Category: prayer

The New Nakedness

Sr. Dorcee, beloved1 Comment

by my friend, Strahan. An insight into the true nature of our intimacy with God.

The New Nakedness

prayer is seeing the one who sees us

Commoners Communion

Oct 13, 2025

Prayer is vulnerability,
a willingness to live in
naked abandonment,
and in agendaless gaze,
never turning back.


This person is a divine radical.

They are totally unafraid to be seen, and have given up all fear of rejection and control. They are utterly free. Truly and totally.

Why? Because they have nothing left to lose. They have already bared all before God and been found not wanting, but embraced by perfect love. They have learned in prayer that they are accepted, and not to be afraid.

This person is untouchable by the world because they have found a home where they are never rejected, never turned away, or left alone. They are stable, immovable now. They have been “filled with the fullness of God”1 so much so that they burn with enough love to give away endlessly to all they meet.

They’re not self-protective. They, like Christ, are able to be seen as they are before the world unclothed in pretence or inhibited by shame because they have come to see their weakness as the very power through which God is more clearly seen and love more tangibly experienced.

This kind of peace is miraculous. Truly, it is. No self-help books can get us there, no affirmations are enough. Just telling ourselves we’re loved can get us some way, but not in the deep places where we know how broken we truly are. For that we need God himself, doing surgery in the deep self.

No, we must gaze eyes open and unashamed into the very burning heart of Love Himself and have Him tell us we’re wanted, we’re healed, we’re enough. This Truth is relational, personal, real. God is not a set of wishful affirmations, He is the Person for whom we were made.

We may not reach such perfection in this life, but we can grow exponentially in it. Daily living more and more from love rather than for it. Slowly relenting our insecurities and discovering confidence. Gradually becoming more like the God we see and know.

Don’t be afraid. If there’s reason to worry God will reject you in your brokenness then what was the cross for? Did God go to all this work simply to keep you at arms length? Do you think Christ himself would endure torture, humiliation and death just so you could continue to wonder whether you’re wanted, loved, and accepted?

Of course not! Don’t forget that it is God who loved us first, who made the first vulnerable move2.

Why not open up, be poor with God, and let him see all of you. Why not refuse to divert your eyes, gaze into his love, his pursuing desire of you, let it affect you, fill you, transform you. It is enough for God to see you each day like this to make you an entirely new person. One who is alive, and totally free, no longer afraid.

Then you too may pray the ancient prayer, “I have now seen the One who sees me.”3

It’s always with “unveiled faces” that we’re invited to “contemplate the Lord’s glory” in communion. Anything less steals from God what he desires most: our naked abandonment to his presence.

Amen.

1

Ephesians 3:19

2

We love because he first loved us.” – 1 John 4:19

3

Genesis 16:13

In an empty church

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

A beautiful short Sunday-poem. Using just a few words, Joseph Massey creates an exquisite image of prayer in an empty church. Do sit with it for a moment.

       In an empty church
in the middle of the day
dark but for stained glass
       flooded with sun, a prayer
held in the breath in my hands. 

 

You can find his latest bestselling book of poems here. 

If you desire

Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment

Blue Journal December 17, 2000

“If you desire to know how these things come about, ask grace, not instruction; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not diligent reading; the Spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity, not light, but the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections.”  (St. Bonaventure)

Praying for laughter

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

“I was close to giving up on prayer altogether. Instead, I started to pray for laughter.”   These words of Amy Julia Becker remind us that sometimes that is the perfect prayer to pray.  Read her guest post on Ann Voskamp’s blog here.  Good to read even if you don’t feel like giving up on prayer . . . ’cause some day you surely could.

This photo will make you laugh–if nothing else.  Me as a child. 🙂

Dbig mouth

I offer this stretch of path

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I would like to introduce you to a Professor of mine, Dr. Antony Lilles.  (“Catholic theologian, married father of three, living in Colorado since 1992.  Having completed doctoral studies in ’98, his research is dedicated to the wisdom of the saints and mystics of the Church.  He has recently published Hidden Mountain Secret Garden, Omaha: Discerning Hearts (2012).”   You can follow him on his blog: Beginning to Pray.

Dr. Lilles is currently walking the Way of St. James in Spain.  Here is one of his reflections, written yesterday.  In it he gives some excellent examples of how to intercede in the midst of daily life:

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Faith on the Way

What does a pilgrim find in Spain?
A land of paradox.   Extremely modern communist style apartments can rise above very ancient and warmer architectural forms on the same street.  Miles of the old primitive path are interrupted by brand new roads or in other places bordered by electric fences (a deterrent for livestock or pilgrims or both).   Beautiful silence is sometimes swallowed by the droning of “power generating” windmills.  The spirit of Don Quixote and the spirit of materialism, idealism and cynicism, faith and skepticism, ancient Catholicism and new religions of drug culture, simplicity of rural living and the complexity of over technologized souls, joy and sorrow; all of these movements one picks up on while treading the via primitiva.
Asturias was very beautiful but the chapels and sanctuaries were all locked or else in ruins.   This made finding a place for daily mass very difficult and, really, our greatest hardship.  Now in Galacia, chapels and masses are a little more available.
The other hardship which we are still contending with is the walk itself … About 18 miles a day.  The body adjusts to this.   And there are only two days to go.  Still, more than half way and drawing closer to Santiago, I still find the last three miles always a little more difficult, but because of that, the very best for prayer.
It is not a deep mental prayer of insight, or or delving introspection, but a prayer of intercession that comes easiest, “I offer this hundred yards  in reparation for the scandal I caused in the hearts of others…please let them know your love and draw them close to you even in the face of my failure to witness- because no matter how great my sin, your love is greater.”
Or else “remember my friend who died.  His life was filled with so much ambiguity and difficulty, but you were with him through it all. Now, as he stands before you, let this little act of love I offer with my feet open up the floodgates of your mercy on him.”
Or again, “I offer this stretch of path in thanksgiving for all the blessings you have lavished on meand my family.  I did nothing to deserve them.  But you blessed us anyway.  Let these steps be for your glory …”
The one phrase however that returns time and again is “Into your hands I commend my spirit.  With this step, I give myself to you completely, I abandon myself to you, with all the love of my heart, with total confidence, for you are my Father.”
As I wrote this reflection in the Albergue, in the room next to me, graduate student Lucy Ridsdale’s voice echoed over the 1970s pop song playing on the local radio. It was paradox: sachrine tunes suddenly overshadowed by something deeper and richer, and more fully human.  Everyone stopped.  The radio was turned off.  One young man broke down in tears.
I will post that recording in the future but here is a rendition of the chant dedicated to St James, sung in Santiago almost 800 years ago, when Saint Francis trod this path during another age of paradox and contradiction, penance and renewal: O adiutor omnium seculorum