Spiritual Life
Ignatian Contemplation (Imaginative Prayer)
Contemplative prayer · Ignatian tradition
Prayer in which the imagination and the senses are put at the service of faith: the one praying enters a scene of the Gospel, watches and listens, takes part in it, and speaks with the Lord who is present there. It is the characteristic prayer of the Second Week of the Spiritual Exercises.
Instructions
Choose the passage the night before and read it once, so that the morning is not spent hunting. Then: 1. Take a moment to recall that God is looking at you, and make the preparatory prayer, asking that everything in you be directed to his service and praise. 2. Make the composition of place — see the road, the room, the lake; put yourself somewhere in it. 3. Ask for the grace you actually want from this scene (St Ignatius calls it the id quod volo): to know Christ more intimately, to love him more, to follow him more closely. 4. Enter the scene with the senses: see the persons and what they do, hear what they say, notice what is happening to you as you watch. Do not analyse the text; be in it. 5. End with a colloquy, speaking to Christ, or to Our Lady, or to the Father, as one friend speaks to another, and close with an Our Father. 6. Afterwards — outside the prayer — spend two minutes reviewing how it went and note a line or two. Repetition is part of the method: return to the same scene later in the day or the next day, going back to the places where you found consolation or desolation rather than to fresh material.
Background
The method comes from the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola (1548), where it structures the contemplations of the life of Christ. The Catechism describes meditation as a quest that engages thought, imagination, emotion and desire, and notes that there are as many methods as there are spiritual masters.
Practice kind
Contemplative prayer
Tradition
Ignatian
Duration
About 30 minutes
Frequency
Daily
Content subtype
contemplative_prayer