Contemplative Practice: Welcoming Prayer
Gregg’s Reflection
A few years ago, I had a failed procedure that left me in terrible pain. It was the worst pain since I had appendicitis in third grade. I had read and journaled about Welcoming Prayer, and got a chance to try it. I found that deep breathing, and following the prayer’s injunction to Let Go actually relaxed my gut, and helped me endure the pain.
Richard Rohr teaches that you can be in a posture of open arms and hands welcoming reality as it is, or folding our arms, clinching and resisting. He follows by saying God comes to us as reality. So accepting reality as it is in our moments of pain, paradoxically, is the way to endure and even lessen the pain.
As you read Jim Finley here, think about finding God hidden in your suffering. The Welcoming Prayer helps you find this space.
As a person ripens in unsayable intimacy to God, they ripen in a paradoxical way. They understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God sustains us in all things. God watches over us; it does not mean God prevents the tragic thing from happening, it means God is intimately hidden as a profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself.
James Finley, Richard Rohr, A Spring Within, p. 173-174
So, read on and learn to endure the worst life brings to you. Here is a short audio introduction:
Welcoming Prayer
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Journaling Prompts
When have illness, pain and suffering left you at the end of your rope, hopeless and helpless? How do you find relief? What might God be teaching you through that experience? How might these experiences usher in deeper humility?
Scripture
But those who suffer he delivers in their suffering; he speaks to them in their affliction.
Job 36:15
For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.
2 Corinthians 1:5
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered
Hebrews 5:8
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.
James 1:2
Ancient Writings
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Kahlil Gibran
I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, ‘It tastes sweet, does it not?’ ‘You’ve caught me,’ my friend answered, ‘and you’ve ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow when you know it’s a blessing?
Jalal Al-Din Rumi
What God arranges for us to experience at each moment is the best and holiest thing that could happen to us.
The present moment is always full of infinite treasure. It contains far more than you can possibly grasp. Faith is the measure of its riches: what you find in the present moment is according to the measure of your faith. Love also is the measure: the more the heart loves, the more it rejoices in what God provides. The will of God presents itself at each moment like an immense ocean that the desire of your heart cannot empty; yet you will drink from that ocean according to your faith and love.
God makes all chosen souls pass through a fearful time of poverty, misery, and nothingness. He desires to destroy in them gradually all the help and confidence they derive from themselves so that He may be their sole source of support, their confidence, their hope, their only resource.
There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action.
Souls who can recognize God in the most trivial, the most grievous and the most mortifying things that happen to them in their lives, honor everything equally with delight and rejoicing, and welcome with open arms what others dread and avoid.
Nothing happens to you except by the will of God, and yet God's beloved children curse it because they do not know it for what it is.
God teaches the soul by pains and obstacles, not by ideas.
Modern Writings
Perhaps the shortest and most powerful prayer in human language is help.
The acceptance of all that God has given us and the willingness to let it go - to give it back to him at a moment's notice - that's true human freedom.
Centering prayer is a training in letting go.
Gratitude is the awareness that life in all its manifestations is a gift for which we want to give thanks. The closer we come to God in prayer, the more we become aware of the abundance of God’s gifts to us. We may even discover the presence of these gifts in the midst of our pains and sorrows. Thus gratitude becomes a quality of our hearts that allows us to live joyfully and peacefully even though our struggles continue.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion 7/1/20
Understanding suffering is key in freeing oneself from the trappings of the mind. Mental liberation lies in finding the source of your suffering, facing its truth and then letting it all go, in order to release yourself from its burden. While our mental and physical levels of consciousness are vital, the most important level is our spiritual one. It is this consciousness that will set you free from suffering and the prison of your mind. So ultimately you have a choice. Following the desires of your ego will only ever result in suffering. However, discovering true happiness lies in following the voice of Spirit.
Joshua Seemungal, The Spiritual Importance of Suffering
This practice of Welcoming Prayer was originally developed by Contemplative Outreach’s late master teacher Mary Mrozowski, it is based largely on the teaching and wisdom of Fr. Thomas Keating and an eighteenth century work titled Abandonment to Divine Providence by Jean Pierre de Caussade.
I will give you a brief overview of the practice and then suggest you move through the experience in your own time and pace.
There are three main movements to the process of the Welcoming Prayer
1. Focus and sink in
2. Welcome
3. Let go
We begin the practice by allowing some time to move your focus and attention to your body. Allow some time to breathe and connect with what you are experiencing. Notice both physical pain as well as emotions. Bring your full awareness to whatever the experience is, without trying to change it. Notice how you experience this in your body. If you feel sad, how is that manifested in your body?
Don’t try to change anything. Just stay present.
Focusing doesn’t mean psychoanalyzing. This is not about trying to discover why you feel the way you do, or justifying your feelings.
This first step is the key to whole practice. By becoming physically aware of this energy as sensation in your body, you can stay in the present, welcoming it which is the second movement.
When you feel fully immersed in the feeling or experience, you begin to practice this inner hospitality and say very gently: ”Welcome, anger” or “Welcome pain, welcome.”
The goal of this practice isn’t to get rid of the experience you’re having, but to not let it take your awareness from being fully present to yourself and this moment.
What often happens is that we experience something we consider “negative” and then we begin to immediately resist the feeling. We may distract ourselves or try to figure out what is wrong. But these responses simply move us further away from an experience of this moment in time.
By embracing the thing you once defended yourself against, or ran from, you are actually disarming it, removing its power to hurt you or chase you back into our smaller self. You open yourself to hear the wisdom it might have to offer, to reveal what it is trying to say to you.
When we bring ourselves fully present to our experience, a remarkable thing happens. We find the courage and strength to stay with the moment. We surrender the desires of the small self to the capacity of the true or authentic self, the inner witness. The authentic self already has a connection to the divine, and is able to be fully present to whatever is happening from a place of calm and compassion. You can stay with your experience no matter its physical or psychological impact.
In this practice we stay present, welcoming it in, but don’t identify it. We come to recognize that this experience doesn’t define the whole of who we are. We are not made up entirely of our grief just as we are not fully defined by joy.
This act of welcome isn’t about condoning the situation that caused the physical or emotional pain. Surrender isn’t about accepting illness or rejection or pain inflicted by another as somehow just the way life is. You are welcoming in the feelings the experience triggers for you and letting them have some space within. This is surrender as an inner attitude rather than outer practice. Sometimes the events of our lives demand our resistance, sometimes we are called to say no. But the feelings we experience, these need room within our inner guest house because paradoxically it is only by inviting them in that we are no longer controlled by them. Once you are in right alignment with your inner experience, then you can discern freely how to respond to the outside world of experience. You choose from a place of centeredness and consciousness rather than reactivity.
The third step is letting go, but the temptation might be to move here too quickly. The real work of Welcoming Prayer is in those first two steps, staying with the experience and welcoming it in until the wall of resistance begins to come down on its own. When you feel this inner fighting of the experience dissolve, then you can begin to practice letting go. This is just for now, because as human beings we will continue to encounter the difficult emotions. This is not a final, forever renunciation of your anger or fear; it’s simply a way of gently waving farewell as the emotion starts to recede.
If you feel resistance to the letting go, don’t pretend, simply accept where you are right now and bring some compassion to yourself.
To let go you might say something simple like I let go of my anger and give it over to God.
The creator of the Welcoming Prayer used this prayer:
• I let go my desire for security and survival.
• I let go my desire for affection and esteem.
• I let go my desire for control and power.
• I let go my desire to change the situation.
When my inner experience is welcomed in, God can transform it for my own deepening. Welcoming prayer helps us to cultivate our ability to live with the truth of this moment, and to accept whatever is happening right now.
Take some time right now, begin with a few minutes. Focus on what you are experiencing without changing it. Once you name the feeling, Welcome it in. Stay with it as long as you need to, seeing if you can simply accept this as the truth of your life in this moment. Then when you feel a bit of release around your resistance, practice letting go, not holding on to whatever this was, knowing that each moment brings its own grace and truth.
Blessings as you go forward with inner hospitality.
Christine Valters Paintner, Guided Meditation, Abbey of the Arts
This might take a few minutes. Welcome the experience, and it can move you to the Great Compassion. Don’t fight it. Don’t split and blame. Welcome the grief and anger in all of its heaviness. Now it will become a great teacher.
If you can do this you will see that it is welcoming the pain and letting go of all of your oppositional energy that actually frees you from it! Who would have thought? It is our resistance to things as they are that causes most of our unhappiness—at least I know it is for me.
Mary Mrozowski, “The Welcoming Prayer.”