Flee Be Silent Pray

What if prayer could be simple rather than strenuous? Anxious, results-driven Christians can never pray enough, serve enough, or study enough. But what if God is calling us not to frenzied activity but to a simple spiritual encounter? What if we must merely receive what God has already given us? In Flee, Be Silent, Pray, writer and contemplative retreat leader Ed Cyzewski guides readers out of the anxiety factory of contemporary Christianity and toward a God whose love astounds those quiet long enough to receive it. With helpful guidance into solitude, contemplative prayer, and practices such as lectio divina and the Examen, Cyzewski guides readers toward the Christ whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light. Ready to shed the fear of the false self and the exhaustion of a duty-driven faith? Flee. Be silent. Pray.

For hard-working, anxious evangelicals striving to find God or experiencing a crisis of faith, Flee, Be Silent, Pray shares how Ed Cyzewski, a Protestant formerly devoted to dismantling Catholicism found peace with God through the contemplative prayer tradition of the church, embodied in the words: Flee, Be Silent, Pray.Resting in God's loving presence is counterintuitive for most evangelicals, but it may be the only hope for many hard-working followers of Jesus who have never experienced the scripture: "Be still and know that I am God."

When daily prayer and Bible study leaves a Christian anxious, doubtful, and frustrated, is there any hope for finding peace with God?Ed Cyzewski grew up in a restrictive Catholic Church, immersed himself in the hard-working world of evangelical Christianity as the path to knowing God, and then graduated uncertain about praying or finding God. The Christian prayer tradition known as contemplation, primarily preserved in monasteries through practices such as centering prayer, was the answer he didn't want to find. If his Protestant faith was going to survive, he needed to move beyond his past grudges in order to learn Christian meditation and contemplative prayer from Catholic teachers.Contemplative prayer goes beyond the limits of Bible study and experiences the loving presence of God described in the scriptures. While scripture and spiritual disciplines have their place, Cyzewski learned that the unstoppable love of God forms the foundation of all Christian spirituality, and that daily contemplative prayer helps us rest in God's loving presence.Using Henr� Nouwen's The Way of the Heart to highlight the three movements into contemplation with the words flee, be silent, pray, Cyzewski found what it means to quiet his religious anxiety by resting in the love of God. Anxious evangelicals and Christians on the brink of losing their faith will find an accessible path toward using this simple, proven approach to daily prayer.

This volume in the United Methodist Studies series challenges United Methodists to engage in life-transforming practices. The author explains a theme and underscores major emphases within the United Methodist denomination. This adult study is divided into four sections with suggestions for group discussion, and can be completed in 4 to 8 sessions. No leader’s guide is needed. The sections are: 1 - Living from the Heart - This chapter examines the essence of prayer and devotional life for United Methodists: holiness of heart and life. The chapter is divided into two sections to enable this examination: Cimmunion (heart) and Compassion (life). 2 - Read and Pray Daily - Exploring these two central disciplines in Christian formation and the Wesleyan Tradition guides readers into practical expressions of what it means to read devotionally (lection divina) and pray continually (the life of prayer). 3 - Get Connected! - The idea of "connectionalism" is a significant part of our tradition. This chapter examines this idea from two vantage points of classic formation principles and the concrete structures Wesley used in early-Methodism, which still contain implications for today. 4 - Go On! - The cultivation of prayer and devotional life in United Methodism is not about "attainment" but rather about "journey." This chapter examines the pilgrimage motif through the two lenses of the biblical doctrine of Christian perfection, and the practical development of that message through an action/reflection model of Christian formation.

While many practicing Christians are relatively satisfied with their prayer life, others are not. The latter often find their prayer practice has dried up. Their traditional forms of prayer at churches have become routine and empty. In a very real sense, there is a void in their spiritual lives. They want a deeper union with God yet experience an unsettling estrangement with their current pathway in prayer. In Contemplative Prayer at Work in Our Lives, Geoff Colvin draws on his own experiences, studies of spiritual literature, and participation in retreats and meditation groups, to unravel the challenging practice of contemplative prayer, a unique form of meditation involving very few words in silence and stillness. Contemplative prayer centers on the fundamental belief that God dwells not only in the world at large but also at the center of our being. This book offers Christians an approach for understanding contemplative prayer followed by hands-on detail for developing and sustaining a practice that hopefully leads to a richer and fuller spiritual journey to union with God.

Monasticism in the Mediterranean: Now and Tomorrow In this edition of Telos, the contributors were asked to offer readers their views and their personal stories in monasticism in its present form in in the Mediterranean. The continuing existence of monasticism in the twenty-first century may seem anachronistic to some and a quaint continuity to others. As the contributors to this edition of Telos demonstrate, the monastic call answers a deeper spiritual manifestation in the individual, transcending history. From the Mediterranean origins of this form of monasticism to today's Mediterranean reality, the monk is a comforting reference point, living a labour of love to God's eternal promise With articles by Aldo CAVALLI, Grigorios D. PAPATHOMAS, Salvino BUSUTTIL, Edward G. FARRUGIA, Henri TEISSIER, Robert FOUQUEZ, Frère MARIE PÂQUES.

“This is no simple ‘how-to’ book, but rather a profound challenge to consider a totally different kind of life. Lawrence Hart approaches these life changes from several different angles—each leading to the deep kind of knowing that is God’s gift to the true seeker.” —from the Foreword by Jean Dalby Clift For thousands of years, deserts have been geographical centers of spiritual formation and direct encounter with God. In Christian spirituality, men and women seeking the kind of purification that leads to wisdom of the heart have sought out the desert places. But the desert is also a state of mind or consciousness, a spiritual practice, an inner place where we come to have a first-hand experience of God. Designed for use by small groups or individuals, the Lenten meditations in this book lead us to this interior desert. The forty days of Lent are a time of metanoia (repentance), of emptying our hearts so that they can be filled with that love and presence of Christ we celebrate at Easter. Entering Lent, then, can be imagined as entering the silence of a vast and empty desert that leads to an experience of “alleluia.” What is essential in the spiritual life is, of course, not that we find a dry and sand-blown country far from any geographical city, but rather a desert place of the heart where spiritual transformation can occur. Lent, with its emphasis on taking spiritual inventory, repentance, renunciation, and preparation for Easter, is just such a desert. In fact, we can appropriately think of the forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday as a Lenten desert.

The Journey into God challenges the adequacy of the biomedical model alone in addressing the symptoms and causes of physical and mental illness. While allowing that the biomedical has its place in the treatment of disease, Dr. Kenneth Bakken argues persuasively that there are untapped resources for health and wholeness in Christian faith and practice. He invites the reader into the way of theosis, the transformation of the person in union with the divine. Opening the mystic heart of Christianity, The Journey into God gives individual Christians and the Christian communities of faith a trusty map for traversing the shifting spiritual terrain of health and wholeness issues in the twenty-first century.