Contemplative Exercises

Praying with Your Imagination

How do we pray with our imagination? When 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 to the states.

We live in a rational, left brain world with global technologies at our fingertips. Yet as humans beings, our soul is still fired by color and imagination. So God gave us an imagination for a purpose. 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 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 leads.

Using the imagination 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 begin?

• First get settled in a comfortable chair in a quiet place where you will not be distracted. Perhaps open your hands on your lap and ask God to open your heart and imagination.

• Pick a story from scripture that interests you. Read through it once slowly, then put it down. Begin to imagine the scene. Imagine yourself in it even. What is around you? What do you hear? See? Smell? Who else is there?Now begin to discern the mood. Is it tense, joyful, angry, chaotic? Notice the emotion. Notice your own thoughts and feelings. 

• Be free to create the story any way your imagination leads. Worrying about historical accuracy can be a distraction that takes away from prayer. This isn’t scripture — this is letting God take your imaginings and reveal something of Himself or others. Let your imagination free you from anything that limits. This is simply a way of opening space for God to reveal and to speak.

Holy Exchanges

Find a calm quiet spot and begin by reading this prayer silently or aloud…

I wonder when you drop into your heart today, what you find there. If you’re like me, sometimes I find things there that I would like to change. Remember that we serve a God who makes holy exchanges. Beauty for ashes, a garment of praise for a spirit of despair, the oil of gladness for mourning (Isaiah 61). He is able to exchange…

So if you would like to make a holy exchange, I invite you to close your eyes and get an image of the Living God; however He looks for you. Imagine yourself handing Him whatever it is you wish to exchange. And imagine yourself receiving something better from God. Simply ask Him, “God what do you have in exchange for me?”

Then take some time to listen and receive. When you are ready, close by reading this prayer silently or aloud…