It’s not easy to move from experiencing prayer as conscious mental dialogue to something more expansive and deep. But communion is meant to be so much more than an exchange of words in the mind or a transactional conversation. It’s meant to be a meeting, a mingling of being. An experience of the reality of one another.
There’s a whole lot to that, but in its essence it’s our simply taking Jesus seriously when he said, “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20), or “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink” (John 7:37) . These are not mental exercises, they’re soul-deep being-to-being ones.
This communion of inness is the heartbeat of prayer.
But how we move from conscious mental dialogue to this sort of intermingling with God? I explore moving beyond prayer as conscious mental dialogue in Beholding, and experiencing God in our deepest places (especially the intermingling of being) in my new book Thirsting. But here I want to offer something else, a guided invitation into a personal experience of the Trinity through imaginative prayer.
Now, before you freak out, imaginative prayer in a Christian sense isn’t engaging in fantasy or the fabrication of truth. It’s simply using our internal, pictured faculties and engaging in what the biblical authors describe as faith. We could call faith the application of our mind and imagination to truth (biblical, Christ centred truth), then living into it.
In this case we’re living into it by allowing our souls to experience it through prayer.
The difference between imagination in a pop Western sense and imaginative prayer in a Christian orthodox sense, is that the Western frame is self-created whereas Christian imaginative prayer is biblically inspired. We’re simply receiving Reality.
Why it matters that we do this in prayer and not just theology (as in through the intellect), is that prayer is the appropriation of truth into the body through experience. It rewires our neurology, our nervous systems, our hearts, will and emotions. Another way of saying that is that it hydrates us. By drinking, through the Spirit, the reality of God daily like this, we become new people. We’re transformed into that which we gaze upon, Saint Paul would say1.
The longer we enter a story of scripture, attribute of God or theology such as the transfiguration, the crucifixion, or the Trinity, the more we allow ourselves to experience it as true. In a way it’s like how when we recall a memory it brings us actual present joy. When we remember something, truly savouring it, we activate the same part of the brain that experienced it in the first place. We literally re-experience it.
That’s what this kind of prayer does except in this case we’re not recalling a memory, we’re entering it from the outside through faith, experiencing it now as our own. As we do it slowly becomes us, moving from the head to the heart, then into the soul.
I say all this simply as a primer to invite you to experience this kind of hydrating prayer through this guided prayer meditation on the Trinity. It’s based on a chapter in Thirsting called The Yearning which is about the pursuing, vital, eternal nature of desire that is God, and how it can reframe our understanding of communion and the gospel as a whole.
So, I invite you to pour a coffee, find some place comfortable, take a few deep breaths and experience the energising love and joy of the community that is God through this guided prayer.
May it awaken you to the
nuclear love, and longing,
that is Father, Son & Holy Spirit.
Much love,
Strahan.
“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:18
My new book Thirsting: Quenching Our Soul’s Deepest Desire comes out October 1st but you can pre-order it today from: New Zealand / Australia and United States. Have a look at how early readers have experience it here.
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