Updated on April 22, 2024
Life to the Full – Lectio Divina John 10
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A meditation with John 10
I have come that you might have life to the full.
Blessings as you pray 🙏🏽💙☺️
Lissy
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.
Updated on April 22, 2024
Follow Me – A Guided Meditation
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In the spirit of the imaginative contemplation, I invite you into this guided meditation based on Matthew 4:18-20.
May you see Jesus in a slightly new way here.
Blessings as you pray.
Lissy
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.
Updated on February 21, 2023
Lent Retreat in Daily Life : The Spiritual Exercises
21 February to 18 April 2023
Hey Friends –
You may be familiar with the Retreat in Daily Life concept. If not, the idea is that rather than going away for a length of time on retreat, you carve out time in the ordinary patterns of your daily life, making a little extra space for prayer over a certain number of weeks. You also generally meet once per week with a spiritual companion/spiritual director during the retreat, to discuss what is coming up in your prayer life and how it is shaping you.
You may or may not know that Contemplative at Home meditations were actually conceived of while I was leading a group of friends through a retreat in daily life with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, back in 2015. I wanted to help my friends imagine how slowly they might savour the text in their prayer spaces, so I started recording the readings into my phone at meditation pace. An idea was sparked, and a few months later, the very first Contemplative at Home meditations were online.
The Spiritual Exercises are a series of prayers and meditations written by Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century, as he was founding the Jesuit order. Traditionally the retreat is made over 30 days of silence, but it can also be engaged with in ordinary time. The retreat invites you to grapple with who you are and who God is, what God’s work in the world is like and how you are invited to participate in that work. To pray through the Exercises is a deepening prayer experience.
I undertook the Spiritual Exercises a few years ago with my own spiritual director, with a wonderful translation of them written by an American Jesuit, Kevin O’Brien. Kevin O’Brien’s translation has also been condensed into a shorter 8-week retreat which sits beautifully in Lent and the week after Easter. This is the course I ran with my friends back in 2015.
This year I am inviting you to consider engaging in this course, this Retreat in Daily Life with me. The material is all freely available from the folks over at Loyola Press, and you are welcome to use it in your own time, in any way you wish.
If you’d like the camaraderie and accountability of a few fellow pilgrims, and the idea of praying with the Exercises through Lent appeals to you, you might consider joining me and a few others on this retreat. We will meet each Tuesday on Zoom to share the graces and challenges with one another, in small group spiritual direction.
If you’d like to join us, you’ll need to be prepared to set aside 30-40 minutes each day for prayer between 21 February and 18 April, and be ready to share and listen respectfully and with an open heart on our weekly Zoom calls.
If you do decide to join us, I can say with certainty that Lent 2023 will be one you always remember.
Do pray about whether this might be the right thing for you this year, and if you’d like to join in along with us, you can find more information over here about how to sign up and the fee I am asking for the group spiritual direction sessions.
If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch!
Looking forward to sharing this journey with you.
Warmly
Lissy
Updated on April 22, 2024
Baptism: A Meditation for Beginning
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In this 18 minute meditation, you are invited to remember the baptism of Jesus, and to explore where you are at just now, how you stand on the brink of something new and possible, and how you might like to open yourself to the Spirit of God at this juncture. You may want to use this meditation to pray about the next few months, or the next year.
No matter who we are, or where we are headed, we all need to hear the words “you are my precious one. You are beloved.”
If you aren’t familiar with Jan Richardson’s poem Beloved is Where we Begin, I commend it to you.
The text in this meditation is from Matthew 3:13-17, NIV.
Blessings, always, as you pray.
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.
PS There are a few minutes of silence at the end of this, please forgive! Episode is 17 mins.
Updated on April 22, 2024
Epiphany: Guiding Star Meditation
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This is a 20-minute meditation with the magi, who studied the stars, and followed a star whose rising signified the birth of the King of the Jews.
This mindful meditation gives you space to prayerfully reflect on Matthew 2:1-3 & 7-12, the visit of the magi, and to consider what insights the account may have for you. I find this a particularly helpful new year meditation, though it is by no means specific to a particular time of year.
We don’t know that the bearers of gold, frankinsense and myrrh were kings, or how many of them there there were. What we do know is that they brought three gifts, that they were astrologers, likely Zoroastrian, and that they came from the east.
I am reminded in my annual reading of Elizabeth Goudge’s children’s book I Saw Three Ships, that gold, frankincense and myrrh may represent wealth, worship and death, three profound gifts we may offer to the Giver of all.
Blessings on you.
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.
Updated on April 22, 2024
Advent Four: The Wolf and the Lamb (Peace)
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A meditation for the fourth week of Advent, with the prophecies of Isaiah 11.
Blessings as you pray.
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.
Updated on April 22, 2024
Advent Three: A Child is Born
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Dear Friends–
A meditaiton with Isaiah 9
Advent blessings
Lissy
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.
Updated on April 22, 2024
Advent Two: Prepare Him Room
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Advent is a time for preparing, for making space (though as Tsh Oxenrieder says in her Advent book “Shadow and Light”, to be still, to make space is an almost subversive act our culture’s December).
I do pray that you might find some space today to breathe, to be still, to listen and to ask yourself the question, what might it mean for my heart to prepare room for the Christchild?
Much love and every blessing as you pray today
Lissy
PS: Here we pray with Isaiah 40:3-5. The whole chapter is worth your Advent meditation time!
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.
Updated on April 22, 2024
Advent One: Come Thou Long Expected Jesus
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The liturgical year has closed and a new year dawns with Advent, as we, laden with sorrow and suffering within and without, long for healing and restoration, for justice, for wholeness, for peace.
Isaiah 35, (read here from the Message), points to a promise of life, of blossoming and singing and joy. It invites us to dare to hope, in the bleakest of places.
Come, thou long-expected Jesus
Born to set thy people free
From our fears and sins release us
Let us find our rest in Thee.
Advent blessings and much love,
Lissy
Contemplative at Home offers guided meditative prayer – space to slow down and listen to the truth that is being born out of God’s love for you today – drawing on Ignatian spirituality and at times, Lectio Divina.
Sign up for Lissy’s newsletter “The Contemplative Window” or join our Facebook group here
You can support the show by sharing it with a friend, rating it on your preferred podcast platform, making a one-off donation or becoming a member. Thank you so much!
All music by Pete Hatch.