Imaginative Prayer E-Book

Jared Patrick Boyd

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 452

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

How do we help our kids connect with God?Most parents want their kids to learn to love God. But most of us struggle to facilitate real spiritual experiences. It's hard enough to have a meaningful conversation with our kids about spiritual things, let alone help them experience true transformation in the presence of God.Jared Patrick Boyd discovered that children's spiritual formation is rooted in the imagination. When we lead our children through guided times of imaginative prayer, they can experience a connection with God that transcends mere Bible knowledge or doctrinal content. This unique resource provides six units of weekly guided imaginative prayer, themed around core topics: God's love, loving others, forgiveness, God as king, the good news of God, and the mission of God. Each unit has six sessions, providing a yearlong experience of spiritual formation for children ages five to thirteen.Through imaginative prayer, you can help your child connect with God. As you do so, you may find yourself connecting more closely with your child, and your own formation as a parent will deepen into greater awareness of God's work in your lives.

Leseprobe

For my girls

contents

Imaginative Prayer Creedal Poem

Introduction

How to Use This Book

PART 1: GOD’S LOVE

1 God loves so many things

2 He loves me

3 When I am lost, he will look for me

4 When I am sick, he wants to heal me

5 When I make mistakes, he will always have grace on me

6 There is nothing that can separate me from the love of God

REVIEW WEEK

PART 2: LOVING OTHERS

7 God invites us to live a life of love

8 Love is patient and kind, and does not make a list of people’s mistakes

9 Love invites people who may be left out

10 Love takes care of people when they need help

11 We love others with the love that God pours into us

12 People will know that we are followers of Jesus because of our love for each other

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PART 3: FORGIVENESS

14 Forgiveness means God welcomes anyone

15 Forgiveness means God takes away our sin

16 Forgiveness means we can forgive the sins of others

17 When we forgive, we will be forgiven

18 Love and forgiveness make room for reconciliation

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PART 4: JESUS IS THE KING

19 Jesus is the King who came to undo the power of death

20 Jesus is the King who came to defeat the power of sin

21 Jesus is the King who came to defeat the power of the Accuser

22 Jesus is a faithful King, even when his people are without faith

23 We have life with God through the faithfulness of Jesus the King

24 Love and forgiveness: this is how God became King

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PART 5: THE GOOD NEWS OF GOD

25 God made a new promise and it comes to us through Jesus

26 The good news of God comes to us through the words of Jesus

27 The good news of God comes to us through the life of Jesus

28 The good news of God comes to us through the death of Jesus

29 The good news of God comes to us through the resurrection of Jesus

30 We receive the promises of God when we choose to follow Jesus

REVIEW WEEK

PART 6: THE MISSION OF GOD

31 When we follow Jesus, we join the mission of God to bring his love into the world

32 The mission of God is to make everything in the world good again

33 The mission of God is to bring all things under the reign of king Jesus

34 The mission of God is to bring peace and reconciliation to everything

35 The mission of God is to take away the veil that covers up the presence of God

36 God is at work all around us: open your eyes and join God in his mission to the world

REVIEW WEEK

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Scripture Index

Praise for Imaginative Prayer

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Formatio

Copyright

Imaginative Prayer Creedal Poem

The most important part of the story is that God loves so many things.

That he loves me.

That when I am lost, he will come looking for me.

That when I am sick, he wants to heal me.

And when I make mistakes, he will always have grace on me.

There is nothing that can separate me from the love of God.

God invites us to live a life of love.

Love looks like being patient and kind and not making a list of people’s mistakes.

Love looks like inviting people who may be left out.

Love looks like taking care of people when they need help.

We love others with the love that God pours into us.

People will know that we are followers of Jesus because of our love for each other.

Forgiveness means we can have peace with God.

Forgiveness means God welcomes anyone.

Forgiveness means God takes away our sin.

Forgiveness means we can forgive the sins of others.

When we forgive, we will be forgiven. When we give, it will be given to us.

Love and forgiveness make room for reconciliation.

Jesus is the King who came to undo the power of death.

Jesus is the King who came to defeat the power of sin.

Jesus is the King who came to defeat the power of the Accuser.

Jesus is a faithful King, even when we don’t have faith.

We have life with God through the faithfulness of Jesus the King.

Love and forgiveness: this is how God became King.

God made a new promise, and it comes to us through Jesus.

The good news of God comes to us through the words of Jesus.

The good news of God comes to us through the life of Jesus.

The good news of God comes to us through the death of Jesus.

The good news of God comes to us through the resurrection of Jesus.

We receive the promises of God when we choose to follow Jesus.

When we follow Jesus, we join the mission of God to bring his love into the world.

The mission of God is to make everything in the world good again,

to bring all things under the reign of King Jesus,

to bring peace and reconciliation to everything.

The mission of God is to take away the veil that covers up the presence of God.

God is at work all around us: open your eyes and join God in his mission to the world.

Introduction

Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.

Pope Benedict XVI

What if education . . . is not primarily about ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? The education of desire . . . requires the pedagogical formation of our imagination.

James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom

This book is about connection. As a father of four girls one of my greatest desires is to pass on to them a deep understanding and awareness of the experience of God. My hope is that they would feel connected to God and the story God is unfolding in their lives and in the world around them. Will they see themselves as part of God’s story? Will they feel close and connected to God as they navigate decisions that come their way and pursue risks on the horizon? Will they say yes to all that God is inviting them into? This book is about connection because of the way Jesus asks us to imagine our life with him—he is the vine, his Father is the gardener, and we are connected to him. This is how we bear fruit. This is the image he gives us. This is what he asks us to imagine.

This book is also about formation. “Spiritual formation . . . is the intentional and God-ward reorientation and re-habituation of human experience.”1 Or, more simply defined by M. Robert Mulholland Jr., spiritual formation is “the process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.”2 Whenever we’re intentionally doing something to shift our experience or understanding of God, we’re involved in spiritual formation. When we’re working, in response to God’s grace, to shift our thoughts, the patterns of our relationships, and our actions toward a greater alignment with the life and teachings of Jesus, we are doing the work of spiritual formation.

And when we help others in their journey of formation, we become connected to them and their story.

We share in their experience, and we too are formed by it.

This book is an invitation to connection with your child and to your child’s spiritual formation.

Parenting, Connection, and Formation

In my late twenties, as I tried to settle into adulthood (and feeling quite unsettled), I began meeting with a spiritual director—someone with formal training in helping me pay closer attention to my conversation with God and the movements in my soul.3 I began to notice the story of my own formational journey, which took me all the way back to childhood. This wasn’t therapy. It was a form of prayerful attentiveness to how God has been present to me throughout the seasons of my life. It is an attentiveness that seeks to name God’s activity and my responses. One glaring observation was that while I had a powerful encounter with the love and grace of God when I said yes to Jesus at age ten, my next experience of God, the next time I felt the nearness of God, didn’t come until I went to a worship service at a Vineyard church six years later.

I have a lot of questions about those six years in between. I remember being asked, at baptism, what I believed about God, about the Bible, and about the cross. What I don’t remember is anyone asking me what my conversation with God was like. Or what my experience of him was like. Or what he might be inviting me into. I think, looking back now, that I would have loved to talk more about Jesus and my experience of him. I think somewhere along the way, someone would have heard me say out loud what I was thinking and feeling. Perhaps someone would have heard in my answers that my experience of God was filled with guilt and shame. And I think someone would have helped me see it differently.

The truth is that the church tradition I grew up in wasn’t really asking these kinds of questions. Spiritual formation and the contemplative stream in the evangelical world of the 1980s was just being birthed with Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, published in 1978, the same year I was born. It took the next thirty years for that contemplative stream to broaden enough to begin widely quenching the thirst of evangelical adults.4 And now those adults are parents and pastors (myself included), raising and forming children the best we know how. It’s second nature to raise a child in the way we were raised. It takes a ton of work to take the lessons we are learning and, in real time, think about how to recontextualize some of that learning for the little ones among us. When I started to sense a shift in my own formational journey, I didn’t have any idea how to offer my children a drink from the contemplative stream. I think I’m beginning to scratch the surface of what has been for me a big shift in my focus as a pastor and a parent. And that is why you are holding this book. This book is my attempt at helping to contextualize a spiritual formation for children.

And here is why.

As I set out to do some of that hard work of allowing my own formational journey to shape my parenting, I noticed something that felt unsettling to me as a pastor; I had spent nearly a decade meeting with a spiritual director, I had been trained as a spiritual director myself and offered a listening ear to dozens of people each month as part of my pastoral ministry, and yet I seemed to only be using rudimentary tools for nurturing the spiritual formation of my own children. I had grown in paying attention to my own conversation with God. I was even getting pretty good at helping other adults pay attention to their life with God. But when it came to these kinds of conversations with my own children, I quickly reverted back to asking questions about belief in God, the Bible, and the cross.

I was reading stories from the Bible and answering questions that my girls would bring up. I was trying to ask some questions I had learned through my spiritual direction practice, but I was having a hard time facilitating for them the kind of connection to God that I seemed to be experiencing in my own life. I was still focused on getting them to understand and believe the right things. And then I read a book by James K. A. Smith, a philosopher at Calvin College. Smith writes, “Human beings are not only, nor even primarily, ‘thinkers.’ We are not as defined by what we know, as we are but what we love—what we long for.”5

We are defined by our longings, and what we long for is at the root of spiritual formation.

I was having trouble connecting with my children around issues of faith because I was no longer focused on making sure I had everything figured out. I wasn’t really concerned with the questions and answers we typically think are important to pass along to our offspring. I had learned to embrace more mystery and tension than I was willing (or capable) of leading them into. I still, of course, believed things about God, the Bible, and the cross. But I was no longer connected to those things the same way; it seems that I had become connected to the vine, and all those questions that nagged my thinking self remained unanswered, though no longer central. My life with God had shifted from the importance of knowing to paying attention to what I was truly longing for. And what I longed for was the experience of God himself.

I wanted my children to connect with God, and I also wanted to connect with them in their experience of him. And yet we didn’t really have a shared vocabulary or a shared experience. I was reading Thomas Merton and Dallas Willard and finding that Wendell Berry was speaking to me as much about the gospel as anyone else had been. I had experienced some deep shifts in my understanding of my experience of God in places of silence, solitude, and imaginative prayer. I knew that I couldn’t expect my girls to become little mystics and plunge the depths of consolation and desolation. There are stages of faith to walk through, often with a more contemplative expression showing up later developmentally.6 We need seasons of certainty as much as we need what follows, which is often the tragic anguish when what we once held certain begins to trickle out the cracks in the façade of self.

But surely, I thought, there is a way to nurture them toward an awareness that God is present and can speak to them. Surely it was possible for my own children to experience God in ways similar to how I was experiencing him. How can I introduce my children to bite-sized pieces of the contemplative life and the experience of God? How could I give my children a memorable experience of growing in their awareness of what God is like? How might I help aim their desires toward becoming the kind of people who intuitively understand the world in light of the gospel?7

These were the kinds of questions I was asking, not only for my own parenting but as a pastor overseeing a kids’ ministry of close to one hundred third- to sixth-grade children. I was trying to think through how to reorient our kids’ ministry toward nurturing a connection with God and teaching parents how to ask the right kinds of questions so that our efforts as a church and parents’ efforts at home would reinforce each other. We were trying to create a culture in which parents understood that they were the most important spiritual influence in their child’s life. How do we help them connect in meaningful ways with their child’s spiritual formation? These kinds of questions led me to meet with Sam.

My Conversation with Sam

Sam was a typical fifth-grade boy. This is not to say that all fifth-grade boys are alike. Sam was unique, but he was typical—high energy, low attention span. Sam’s parents were also typical, though both had been in ministry positions in the past, which means they had a little extra insight into why we were all sitting around this table on a Sunday afternoon. Sam was their oldest of three children, and they were tired parents. They had that after-church kind of tiredness that most parents of children can tell you about. We all were on our second or third cup of coffee. Sam’s parents seemed a bit hesitant about some of my efforts to introduce contemplative practices in our church service and community groups. They were hesitant but curious.

Sam was all over the place during the first part of our meeting. His parents had informed me prior to our meeting that Sam had a healthy dose of ADHD. And this is exactly the reason I wanted to meet with Sam. If we can’t figure out how to pastor parents of kids like Sam, and if we can’t figure out how to pastor Sam—to help him grow up to be someone who is intrigued by Jesus and wants to follow the kind of life that Jesus invites us to—then we need to keep trying. Sam was just as much a part of our church as his parents were. And I felt like I wasn’t doing a great job of nurturing his formation. I wasn’t interested, however, in trying to get Sam’s attention. I couldn’t compete with video games or a high-budget youth program. I went into my meeting with Sam convinced that getting him to get a glimpse of what it feels like to experience God would be a good place to start.

“Sam, I want you to try something for me. I want you to close your eyes and listen to a story I am about to tell you.

“Sam, I want you to imagine that you are a crippled beggar. Sam, you can’t walk. All you can do is sit on the side of the road and beg for food. Imagine that you are on the side of a dusty road, Sam. Imagine it in your mind as though you are watching a movie.

“Now, imagine with me, Sam, that some friends of yours come and pick you up. They’ve brought something like a stretcher to carry you on. They are taking you to a house down the street because someone said that Jesus is there.

“Keep your eyes closed, Sam, and imagine that your friends carry you all the way to a house down the street—they’re going to ask Jesus to heal you. They think Jesus can say the word and make it so you can walk again.”

I’ve got my eye on Sam. He’s got his head down. His feet are fidgety—but he’s quiet. He’s really listening.

“Now imagine, Sam, that you get to the house down the street where Jesus is. Imagine that the house is completely full and there is no more room. You can’t even squeeze through a window because there are so many people in the house listening to Jesus talk. I wonder what he’s talking about. Imagine that you too are wondering what Jesus is talking about that has so many people listening so intently.

“Sam, I’m going to ask you a question, but it’s just a question for you to think about—you don’t need to answer me: Sam, what does it feel like for there not to be any room for you to get in to be healed by Jesus?”

I pause for just a bit. Long enough to give Sam some space, but not too long.

“Now, imagine with me, Sam, that your friends decide to do something crazy. They pick up the mat you are resting on and begin to climb the stairs that go up to the roof of the house. This house has a flat roof that can be walked on. You are now on top of the roof and your friends begin digging into the roof with their hands. The roof is made of mud and straw—and so little bits of the roof begin to crumble and you can see a small hole beginning to form. Suddenly, you and your friends are getting all the attention. Everyone is staring up at the roof from inside the house. Some men are down below yelling up at your friends—but your friends don’t stop digging.

“And you won’t believe what they do next, Sam. They tie a rope around you and they begin to lower you through the hole in the roof. Imagine, Sam, that everyone in the room down below is looking at you as your friends lower you to where Jesus is standing. The room is quiet, and everyone is looking at you. What do you feel as you are lowered down to Jesus?”

Again, I pause here. There is silence. Sam’s feet are no longer fidgety. Sam is now sitting upright, silent, with his eyes closed; he’s still. Something is happening here.

And then Sam says out loud, “I feel embarrassed. I feel embarrassed that everyone is looking at me.”

“Sam, imagine that Jesus looks right at you. How do you feel when Jesus looks at you?”

Sam’s eyes are still closed, but he smiles. “I don’t feel embarrassed anymore.”

“Imagine that he kneels down beside you and he takes your hand and says to you, ‘Get up and walk.’ Imagine that you stand up and walk for the first time in a long time.”

We get to this point and I’m not quite sure what to do next. It ends quite a bit more awkwardly than I wanted it to, but I knew that what had just happened with Sam was what I was looking for. I knew it. His mom knew it. And I think Sam knew it too. I asked Sam what he would think if we did this kind of thing on Sunday mornings at church.

“What if we could use our imagination? To watch the story inside our head as though we’re watching a movie? Sam, what would you say if we did some of that?” I asked.

He said, “That’d be cool.”

But I had no idea how I was going to make it happen.

Imaginative Prayer

The Christian imagination plays a great role in the spiritual development of the soul. St. John of the Cross

There is something mysterious and perhaps more than moral about the power and call of imagination. G. K. Chesterton

What I had stumbled across that afternoon with Sam goes quite a bit deeper than just pretending to be a part of a scene that includes Jesus. I remember hearing a story that Eugene Peterson told in one of his lectures. One of his grandchildren crawled up on his lap and said, “Tell me a troll story, Grandpa, and put me in it!” He used this story to illustrate our desire to get into the story—that there is a way for us to read and experience Scripture that puts us in the story. It turns out that there is a rich tradition of reading Scripture and imagining ourselves in the story as a way of prayer. St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, was converted through an imaginative experience of God.

In 1521 Íñigo López de Loyola, while serving as a commander under the Duke of Najera, was severely wounded when the French invaded the city of Pamplona, Spain. After a surgery to repair one of his legs, which was struck by a cannonball, he spent nearly ten months in bed with nothing to do except read two books that were handed to him: De Vita Christi (Life of Christ) by Ludolph of Saxony (a fourteenth-century Carthusian monk), and a collection of biographies known as The Lives of the Saints.His conversion experience happened in the loneliness of his convalescence, and through the adventure that he lived in his fantasies about what it might look like to emulate people like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic. When he read about the lives that these men lived, and when he imagined living as they lived, he found that his desires, his longings, began to shift away from daydreaming about becoming a hero in battle and winning the hand of a wealthy girl. His imagination, and thus his desires, began to shift toward following the person of Jesus—doing great things for the greater glory of God.

It was in that daydreaming and in his imagination where conversion took place. At first, he began to imagine himself in a story whose plot included him laying aside his life of wealth and privilege. It began as a fiction in his mind. But eventually, as this fiction was nurtured through contemplation and prayer, he felt compelled to make it true. As soon as he was able to walk, Ignatius began a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, giving his fancy clothes to a poor beggar and taking for himself a linen robe of poverty. Ignatius imagined his way toward a life of complete devotion to Christ. And then he enacted what had first taken place in his imagination.

St. Ignatius’s own conversion experience would later inform his method of spiritual direction for those who were looking to join the Jesuit order, as well as those looking to deepen their experience of God. In the Life of Christ, Saxony encourages his readers to place themselves within the scenes of the Gospel story and to make that imaginative exercise a prayer. He recommends the reader to look at the events of the life of Christ as though they were actually taking place. This method of prayer would become the center of the Spiritual Exercises (a series of prayers, meditations, and other mental exercises)that St. Ignatius wrote shortly after laying his sword and shield, in true chivalrous fashion, at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary.

My conversation with Sam was rooted in a practice that goes back nearly five hundred years. We were daydreaming together for the greater glory of God.I provided the scene for Sam, giving him a setting and directing his attention a little, but his imagination and the Holy Spirit did the rest. I never could have planned for Sam to feel embarrassed while imagining being lowered through the roof with everyone looking at him. I certainly couldn’t have forced the natural smile on his face when his attention turned to the face of Jesus. What happened inside Sam’s daydream is nothing that we could recreate or even fully describe—it belongs to him. It’s a gift. I’ve become convinced that in the spiritual formation of children we are looking for little movements like this. We can go back and help Sam name what he experienced. We can even help point to other stories in the life of Jesus that might bring up a similar response—Zacchaeus being called down from a tree, Peter walking on water, Joseph holding the newborn Messiah—but we can’t see what Sam sees. And we can’t predict where Sam will make a connection to the life and story of Jesus.

It’s his alone.

Now I had a connection to Sam. We had a shared vocabulary of experience. I know a little about what he experienced that day because I have had similar experiences.

A few months before my conversation with Sam, I had a profound experience with imaginative prayer. I was working through the preparatory exercises before beginning my own journey through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.8 After a brief time of slowing down and inviting God’s presence to be with me, I began to read through the passage found in Matthew 20where Jesus is telling a story about workers and wages. I first began to imagine myself as one of the workers who came to work early in the morning. I imagined working all day long, sweating in the hot sun, and watching other workers show up throughout the day. I paid attention to the anticipation I felt for receiving my wages when the work was complete. I watched as the manager began to hand out cash to each worker. And I felt the sting of receiving the same wage as those who had slept in that morning, taken a long lunch, and showed up just a few hours before the work was finished. Finally, I started over and reviewed the whole story by imagining myself in the shoes of the latecomer.

The one who missed the morning call to work.

The one who overslept.

The one just squeaking by.

What if God’s love and grace were like this? What if he wasn’t paying so much attention to how hard I was working or what great thing I was trying to accomplish? What if the grace and love of God were simply a gift? Could I rejoice that others received the same as I? Could I allow myself to receive the abundance of the gift, knowing that I was undeserving?

Something happened in my mind that morning as I sipped coffee during my morning prayer. I wiped away tears as I felt the love of God wash over me. (In fact, I’m wiping them away now at the memory of it.) I closed my eyes and imagined what response I might have to Jesus as he tells the story. I imagined what it might be like to walk away with a pocketful of cash after just a few hours of work. I recognized that I was drawn toward Jesus, that I could see the grace of God, and that God was more generous than I had imagined.

All of this happened because I had a story to jump into, a little guidance from a book, and some time allotted to use my imagination in a way that didn’t come naturally to me. In fact, when I first started out in imaginative prayer, it felt quite clunky. I’m not by nature a very playful person. I studied philosophy in college, and I studied a lot. Most of the books I had read up until a few years ago were nonfiction. Stories, science fiction, and make-believe have never been my strong suit. But there was no denying that something happened in me that day. I had experienced God’s presence and something shifted.

As I continued to work my way through the Spiritual Exercises I began to wonder whether my children might be able to enter into some of what I was doing. I watched them playing dress-up and make believing all sorts of things. They had no trouble imagining themselves as one of the characters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Certainly they could put themselves into a Jesus story. Perhaps in pretending to be with Jesus, they might experience firsthand what it was like to see him bring the kingdom.

For a few weeks I began to sit quietly with one or more of my daughters. I would help them create the scene of one of the stories of Jesus in their imagination. It was simple: I would pick a story from one of the Gospels and begin to narrate what was happening in the story.

But here is what happened that convinced me we were onto something. One evening during our bedtime routine that includes a time of connection with each of our four girls, I was trying to explain to one of my daughters, who was then eight years old, that God is present to us whenever we need him, that he sees us and knows us and even though we cannot see him, we can know him. “What do you mean?” she asked. She was curious enough and engaged enough that I knew she wanted to know more; I just didn’t know how to explain it. I couldn’t quite put it into words because I don’t think I fully understood it myself.

I invited her to close her eyes and began to rub her back. How do I explain to an eight-year-old that God is present with her? I started to speak.

“Imagine with me that you are lying in bed and are about to go to sleep. Imagine that Jesus comes into your room and is rubbing your back and singing you a song, just like Daddy does each night. Imagine that right now it is Jesus who is rubbing your back.”

I paused briefly.

“What would you ask Jesus if he were here? What would you say to him?”

I paused again, not even knowing if she was still awake. There was a long enough pause that I assumed that she had fallen asleep. But just as I stopped rubbing her back, and as I stood up to leave the room, she said, “I would ask him to hold me while I sleep.” I knelt beside her bed and quickly said to her in a whisper, “And what do you think he would say back to you?”

“He would say yes.”

How to Use This Book

[Knowing] God is mediated through formation, imitation, affectivity, intuition, imagination, interiorization, and symbolic engagement.

Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome

How can we use our child’s imagination in the process of their spiritual formation?

Let’s go back to the story of Sam from chapter one. I can’t describe Sam’s experience for you, but I can describe what I witnessed: nothing less than Sam dipping his toe into the contemplative stream of Christian experience. Instead of rehearsing some abstract doctrine, Sam had an experience of Jesus. Instead of reciting something that someone wrote over five hundred years ago, Sam left that day with a memory of something that happened to him. Instead of sitting through another Bible lesson, Sam climbed into the story and imagined what it would be like to be healed by Jesus. We helped Sam make a connection to Jesus through a real experience of God. This experience created a memory. And this memory can be drawn upon in the future. This memory will represent (literally re-present) Jesus to him at some point in the future.

This book is written to help you have a full year of spiritual formational experiences with your child.1 This book is written to provide a new shared vocabulary of the experience of God. When both you and your child can imagine your way into the story, you each have your own experiences. And though you aren’t experiencing the exact same thing, you share the context and the story. If you’ve ever had an opportunity to stand in front of a Van Gogh painting or have viewed the Rocky Mountains from the top of a “fourteener”—when you meet someone who has also had that experience, you have a connection and a shared vocabulary.

Children are unique little creatures. You may find that your child seems engaged in the imaginative prayer sessions. Or not. Or maybe it’s a little of both, and there isn’t any rhyme or reason to it from one week to another. I have four girls with differing personalities and abilities. Each of them has experienced imaginative prayer in her own way, and I’ve experienced some level of connection with each of them as we engage in the practice. The conversations that follow these experiences are where the real gold is. I’m tempted, as I think many parents are, to try to figure out what works. Part of what it means to go down a path of a more contemplative approach of spiritual formation is to embrace the mess and leave behind the part that wants to quantify the progress. Let me set you at ease: the Holy Spirit will do the heavy lifting. And this kind of formation takes time.

Slowing Down

Our lives are busy. Most of us struggle to pay bills, do laundry, make repairs, and put healthy food on the table. Evenings are filled will homework and housework, play practice, soccer practice, dishes, baths, and getting ready for the next day. When are you going to find time to lead your child in imaginative prayer? It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to add something else into your schedule.

The question is, what can I take out of my schedule to make room for this?

In order to take on this spiritual formation journey with your child, you’ll need to make room for it. While some of what is in this book can happen on the margins of your life (we’ve planned for that), going all the way back to the desert fathers a general attitude pervades the literature on spiritual formation: nothing good happens in a hurry. Dallas Willard, one of the fathers of the evangelical contemplative stream, suggested that you should “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”2

This book is not a guide for busy parents. It’s an invitation for busy parents to slow down, take some deep breaths, and recognize that you are the most important person in your child’s life and spiritual formation. There is no environment your church can create to compete with the kind of connection that you are able to nurture with your child. Spend some time together as a family thinking through your weekly schedule. This book asks for one thirty-minute time slot each week, and ten minutes of conversation each day. Anything else that comes out of that is a bonus.

We’ll be exploring six themes together over the next nine or ten months. In truth, given the rhythms of many of our lives, while there are forty-two weeks worth of material here, it might take a full year to journey through.3 Once you have found a spot in your calendar for the thirty minutes of imaginative prayer each week, guard that time slot. Even this commitment, and your intention to keep it, will be a place of formation for your child. The habit you form in the practice of these sessions will do as much formative work as the prayers themselves.4 This book tends to build on previous weeks. If you set it aside for long periods of time, the continuity won’t be the same. But by all means give yourself some slack, and ask God for the grace to gently bend your life in this direction.

My hope is that you’ll keep this book in a special place on your bookshelf or end table, along with a journal, which you can use to facilitate some reflection with your child through drawn pictures and written prayers.5

How Is This Book Laid Out?

Each of the following six parts explores a theological theme: “God’s Love,” “Loving Others,” “Forgiveness,” “Jesus Is the King,” “The Good News of God,” and “The Mission of God.”6Each part is made up of seven sessions with six imaginative prayer sessions and a seventh session set aside for a week of review. Some of you will be reading this book as part of a larger initiative at your church where the imaginative prayers will be introduced during your child’s class, while others will be leading your child through the imaginative prayer yourself at home. Either way, each week you’ll have some guiding questions to help you stay in touch with your child’s experience of the theme for that week’s session. These questions are designed to deepen your child’s understanding and experience, as well as to help facilitate a greater connection between you and your child. These are the questions you’ll throw into the natural rhythm of your day. Each session has five sections.

Connection and Formation

Each session begins with “Connection and Formation.” This section is meant to provide the theological framework and the purpose behind that session’s imaginative prayer. It includes imaginative prayers that borrow from and build on themes from previous sessions. I try to point these out to help you see the connection. There are also some sessions in which further theological reflection might be helpful. Of course each of the themes we explore could be addressed in several volumes. I’ve tried, in less than a page, to say why this particular imaginative prayer contributes to the formation of your child. My hope is that part of the formation process will include some age-appropriate theological reflection. Again, the goal isn’t knowledge, but for you as a parent it’ll be helpful to see how the imaginative prayers contribute to a holistic understanding of the experience and work of God.

Q + A

Each session also has a “Question and Answer” section. This is a throwback to the style of catechism the church has used historically. From the late Middle Ages up to the present, the church has focused on knowledge and understanding of the articles of Christian faith through a question and answer format initially popularized in Luther’s Small Catechism. In a traditional catechism, a parent (or tutor) asks a child (or student) a series of questions like, “What is the chief end of man?” and “What is thy only comfort in life and death?”7 This question-and-answer format is still used today in church traditions that participate in a formal catechism. And, while it’s true that the answers to these questions are important—men and women gave their lives for some of the answers—this book has attempted to approach spiritual formation through the use of other (more contemplative and formative) avenues. Sometimes the patterns of pedagogy need to be revisited, modified, and reimagined.

This book began as an effort toward reimagining catechism for the twenty-first century. I believe the traditional question-and-answer format is still a valid form to help remind children of larger concepts. I’ve kept this remnant of traditional catechism in hopes that the questions and answers provided in each chapter will serve as signposts to the memories that we hope to create along the way. Each question-and-answer coupling is a stand-in for the imaginative prayer, which I hope will itself be a stand-in for your child’s experience of that prayer. I’ve shared a story in “Buckets of Water” (see below) of how I’ve seen this get fleshed out in our own experience. When you stitch together the answers to these questions, they make up a thirty-six line creed that can be memorized along the way. This can help maintain continuity throughout the year and serve as a tool for gathering up these memories once the year is completed. I see the use of this creed more like a poetry slam than any sort of test for proficiency or rite of passage. I do think the church needs ceremonial events for children as they pass from one stage to the next. Though I’d love to see these events as a celebration of a child’s life and experience of God rather than a demonstration of what they know or have learned about God.

Buckets of Water

An imaginative prayer in chapter eleven stands out to me as a good example of how the memories created in imaginative prayer can be drawn upon later.

In session eleven we are led to imagine that each time we fill with water the empty buckets of our neighbors, we find that our own bucket is made full again. Each time we see a thirsty neighbor (in an area where there is little access to water) and share our water, by some strange mystery we find that once we return to our own home the bucket is filled again. The point of the lesson is that we love others with the love that God pours into us. It is a lesson about how the work of the kingdom comes as a result of first being filled up with God’s own love for us. The resource we have to give, namely, our love for others, comes from what God gives to us. This lesson also sets us up for future conversations about the work of the Holy Spirit.

During the week that this particular lesson was at the forefront of our conversation, one of my daughters was planning to attend a playdate. She had everything packed for the day. The playdate was with a longstanding friend, though by looking at her you wouldn’t know it. I could sense that something was off, and so I asked her about it.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” I probed.

She told me that she and her friend had been experiencing some conflict recently. She was having a difficult time with something unkind her friend had said. We talked about forgiveness and then about love.

“What would it look like for you to love her right now?” I asked.

It’s a simple question that got her thinking. This question opened up even more conversation. She was having a hard time thinking what it would look like to love, because she felt hurt.

“What would it look like to take buckets of water with you?” I asked.

I smiled. So did she.

This question helped her understand that her friend was just like a neighbor in our imaginative prayer—someone who was thirsty and in need. This question reminded her that there is a deeper well she could draw from. We talked about what it might look like to get filled up before she left. We prayed together briefly. And she left for her playdate with visions of full buckets in her imagination.

The image of buckets of water was a signal of a larger story she had already participated in through imaginative prayer. She had a memory of that practice. The story itself was a stand-in for a bit of spiritual theology and formation—that we give to others out of the overflow of our life with God and what he provides. This is rooted in Jesus’ own experience of receiving the love of the Father (Mt 3:16-17), being filled with the Holy Spirit, and ministering to others with what God has already provided (Acts 10:38). Each imaginative prayer in this book is meant to work like this. We are looking for spiritual formation of our heart and desires through experience rather than knowledge. Your child may memorize the answers to poignant questions throughout this material, but the content they memorize is meant to be a trigger for the larger imaginative experience. Memorization is in the service of remembering.

Imaginative Prayer

The “Imaginative Prayer” is pretty straightforward. If you are leading your child through this material alone (without partnering with your local church),8 each week you’ll want to find a twenty- to thirty-minute time of quiet (not at bedtime) to lead your child through the imaginative prayer. I’ve written the exercises in such a way that you should be able to read each session out loud, slowly, and prayerfully, following the prompts—(pause 8 seconds)—for silence and cadence.9

Feel free to adjust the language for your household. Some of these prayers try to address themes (e.g., lust, racial injustice)that may feel a bit much for where your own child is in his or her experience or development. I’ve taken risks in introducing some important topics because true spiritual formation is rooted in the real world around us. You’ll want to be aware of your own child’s sensitivities and possible triggers that may be present in their emotional life. The imagination is a powerful tool and can often evoke emotions on par with real-life events.

Before each imaginative prayer, there is a short welcome of God’s Spirit. I like to take three long, deep breaths before I begin, and I encourage the child to join me in those breaths. My hope is that you and your child will marinate in each theme and revisit that week’s theme a little each day, even just for five minutes at the end of the day.

For the Parent or Mentor

The “For the Parent or Mentor”section is meant for your own reflection and devotional life as a parent. This is where you can create that shared vocabulary of the experience of God. I encourage you to share openly with your child about your own interaction with the imaginative prayer and the questions that it might provoke for you. Your own vulnerability here will go a long way in forming the connection this volume intends.10

As you lead your child through this book, my hope is that you too will go deeper in your life with and experience of God. I’ve provided questions that are meant to help in your own formational life (as well as some further invitations for you to consider). I believe that most of what we pass on to our children comes out of who we are and our own experiences. In short, it’s hard to lead someone where we ourselves haven’t gone. If you want your child to experience the wealth of God’s grace and forgiveness, it will go a long way for you to experience these first. You may have picked up this book with a desire to deposit some good things into your child. My prayer is that you too will see these next nine to twelve months as a journey in your own spiritual formation.

Suggested questions and conversation starters are found at the end of the section for parents or mentors. I’ve tried to provide more suggestions than you likely will be able to implement. The list of questions during the review week may seem particularly long. Just choose a few questions. Once you get going, your natural instincts will take over. These example questions are there in case you are stuck and need a quick reference.

These questions, and your own experience of the material, provide ever-so-brief moments of dialogue throughout the week (doing errands around town, walking to the school bus, eating meals). These moments will continue to solidify your child’s experience as well as create more places of connection for both of you. You might be surprised by the conversation that opens up, though don’t be discouraged if your child seems occasionally to lose interest. The goal is not to master the material. The material and exercises are here to foster connection and experience. If this starts feeling like a chore for you or homework for your child, something has gone off course.

For the Journal

At some point during the week you are encouraged to carve out fifteen to twenty minutes to encourage your child to write down some thoughts or draw a picture related to that week’s imaginative prayer. Many adults have found that keeping a journal has aided tremendously in their spiritual journey and formation. Additionally, articulating their thoughts and emotions on paper can either make something more concrete, in the case of writing (which comes from the more literal and analytic left side of our brain) or can open up a richer emotional experience through drawing (which helps us access the more intuitive, emotive, and nonlinear right side of our brain). Just fifteen minutes once a week can help make that particular formational experience stick.

You Are Ready

You are now ready to dive in! But let me leave you with one last thought. Even with another nine months worth of material—which is currently being planned—I wouldn’t be able to include every important scriptural theme or experience that you might hope to convey to your child about God’s good news for the world. I’ve made no attempt here to be comprehensive.

As you work your way through these imaginative prayers with your child, you may wonder why this is included or why that is left out. There are even some imaginative prayers that aren’t directly pulled from Scripture, but rather attempt to put your child in a make-believe setting in order to help them experience the deeper truth of a theological principle and experience of God, which may be the root of a larger theme of spiritual formation. Aslan on the stone table and the “deep magic” of Queen Jadis are two examples. There is no stone table in the Bible, but the image comes through, the scene does some heavy lifting, and there is something about that imagery that makes some things true of God’s kingdom stick. Fiction does more than ask someone to believe something. “When we tell a story,” and when we put ourselves into a story, “although we may hope to teach a lesson, our primary objective is to produce an imaginative experience.”11 These imaginative experiences, and the conversations that follow, I believe, will begin to do the work of spiritual formation in your child.

PART 1

God’s Love

1

The most important part of the story is that God loves so many things.

2

That he loves me.

3

That when I am lost, he will come looking for me.

4

That when I am sick, he wants to heal me.

5

And when I make mistakes, he will always have grace on me.

6

There is nothing that can separate me from the love of God.

1

God loves so many things

Connection and Formation

The purpose of this imaginative prayer is to help your child experience how vast and wonderful the world is. Your child lives within God’s ongoing creation. “It is the visual, fragrant, audible, touchable, and tastable manifestation of God’s love, the place where God’s desire that others be and be well finds earthly expression.”1 This creation is part of God’s revelation, it is full of beauty, and God loves every bit of it.

We are trying to help your child find his or her place in a world that is deeply loved by God. This is the opening session of part one, which explores God’s love. He is rich in love. He is not stingy. There are so many things that God loves.