examine, your daily prayer hosted by Father James Martin and brought to you by America Media, a Jesuit ministry.

Please consider supporting this podcast by getting a digital subscription to America.

A subscription gives you access to all of our content and supports the production of the Examine podcast.

Please visit americamagine.org slash subscribe. The link is in the show

notes. Hi, I'm Father Jim Martin. I'm about to lead you through a traditional Jesuit prayer

to help you notice where God has been in your day.

But first, here's our weekly reflection.

This week, we're continuing our series on prayer. I'd like to look at faith sharing.

Essentially, faith sharing is the practice where you meet with a group of friends to share

where God has been active in your prayer or your daily life. Usually, the group is about

four to five people, though it can be larger if it's, say, taking place in a parish setting,

or being done on a pilgrimage, or during a group retreat. Faith sharing is pretty simple. Each

person offers their experiences of God's activity in their lives, perhaps where they felt most

moved, or notice God's presence, and especially what's been going on in their prayer.

Usually, it's better that there not be too much in terms of response from the other people in the group.

Why not?

Well, because often if someone is going through a hard time or even a dry time in prayer,

it's tempting for someone

else to offer advice or say, oh, don't worry about it, or, oh, I went through that too, or,

oh, let me tell you what to do, rather than simply listening and being present to what is going

on in that person's spiritual life. Overall, faith sharing can be a great benefit to one's spiritual life, not only because

you accompany others in their spiritual journeys, but also because you can see the different

...