There are many books, some excellent, that help us to grow in our relationship with Jesus. I’m sure you have read many over the years. Most of these, at least the ones that have helped me the most, tell me something insightful about Jesus, encourage me in my faith, or set a lens on Jesus from a new and unique angle. All these ways, and many others, help us to see Jesus in fresh ways and understand what a life devoted to him looks like. We are all in need of growing in our faith – this journey is never completed.
The hope I have for my book is that it not only frames a life with Jesus as a growing and developing friendship, but invites you, the reader, to enter into this process through praying with your imagination, helping you to actually experience life with Jesus in new ways. St. Ignatius, in his Spiritual Exercises, says the goal of this way of prayer is that we might come to know Jesus more intimately, love him more deeply, and follow him more closely.
I write this in the book:
When we use our imagination in prayer we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Just as Jesus tells stories to draw in his listeners, the Gospel writers do the same, presenting stories that invite us to experience the reality of Jesus through our imagination. Throughout the Gospels, we see those who spend time with Jesus interacting with him as they would with anyone—speaking to him, listening to him, observing him, enjoying him, just as we all do with people in our lives. Imaginative prayer helps us imagine interacting with Jesus in the flesh like his first followers did. Imagining a scene and allowing it to impact us is different than listening to an essay about abstract concepts like love and forgiveness. When we pray imaginatively we move beyond a conceptual understanding of Jesus toward an actual encounter with him, in ways very similar to our experience of any relationship in our lives. (p.24)
By placing ourselves imaginatively into a story from the Gospels we are able to experience Jesus as a real person, we are able to notice and bring our real emotional responses into prayer more readily and we are able to bring our entire selves, mind and body, into our engagement with Jesus. This is how we interact with our friends all the time. Why not with Jesus?
There are three aspects to imaginative prayer that I want to touch on here:
Bodily Experience
Our Emotions
The Humanity of Jesus
First, the Body.
The 2024 Summer Olympics have just finished and we were thrilled with the amazing physical accomplishments of the athletes. One thing I have learned about high level athletes is that as part of their training and preparation they will visualize and imagine their race, or their routine, before they step to the start line. I saw many gymnasts doing this, eyes closed, their head moving from side to side and rotating, obviously imagining the routine one last time before they set their body to accomplish it. Brain researchers have discovered that the neurons firing while imagining a scenario like this are the same ones that fire when the body is engaged. That is amazing. (I tell a story in the book about research with piano players. It’s wild!). Praying the Gospels with our imagination is very close to actually experiencing these stories in real life, with our bodies.
Praying with our imagination engages our physicality in ways that help us to deepen our experience of God. The “activity” is happening in our minds, of course, but it is much closer to a bodily experience than the usual overly cognitive and rationalistic emphasis that many of us live with in our spiritual lives.
In the Crowd
After several weeks of imaginative prayer with a group of friends some years ago, I noticed that each time I entered into a biblical scene I was at the back of the crowd, arms crossed, watching Jesus but self-protective and wary. I recount in the book what happened next.
Slowly during that season of my life I began to feel a faint but growing desire to be closer to Jesus and to trust him more deeply. I no longer wanted to remain at a distance but I did not know how to get closer to Jesus. I knew I could not simply flip a switch and trust more. As I lingered with yet another crowd scene in prayer, I suddenly knew what to do. Though I was unable to flip a “trust-switch,” I could get my body closer to Jesus in my prayer, symbolizing my desire to be nearer to him and to trust him more. And so, in my imagination, I got up and moved through the crowd toward Jesus. I felt both nervous and excited as my heart began to pound. I plopped myself down directly in front of him. Jesus looked at me and smiled. I felt he was validating my longing to be near him, to love him, to trust him. I still did not know what this “trusting” would look like in my daily life but through my imagination, I was able to express my desire to say “Yes” to Jesus in a tangible way. (p. 79).
My imagination helped me to engage this deep longing in ways that words could not. Engaging my body in prayer, through my imagination, helped to move me closer to Jesus.
Our Emotions
Many of us struggle to bring our emotions into prayer. Perhaps we were brought up to approach God with reverence and awe, which usually meant with head down and emotions firmly packed away. Engaging our emotions can be difficult at the best of times.
The place where we tend to allow our emotions to come up for air is in our interactions with other people. Think about the last time someone cut you off in traffic, or you saw your child about to dart out into in front of a speeding car. Your emotions are on full display! But then we come to pray and our emotions are nowhere to be found.
Praying with our imagination helps us to bring the reality of our emotions into our prayer and relationship with Jesus. As we interact with him and see others doing the same, our emotional responses are right at the surface, because it is in relationships that emotions come out to play. We do not have to work at finding them and coaxing them forward. They arrived when we were not looking!
When Jesus turns to look at you in prayer – you feel that!
When Jesus heals your friend that you have brought to him – you feel that!
Our imagination carries our emotions, our longing, our frustration, our anger, our love, into our prayer and lays them at Jesus’ feet. Then he can see who we really are, feeling what we actually feel, not what we are “supposed” to feel. Emotions are the glue that hold friendships together.
The Humanity of Jesus
Growing up in a Christian home, Jesus has always been a part of my life, at least in terms of hearing the name and knowing who he was. But I discovered in my own struggle with God and life that Jesus was much more of a good idea than an actual person.
All the doctrines and the theology about Jesus had turned him into a kind of cardboard cutout.
It was difficult to see what a “relationship” with Jesus was supposed to look like, never mind a friendship. We can easily find ourselves living a spirituality that is very abstract and conceptual, losing touch with the lived reality of our daily lives. As a spiritual director, I hear many stories of people who find themselves in a place like this.
But the incarnation, the Word made Flesh, explodes all of this abstract religion once and for all. The incarnation invites us not only to contemplate Jesus as “one with the Father” but to engage with his humanity, as one who has “moved into the neighborhood,” as Eugene Peterson so brilliantly puts it. It is a scandal, for sure, that God would become human, but that is the core of our faith. We can state the doctrine but many of us struggle to engage with the reality. Developing a friendship with Jesus through imaginative prayer invites us into this reality.
Our imagination is the gift that God has given us to experience the humanity of Jesus with our humanity. As we do, we slowly come to know him more intimately, love him more deeply, and follow him more closely. Ignatius would be proud.
Come back next week when I will begin to walk through the stages of friendship that I engage in my book Friendship with Jesus: An Imaginative Prayer Journey. Until then, check out the prayer exercises as a way to dip into praying with your imagination. They are on the podcast page. (www.danheavenor.com/podcast).
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