Building a Prayer Life – St Gregorys Church

This evening we discussed and participated in prayers.

We considered

Our good experience of Prayer.
Difficulties in prayer
Our Hopes for Prayer

You were very inspirational sharing your varied experiences of prayer and it was a great delight to hear your conversations, and in particular to notice that you were listening to each other.

Graham Ledger gave us an introduction to contemplative prayer drawing on his extensive experience as a hospital chaplain, 3rd order of the Prinknash Abbey community, and a life time of discovering that prayer is essential to hear God's will in our journey of faith.

We concluded with Compline - one of the daily Office Prayers, which Christians all over the world - in their millions - pray knowing that others are doing the same.

Resources:

The office of the Church can be found online and in apps - several are available. Universalis is perhaps one of the best, especially if you pay for the full version which gives you access to the prayers for any day (the free version basically just gives you access to the prayers for today). The prayers are also available in several small booklet forms - The Magnificat monthly magazine is one such (also has other prayers and interesting reading in it).

Books: a few were mentioned:

Some of these may be in our library upstairs - there is a shelf of books on prayer there. You can go and have a look after Sunday Morning Masses. Or they can readily be found in online bookstores. A project coming up - is to catalogue our library, so that it becomes more useful to us!

Pray As You Can, Not as you Can't - Dom John Chapman;
God of Surprises - Gerard W Hughes S.J.,
Micah 6:8 - Any Bible including online
He and I by Gabrielle Bossis (Extracts available online) - the latter being spiritually verified and recommended by Abbot (emeritus) Father Francis Baird OB Abbot of Prinknash Abbey for 25 years.