The Practice of Leading Contemplative Prayer
by Kevin Driedger
Sometimes after doing a practice for a while, you may be invited to lead others in that practice. And leading contemplatively is its own practice.
If you do have the opportunity to lead a time of contemplative prayer, be grateful for this. It is an opportunity to offer hospitality, welcoming people into a time and place of attentiveness to God.
My suggestions come from my own weekly practice of leading a time of contemplative prayer and lectio divina.
Prepare
Select a text for the lectio practice. One place to start is with the lectionary texts appointed for the upcoming Sunday. Psalms and poetry are other sources. Don’t struggle to find just the right text. God’s voice is not constrained by your choice. Keep the text relatively short (about 5 verses). With a longer text it becomes more difficult to hold the whole text in one’s mind. This is particularly important as participants are encouraged to simply listen to the readings, rather than study the text on the page.
Format the text as a printed document for the participants. Use 14 or 16pt font to make it easy to read.
Set up the gathering space with chairs in a circle, or however works best in the space. Place a candle in the middle. This provides a visual focus. Offer a prayer for those who will participate.
Center
Don’t worry about ongoing conversations as people arrive. They will stop when you begin. To begin, light the candle and offer a few words of invocation. This initiates the time and place for prayer.
Welcome others and outline your time together–a time of prayer using silence and scripture.
If these practices are newer to people, you may want to offer more detailed instructions for the process of centering prayer. If the participants are familiar with this practice, offer a few simple words introducing a time of silent attentiveness to God’s presence. Let them know the initial time of silence will last 20 minutes.
Encourage people to take a few deep breaths to prepare their body and spirit for this time of silence. You may wish to offer a brief spoken prayer.
Use a timer, or the Centering Prayer app to keep track of the time. This will reduce your anxiety around monitoring the time. The Centering Prayer app has a variety of sounds to mark the beginning and end of the time.
Once the time has begun, do not worry.
Unless something egregiously distracting happens, don’t worry if someone arrives late, or a phone dings, or someone nods off. These things will happen, and it’s best for everyone not to get anxious about them.
Enter the time of silence. You may feel particularly aware of the others in the group, but consider that a gift rather than a distraction.
At the end of the 20 minutes, give people time to stretch and get resituated.
Lectio Divina
Distribute the lectio texts.
Briefly introduce the practice. You may want to have detailed instructions about the steps in the lectio divina process but don’t share all the steps at first. That can be overwhelming. Simply say that we will read through the text multiple times with brief instructions between each reading. You may want to pre-assign readers or have people volunteer to do the next reading.
And once again, do not worry if others don’t do it “right.”
Offer the first reading, telling others to simply take in the whole text.
Leave some silence after the reading and then have someone read the text again. Invite the people to listen for a word or phrase that captures their attention. Tell them that following the reading they can speak that word into the circle if they wish.
You may wish to decide on a preset amount of time to leave after each reading. Leave more time than initially feels comfortable. There is no need to rush. Don’t forget to enter this practice.
Go through each cycle of reading and silence, inviting everyone to listen for what God might be saying to them in the text, and then to consider their response to God from what they heard, and after the final reading to simply rest in the text.
A bell or gentle alarm is a good way to end the final silence.
Closing
Leave a bit of time for people to get resituated and ask something like “And what have we heard during this time?” This opens a time for sharing brief reflections. This sharing can be very rich, but it should not last very long – no more than 10 minutes.
Thank the people for their participation and presence and extinguish the candle.
Breathe.
Be grateful.
Kevin lives on the Canadian prairies with his lovely wife June. He tries to bring a contemplative, compassionate, and creative spirit to everything he does.
