Helping Catholics grow in contemplative prayer
Scripture doesn’t offer quick fixes—but it truly transforms us. In this episode, Fr. James Brent, O.P., shares how daily lectio divina with the book of Genesis changed one young mother’s outlook on her marriage, her family, and her interior life. Discover how God’s Word quietly reshapes the mind and heals the heart. Watch the full episode 42 of Contemplata, with Fr. James Brent, O.P., to deepen your intimacy with God.
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Fr James Brent, O.P., reminds us that whatever happens to us is also happening to Christ in us. You and I are so closely united with Jesus Christ, as branches are to the vine, that our joys, sufferings, and daily experiences are shared in him.
Watch the full episode 41 of Contemplata to reflect on this profound union with Christ.
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The Lord says ‘I am the vine, you are the branches.’ That is how the Lord wants us to think of the life of grace. Jesus is the head of the body, we are his members. There is a distinction, but there is one common life. You and I are branches on the vine of Jesus Christ.
You and I can say His life is mine, by the gift of His grace. Christ’s own life comes into us - we ingest His body and blood, and His life is something we receive, consume, and eat.
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Every word of scripture is full of fire from the Holy Spirit. Every time you and I take a word of scripture to heart great things begin to happen in our souls. We begin to recover our sense of the presence of God in our lives and in the world around us. The communion of our Lord Jesus Chirst is a heart full of the Holy Spirit - it is friendship with him, and knowledge of His love for us. It is living in His relationship with the Father, and calling His Father as our Father.
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The great plan of God is to unite human beings everywhere with His eternal Son, Jesus Chirst, by the power of the Holy Spirit. His plan is to make us live on a whole new level, so that we can worship Him with Jesus. In our baptism the love of God was poured forth into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. When you and I have been loved in that special kind of way we come alive. We are regenerated, refashioned, and recreated in the depths of our souls. And we begin to live the supernatural life of grace.
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Very often it doesn’t seem like God has a plan. It can feel like everything is going wrong. But we need to remember—God has a plan for the whole world, and for each of us personally.
St. Paul called God’s plan “the mystery.” Through Scripture, he was authorized by God to reveal this secret plan, hidden in God’s heart since the beginning of the world. What has been revealed is that God’s plan is Jesus Christ. In Him, we are drawn into the Mystical Body of Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, and invited to live according to God’s eternal wisdom and love.
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In order for us to live the spiritual life and really grow in our awareness and knowledge and love of the Holy Trinity dwelling in our hearts, one of the best practices we can take up is the practice of Lectio Divina—the slow prayerful reading of Sacred Scripture. Sacred Scripture is God's present and active medium of communication with us. Reading, meditating, and praying with Scripture is the way to contemplation.
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Each of us has an interior life—an inner room which Scripture often calls the heart, or the deep heart. And the Lord is telling us to go there to our inner room within each of us. He also tells us to close the door. That's what we've been talking about over the course of this podcast—we are called to become contemplative souls, to wake up to the mystery of the Trinity living and dwelling in our hearts by grace and grow in the sense of the presence of God.
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How do we interact with the indwelling Trinity and live in this presence of God? In this episode, Fr. James tells us there are three things we need to do. First, we need to guard our hearts, and not be pulled away from God by distractions and sin. Second, we need to enter our hearts by finding times of silence and recollection. And, third, we need to simply talk and pray to the persons dwelling within us—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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God is commonly present to all things, but in our baptism, God comes to be present in our souls in a new way, in a special mode. So how can we understand this special mode of the presence of God that we call the indwelling Trinity? In this episode, Fr. James explains that this mode of God’s presence in our souls is something really distinct. It's a way of being present that's person to person, heart to heart, so to speak.
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Through our baptism, and so long as we are living in a state of grace, each of us has the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit living and dwelling in the depths of our hearts. In this episode, Fr. James explains the mystery of the indwelling Trinity, which is so important because this particular mystery describes the point of contact between the highest mystery of them all, the Holy Trinity, and the mystery of our own souls. And one of the marks of the contemplative soul is becoming more and more aware of the gift of the indwelling Trinity that was given to us in our baptism.
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What's in the future? We are weak in our faith and we tend to conceive of the future as if God is not going to be there. In this episode of Contemplata, Fr. James explains that in the fifth paraclete promise assures us there is no future without God in it. In fact, the future belongs to the Father. We don’t know the future or what the circumstances or the events of the future will be, but we do know that whatever they are, God will be there for us. The Holy Spirit will lead us and guide us through all of it.
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The Lord promises to send the Holy Spirit to penetrate the hearts and minds of people who are listening to the proclamation of the gospel. And he promises that when the Spirit comes, he will convince them of sin and of righteousness and of judgment—so the fourth paraclete promise could be called the promise of convincing concerning sin. But what does this mean, to convince the world of sin? In a word, it means that the Spirit will illuminate a person's conscience to realize he or she has sinned.
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Why would we expect anyone today to come to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to come to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and to come to practice the Catholic faith? The reason we expect that is because in the third Paraclete Promise the Lord promised to send us the Spirit of Truth to bear witness along with us to these truths of the faith.
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The second Paraclete Promise the Lord gave us at the Last Supper was the promise of memory and understanding. This promise tells us what the Holy Spirit promised will do in us—to bring to our memories all that the Lord has told us and to teach us.
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At the Last Supper, the Lord promised to send his Spirit to dwell in each of us. And when you and I were baptized, we received the Holy Spirit in a whole new way—we came to have the very person of the Holy Spirit himself living and dwelling in the depths of our souls. You and I can also pray for this indwelling of the Holy Spirit to grow and to increase in us more and more.
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In this episode, Fr. James Brent, O.P., introduces us to what scripture scholars call paraclete promises, which are found throughout scripture and are a great reason to be confident in our prayer before God. Fr. James will point to many of these promises that God has made (which can be found in scripture) and, over the next 5 episodes, he will look at the 5 Paraclete Promises the Lord promised to send in the Upper Room. Pope St. John Paul II focused on these paraclete promises quite a bit. He really believed that this was the place to turn in order for the church and for the world to receive the renewal that we need so desperately.
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Petitionary prayer, meditation, contemplation, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary, the Glory Be. The Rosary has it all. If we stay with it and practice praying the Rosary, the different elements of it come together and gradually we realize that this prayer has the power to dispose our hearts, and the eyes of our hearts can then begin to look at the Lord with more love and affection, and the truth of what he has done for us in each one of the mysteries of his life can really leap forth for us.
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God is a refiner's fire, and he says through the mouth of the prophet Zechariah, “I will refine them as silver is refined.” What does that mean? You and I can ask for God to plunge us into the fire, to purify us, to separate out the lead from the silver within us. And he will do it because God is good and he has these graces of purification for us. The process of purification is going to be different for each one of us, depending upon the different graces of purification God gives us.
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There’s one prayer in particular that’s the best prayer and it is the name of Jesus. When we call upon the name of Jesus with faith, we should expect to receive his grace. The name of Jesus will work in our hearts and will do in our hearts, in a certain way, everything that Jesus himself does in the Gospels.
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“O God, come to my assistance, O Lord make haste to help me.” This prayer was taught to John Cassian and his friend Germanus by one of the desert monks, Abba Isaac, who told them if they just pray this prayer over and over again, their hearts will be set on fire. This prayer is a prayer you can pray in all circumstances.
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In this episode, Fr. James Brent, O.P., gives an example of how javelin prayers can be helpful in the spiritual life as he recounts a story about someone he knew who was a high-powered lawyer in New York. She barely had any time for extended daily prayer but could see the people around her were looking very lost and empty. She saw in them a real desire for God and wanted to find a way to slake their thirst somehow. By praying these short, frequent, “javelin” prayers, she led a life of serious prayer in the midst of a very busy life in New York City. Her life and her heart became a point of entry for God to enter into this world.
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As we’ve discussed for a few episodes now, one of the principal pathways to metanoia is prayer. And one of the principal challenges to prayer is distraction. Aside from external distractions which many of us suffer from, we have interior distractions. Even the Desert Fathers, who committed their entire lives to prayer, faced interior distractions from prayer. But they found a solution—short, frequent prayers—or “javelin prayers” as they called them.
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People—especially busy people—forget we can ask God for help with everything. No matter how busy we are, all of us are able to make frequent short prayers throughout the day. “Lord, help me with this situation at work. Lord, help me prepare the meal, etc.” Proud human beings don’t ask for help, but humble human beings live from one petition to the next. If we season the day with little short prayers, that’s a way to always have, or to develop, a life of prayer.
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When people hear the word prayer, they think about the various prayers that we say—the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Anima Christi. That’s one sense of the word prayer. We’re called to not only say acts of prayer, but to live the life of prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives this definition: the life of prayer is the habit of being in the presence of the thrice holy God and in communion with him. Fr. James Brent, O.P., begins to unpack what the life of prayer looks like in this episode.
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The purpose of our lives is to enter into the life of the Holy Trinity, and come to know something of the holy, awesome, and awe-inspiring life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The question is, “How?” The Lord Jesus tells us the answer very clearly. In the Gospel of Mark, the first thing the Lord says is this: “the time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.” The Greek word for repent is metanoiete and it comes from metanoia. Metanoia means the transformation of the mind. Learn more about the pathways of metanoia in this episode of Contemplata.
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The purpose of our life is to know, love, and enjoy God. More specifically, the purpose of our life is to know, love, and enjoy the Holy Trinity. In this episode, Fr. James Brent, O.P., meditates on the sign of the cross, a simple gesture that contains two great truths of our faith – that the purpose of our life is to participate in the life of the Trinity and the way is to follow Jesus Christ and him crucified.
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In previous episodes, we learned about the Eucharistic sacrifice and about the qualities of heart we need when we go to Mass. One of these qualities is thanksgiving. We need to take time to count our blessings. And two of the best ways we can prepare for Mass is to count our blessings and pray the Rosary. We can combine these two. Learn how in this bonus episode of Contemplata.
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“You become what you eat,” they say. If you eat the body and drink the blood of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ, who do you become? You become him. You become Jesus. You become another Christ in this world. You learn to live his life – his supernatural and divine Life. You come to know his Father. You begin to breathe his Spirit. You learn to walk as he walked. You learn to pray. You learn to listen to God. You learn to lay down your life in humble service of other people. In short, you and I learn to live in a personal friendship with God.
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At Mass, the people are called to co-offer the sacrifice. But how, precisely, do we do so? It is principally an affair of the heart, a matter of intention. Find out in this episode how heaven teaches us to form such an intention at Mass.
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Very often, when we think of going to Mass or not going to Mass, the question in our minds is, “What I will get out of it.?” We do not think in terms of what God is worth or how, in the Mass, we render to God the worship he deserves from us. But what is God worth? Even if you can’t receive communion that day, you and I have been given the grace, the honor, and the privilege to join with Jesus Christ himself in offering true worship to the Father at the holy sacrifice at the Mass. That is reason enough to go. God is reason enough to go.
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Pope Pius XII once said that “all the faithful should be aware that to participate in the Eucharistic Sacrifice is their chief duty and supreme dignity.” But how do we do so? What is our part in the Mass? The answer is simple. Our hearts should have the same qualities of the heart of Jesus Christ in his worship of the Father and our hearts should be a reflection of his. But what are the qualities of the heart of Jesus in his worship? Fr. James Brent, O.P., ponders some of these qualities of the heart of Jesus in worship in this episode of Contemplata.
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When we go to Mass, we remain on earth. But Fr. James Brent, O.P. explains that what we have on our altars in our earthly liturgies is one and the same Lamb of God as in heaven—not merely a sign or merely a symbol of the Lamb, but the actual Lamb of God—body, blood, soul, and divinity.
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There is one place above all where we can come to know the love of God—the Eucharist. It is called the sacrament of charity, the sacrament of love. And it was out of love that Jesus Christ set up this great sacrament in the Church. It was in order to remain with us always, in order to bring us back to himself in eternity.
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In this episode, Fr. James Brent O.P., talks about the Marian apparition at Knock (in Ireland) which he says is also a Eucharistic apparition—and that Eucharistic Adoration is essentially a sustained beholding of the Lamb of God. It is the perfect response to John the Baptist’s prophetic command: metanoeite! Mind your God!
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When we receive holy communion in a certain state, when we are well disposed with certain qualities of mind and heart, then holy communion will have a great effect on us. When our minds and hearts lack those qualities or are not well disposed, then the effects of holy communion on us will be less. The effects of holy communion run deeper, grow stronger, and last longer when we approach with the proper spiritual dispositions. But what are the proper dispositions?
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When we receive holy communion, the sacrament has certain effects on us—spiritual or supernatural effects. Just as food nourishes a child and causes the child to grow strong in bodily life, so holy communion nourishes our souls and causes us to grow strong in the spiritual life, the life of grace.
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As Catholics, we believe and confess that the Eucharist is the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, not a new or additional sacrifice, but the same sacrifice. How can it be so? In this episode of Contemplata, Fr. James Brent, O.P. further explains how the sacrifice Christ offered at Calvary is the same sacrifice on the altar at every Mass.
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Jesus fulfilled the law of sacrifice in a unique way when he offered himself to the Father on Calvary. In his sacrifice, we find the three elements common to all sacrifice. First, we find an inward or spiritual sacrifice—the offering of his heart to the Father. Second, we find an outward act of sacrifice—a definite gesture expressing the gift of his heart. Third, we find a thing offered. In this episode of Contemplata, Fr. James Brent, O.P., considers each of these.
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In this episode, Fr. James Brent, O.P., discusses sacrificial worship—human beings have, written in their hearts, a desire to offer sacrifice to God. Jesus taught us that the one sacrifice that would please God is not something we make up, but it is he, himself. He is the one true sacrifice that offers himself up to the Father.
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St. Paul tells us that Jesus Christ is the wisdom of God. To provide food for us, food that lasts eternally, the heavenly Father sent his Son into the world—the very wisdom of God.
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God is always working to recover our hearts by grace—primarily through his Word, through prayer, and through the Eucharist. More than anything else, the Eucharist forms us for eternal life. In this episode of Contemplata, Fr. James Brent, O.P., begins a series on the Eucharist.
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All of the teachings and all of the practices of the holy Catholic Church are given to the world for the recovery of the human heart. In this episode of Contemplata, Fr. James Brent, O.P., talks about a certain pathos of the human heart—that ever since the Fall, the heart has been embattled. But there is hope for recovering the heart.
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