Book Reviews and More: Thirsting for Prayer - Father Jacques Philippe translated by Helena Scott

Priestly Fatherhood:

Treasure in Earthen Vessels

Father Jacques Philippe
Helena Scott (Translator)

Scepter Publishers

ISBN 9781594172083

eISBN 9781594172120

ASIN B00IRKFPVE

Thirsting for Prayer - Father Jacques Philippe translated by Helena Scott

Reading this volume marks the 19th time I have read a work by Father Philippe. Though several of those 19 were rereads. Everything I have ready by him has been excellent. I mainly read this volume while on a 4 day silent retreat and much of the material lined up with the meditations and talks that were given during the retreat. This is an excellent volume.

The description of this book states:

“"What the world most needs today is prayer. It is prayer that will give birth to all the renewals, healings, deep and fruitful transformations we all want for society today.... I am more and more convinced that everything comes from prayer and that, among the calls of the Spirit, this is the first and most urgent one we should respond to."

Many have already benefited from Fr. Jacques’ best-selling book on prayer, Time for God. In Thirsting for Prayer, Fr. Jacques revisits some of the themes covered in that book and develops new insights that are both profound and practical. This book of reflections will guide us with simplicity on the path to intimacy with God, helping us to develop an actual taste for personal prayer. This "school of prayer" opens us up to the encounter with God that transforms us from within.”

About the author we are informed:

“Fr. Jacques Philippe is a member of the community of the Beatitudes, founded in France in 1983. After studying in Nazareth, Jerusalem, and Rome, he was ordained a priest in 1985. He primarily devotes himself to spiritual direction and preaching retreats internationally. His published books on spirituality are the consolidated result of such work. He is the author of Fire & Light, Interior Freedom, Time for God, and The Eight Doors of the Kingdom, among others. You can find out more about Fr. Jacques and his preaching schedule at FrJacquesPhilippe.com.”

The chapters in the book are:

Introduction

I What Is at Stake in Prayer

1. Prayer as a response to a call

2. God comes first in our lives

3. Loving freely, not for what we get out of it

4. A foretaste of the Kingdom

5. Knowing God and knowing ourselves

6. Compassion for our neighbor is born of prayer

7. Prayer, a path of freedom

8. Prayer unifies our lives

II Conditions for Prayer to be Fruitful

1. Prayer as a place to find inner peace

2. The dispositions that make prayer fruitful

3. Prayer vivified by faith, hope, and love

4. The gateway of faith

5. The role of emotions in our prayer life

6. The role and limits of the mind

7. Touching God

8. The faith that opens all doors

9. Prayer and hope

10. The power of humility

11. Going down into ourselves

12. Prayer as an act of love

13. Conclusion on the “theological virtues” in prayer

III The Presence of God

1. God’s presence in nature

2. God gives himself in the humanity of Christ

3. God’s presence in our hearts

4. Praying the Word

5. Word and discernment

6. The Word as a weapon for the fight

IV Practical Advice for Personal Prayer

1. Outside the time of prayer

2. Establishing a rhythm

3. Beginning and ending prayer

4. The time of prayer itself

5. When the question “What should I do?” does not arise

6. When we need to be active in our prayer

7. Meditating on Scripture

8. Toward continual prayer

9. Repetitive prayers

10. The Jesus Prayer

11. The Rosary

V Prayer of Intercession

1. God refuses nothing to people who refuse him nothing

2. Intercession, a place for struggle and growth

3. When God does not seem to hear us

I highlighted a number of passages while reading this volume, some of them are:

“There are plenty of excellent books about prayer. Is there honestly any need for another one? Not really. I have already written a book on this subject some years ago, and I was not planning to write another. However, in spite of the risk of repeating myself on certain points, I recently felt impelled to write this present book, in the hope that it could help certain people to persevere along the path of personal prayer or to start out on it.”

“To be renewed in prayer is to be renewed in all the aspects of our lives, to find a new youthfulness. More than ever, God the Father is seeking those who will worship him in Spirit and in truth (cf. Jn 4:24).”

“I shall be talking essentially about personal prayer. Communal prayer, especially participation in the Church’s liturgy, is a basic dimension of Christian life, and it is not my intention to undervalue it. However, I shall speak mainly about personal prayer, because that is where people generally encounter most difficulties.”

“All men and all women are in search of their identity, their personality at the deepest level. “Who am I?” Sometimes we ask ourselves that question in anguish halfway through our lives.”

“Prayer and the meeting with God make us discover God’s unique love for us.”

“There is a much greater difference between people’s souls than between their faces, says St. Teresa of Avila. This unique personality is symbolized by the “new name” that Scripture speaks of.”

“Because of what we have just said, and for many other reasons besides, the discovery of God as Father, which is the essential fruit of fidelity to prayer, is the most precious thing in the world, the greatest of all the gifts of the Spirit.”

“One of the most beautiful fruits of prayer (and a way of discerning whether prayer is genuine) is that it makes our love for our neighbor grow.”

“Experience teaches us this. Faithfulness to prayer, even if it passes through difficult stages, times of dryness and trial, leads us progressively to find in God the deep peace, security, and happiness, that make us free in relation to other people. If we find our happiness and our peace in God, we will be able to give much to our neighbors, while also accepting all as they are, without holding it against them when they fall short of our expectations. God is enough.”

“Without faithfulness to our appointments with prayer, by contrast, there is a serious risk that our lives may never acquire any coherent meaning.”

“My prayer isn’t wonderful, I’m far from being one of the great mystics, I often have distractions and times of dryness; most of the time I don’t feel very much, and I certainly don’t claim to have reached the pinnacle of the spiritual life. Despite that, I recognize that for me, the fact of keeping these regular appointments with our Lord is producing an effect of inner pacification. This peace is not something I always feel with the same intensity, but it is often the result of my times of prayer.”

“A first point (which follows from what I am going to say later, but it is good to emphasize it) is that fidelity should be a principle quality of prayer. Jesus does not ask us to pray well; he asks us to pray without ceasing!”

“Faith is expressed, renewed, purified, and strengthened when exercised in prayer.”

“Ultimately, these considerations have one practical consequence, and it is an extremely consoling one. There are moments in our prayer lives when we are, quite simply, poor. Despite our good will and efforts, we remain arid, cold, devoid of feeling, understanding, and lights…”

“Prayer is an act of hope: it means recognizing that we need God, can’t manage by ourselves when faced with all life’s challenges, rely on God more than on our own resources and talents, and trust him to give us what we need. In prayer our hope is expressed and, in consequence, deepened and strengthened. This line of thought necessarily leads us to humility and spiritual poverty, which cannot be separated from the virtue of hope.”

“Our prayer lives lead us necessarily to experience our own poverty. Sometimes this is very painful, but we should not be afraid of this experience because ultimately it is extremely beneficial.”

“Let’s start from our own lives. That half hour or hour spent in personal, silent prayer, perhaps in a corner of our room or in a church, is sometimes a time of great beauty and sweetness. We taste a happiness, joy, and peace more precious than anything this world can offer.”

“Prayer brings us inexorably face-to-face with what we really are. Every single person has his or her dark side, that part of themselves that sometimes weighs heavily and is a source of shame, guilt, and anguish: human limitations, psychological weaknesses, emotional wounds, areas of complicity with evil, incapacities, falls of different kinds, etc. Prayer makes us enter more and more deeply into God’s light, and like a ray of sunlight coming into a dark room and revealing the tiniest speck of dust floating in the air, that lays bare our imperfections and sins.”

“That is how it is for us. Faithfulness to prayer involves a painful confrontation with what we have in our hearts. There we find things that weigh us down, tangled things, dirty things. But the day comes when, deeper down than our psychological wounds, even deeper than our sins and dirt, we reach a pure spring, the presence of God in the depths of our hearts, enabling our whole selves to be purified and renewed.”

“Prayer is a privileged place for love to be exercised, and hence deepened and purified. It is a marvelously effective school of love. It is a school of patience, faithfulness, humility, and trust, and these attitudes are the most genuine expressions of true love. Prayer is a school of love of God, love of our neighbor and also (not least importantly) charity toward our own selves.”

“It is essential to hold ourselves in God’s presence, poor and little as we are, but open and receptive to his Love.”

“Certainly, at the beginning of our prayer, we should give a light to our love: a mystery of faith, a promise of Jesus Christ, examples and virtues of the Son, the Beloved of the Father; but once our soul feels attentive to God, we can devote ourselves to loving him in accordance with what we see in him—and love will reveal new splendors to us.”

“It is a truth of faith that God lives in us, with a hidden but real presence.”

“The Council uses strong words here: the Word of God is the strength of our faith, the food of our souls, the pure and everlasting source of our spiritual life.”

“It is good for us to expose ourselves to the Word of God regularly. It alone can bring about a deep work of discernment and truthfulness in our lives.”

“It is not we who work on the Bible but the Bible that works on us. We need, day after day, to let ourselves be worked upon and shaped by it, by this or that specific passage. That means taking a risk, because the Word can sometimes tell us things we do not want to hear. But ultimately it works for life, freedom, and peace. Whether it corrects us or consoles us, it brings us life.”

“Jesus is not a link in the transmission of the Word; he is the Word itself, in its very source and origin.”

“Do not allow a single day to go by, then, without taking at least a few minutes to meditate on a passage of Scripture. It may sometimes appear to be dry or obscure, but if we read it faithfully, in simplicity and prayer, it will sink deep into our memory without our even realizing it. And on the day when we need it, in a time of adversity, that verse or some other will return to our minds and will be precisely what we need to recover our hope and peace.”

“The quality of personal prayer is obviously conditioned by how we live our lives outside our times of prayer.”

“Human life is made up of rhythms: the rhythm of breathing, the rhythm of days and nights, weeks and years… . If we want to be faithful to prayer, it must find its place in our life’s rhythms. Praying at a particular time of day, reserving a set point in the week for God, etc., should become habitual.”

“Our prayer is called to become not just one activity among others but the fundamental activity of our lives, the very rhythm of our deepest existence, the breathing of our heart, so to speak.”

“G. K. Chesterton argued that repetition is a characteristic of the vitality of children, who like the same stories, with the same words, time and time again, not because they are bored and unimaginative but because they delight in life. Chesterton wrote: “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again!’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead, for grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.”

“Not a single one of our prayers is ever lost. Sooner or later, each will be answered; perhaps not at the time or in the way we imagine, but when and as God wants, in his plans that surpass our understanding. Our prayers are not always answered as we would want, but the fact of expressing them always brings us closer to God, leads us forward on our inner journey, and attracts a certain grace that we shall one day see clearly and that will then fill us with wonder.”

“There is nothing like thanksgiving and gratitude to purify our hearts and make us experience this beatitude: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God (Mt 5:8). Blessed be his Name forever! Amen.”

I hope those quotes give you a feel for this volume. The first note where father Philippe states that another book on prayer was not necessarily needed but he felt compelled to write this one. I am very thankful that he did. It fit perfectly with my retreat and brought several of the points home and reinforced what I was learning.

Everything I have read by Father Philippe has been excellent. I have been recommending his books to others since I first encountered them nearly 20 years ago. In fact I occasionally check for new titles in English that I have seen French editions of but have not yet read. Hope they will appear in English. This is a book that will be of immense spiritual value to any catholic who reads it. It is a resource that would be great in anyone’s prayer corner or bedside table.

I can easily recommend this volume; it is an excellent read, I challenge you to pick it up and give it a read, your prayer life will never be the same!