The Bookshelf

Four Signs of a Dynamic Catholic

if you have read this book in the past, now may be a good time to bring it out again and re-read. If you are feeling adrift during our current environment, prayer can be the rock that keeps you grounded.

Taken from the book "The Four Signs of a Dynamic Catholic," by Matthew Kelly.

The Prayer Process provides a consistent format to guide you in your daily prayer. The first barrier to entry for most people who feel drawn to prayer is that they simply don’t know how to pray. They have never been taught to pray.

The Prayer Process overcomes this  first barrier by providing people with a format and a method. It provides the routine within the routine that dynamic Catholics have spent decades developing through the painstaking process of trial and error.

The Prayer Process:

1 Gratitude: Begin by thanking God in a personal dialogue for whatever you are most grateful for today.

2 Awareness: Revisit the times in the past twenty-four hours when you were and were not the-best-version-of-your-self. Talk to God about these situations and what you learned from them.

3 Significant Moments: Identify something you experienced in the last twenty-four hours and explore what God might be trying to say to you through that event (or person).

4 Peace: Ask God to forgive you for any wrong you have committed (against yourself, another person, or Him) and to fill you with a deep and abiding peace.

5 Freedom: Speak with God about how He is inviting you to change your life, so that you can experience the freedom to be the-best-version-of-yourself.

6 Others: Lift up to God anyone you feel called to pray for today, asking God to bless and guide them.

7 Pray the Our Father.

Awakening Your Soul to the Presence of God

It’s one thing to search for God and another thing to listen to Him once we have found Him. Many people never listen to God because they are not aware the He speaks to them.

Yet God does speak.

When does God speak to us? He speaks at all times, especially in prayer. Prayer is a conversation with God. But it is not a monologue. When we pray, then, we should also listen, because a good conversationalist is also a good listener. We do not pray well when we recite ready-made formulas quickly and distractedly.

We act as if God should only to listen to us, and that we have no need to listen to the thoughts and desires He wishes to for us.

Day by day, we must progress, seeing the hand of God in all things, being aware that He speaks to us and manifests His will in the joys, sorrows and circumstances of our daily life."

Wasting Time with God

At first, the book "Wasting Time with God," by Klaus Issler seemed slow moving, but thank goodness, I continued. The book became deeper the more I read, or maybe I became deeper the more I read.

This is a bit longer read, but still easy to spend short times with. Stick with it, the book builds on itself. The title intrigued me. It spends time addressing experiencing God in leisure. The foreword tells you what to expect. I wish I had paid more attention to it. It says the book may catch you off balance, and it did that to me.

I highlight things that impress me when I read. The chapter I highlighted most in this book is the beginning chapter, The Quest. This chapter asks, what are you looking for…which reminds me that same question on Holy Thursday on the Mount of Olives. The author does use some diagrams that may make the book seem more scientific, but don’t let that dissuade you. The author also takes you through friendship, humility, and faith as necessary virtues to develop as we spend time with God. He speaks of the need to become more “mature” in our capacity to know and be friends with God. As we do that, it becomes natural to want to just “waste time” with this God, we love.

The book is divided into two parts and if you stick with it, I guarantee your relationship with God will change and you may actually want to waste some time with Him.