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When I was a Jesuit novice, I was introduced to a wonderful method of contemplative prayer. Actually, it’s more accurate to say that I was introduced to contemplative prayer—period.
For outside of Mass and the occasional grace at mealtime, I had never done any sort of praying other than reciting traditional Catholic prayers and asking Saint Jude for favors from time to time. It never dawned on me that prayer could be anything more. Or anything else, for that matter.
The prayer I learned, based on techniques popularized by St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, goes by a number of names: “imaginative prayer,” “Ignatian contemplation,” and “composition of place.” Though Jesuits proudly like to claim it as their own, this approach had been around in various forms before Ignatius used it in his classic sixteenth-century text, The Spiritual Exercises.
Essentially, in imaginative prayer you attempt to place yourself in a biblical scene by using your imagination. Then you reflect on what God has revealed…
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