The Psalms are our prayers because they are, first and foremost, the prayers of the Beloved Son, who embodies our exile before the Father. Jesus was a part of the exiled Jewish community living under Roman occupation; The Psalms were His prayer book. They were the communal prayers that taught Him how to speak to His Father praise and sorrow, without any masks. If the psalms are the prayers of Jesus bringing His whole self before our Father, then they — in all their grief, joy, and violent rage — must be the prayers that lead us to Him as well.

A single word uttered from an open heart can do more for us than any amount of anxious babbling. There’s a lot of mental and emotional debris floating around us and within us that needs to be removed so we can see God clearly. Jesus reminds us that humility is our first posture in prayer, remembering that God is God and we are not.

One of the most ancient prayers we can pray is this: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me (a sinner).” A simple prayer like this is meant for repetition so that it becomes like breathing, sinking down from lips to heart - your spirit prays even when your lips aren’t.

A rich prayer life connects us to God from the inside-out, and from the outside-in. It’s valuable to have prayers that arise from our thoughts and feelings spontaneously, but often we might find ourselves stuck in where to go beyond that. Spontaneity does not equal authenticity, and it doesn’t lead us to maturity in the faith. We need guidance to learn God’s character and will. Liturgical prayers helps lead us places we might not go in our wandering.

Everything about our faith flows first from sharing in divine love with Jesus through prayer. Often the story of Mary and Martha is reduced to “don’t do stuff, just sit,” but there is something deeper at work. Jesus is not critical of Martha’s activity itself, but her motive. She is anxious because she finds her value in her good behavior and she is projecting her frustration upon her sister. Action and contemplation actually go hand-in-hand - to “pray without ceasing” is to merge our communion with God and our daily activity. Without contemplation, our activity burns us out and we become filled with contempt.

We need a “rule of life" to steward vision from God so we don’t get distracted. It is a fact of life that maturity, in any form, does not happen to us spontaneously. The life of the Spirit we are called to live into sees both our passions (what makes our hearts come alive) and our discipline (what we commit to regardless of how we feel) as gifts meant for our liberation.

Right action and contemplative thinking are important, but it is the love in our hearts for Jesus that keeps us close to him. To love God with our whole self is to pay careful attention to how each of our faculties are being redeemed by the word spoken to our souls, calling us Beloved. Contemplative thinking opens us up to possibilities beyond the conventional, right action helps us embody the truth, and emotional attachment binds us in the heart so devotion can sustain the journey.

I wonder if we were the ones Jesus asked, “do you love me?” how we would respond. We often think of love in sentimental terms, as feelings and inclinations. The Greatest Commandment, however, is an imperative to close the gap between our vague aspirations and the material reality of how we lives our lives; to bind the heart, mind, and body to our soul. I think here is is especially important we remember that Jesus does not ask us questions like this to bring us shame, but rather, to come to terms with this gap.

Love is an action. When I move towards my beloved, I have to attune my attention to her needs and desires. Rather than spraying loving gestures into the wind willy-nilly, I must learn - what can I do to love my beloved as she actually is, not the illusion I have built in my heart and mind? Sentimentality refuses to take an honest assessment of our actions, and it gives little heed to to desires of the object of our love.

As Christians we can fall prey to anti-intellectualism or rigid thinking. We might have been told “don’t think, just believe”, or we might have been told what we’re supposed to believe doctrinally but not how to hold those beliefs so that they lead to encounter; both types of thinking keep us on the surface of life, only reaching for what we already know.

At the empty tomb, John bends over as a sign of humility to see the strips of linen lying on the deathbed without a body to accompany them. Contemplative thinking enables us to to lean in and listen for resurrection possibility beyond our assumption about how life is “supposed” to work. The word contemplation derives from con- meaning “with, together”, and the root temple, which means “a space demarcated for sacred consecration”. To contemplate is to establish a sacred space in the mind to be joined with God, which is the goal of the spiritual life.

The goal of loving with our hearts, minds, and strength is to drill down and touch the eternal place where our souls rest in God, rather than remaining on the surface of our lives through emotivism, intellectualism, or frenetic activity. As we pierce the surface of life to encounter and embrace our soul, our true self in God, our whole person becomes the best sort of apocalyptic event, the place where resurrection manifests. We cannot experience resurrection life if we judge our hearts, mind, and strength by conventional means in the world outside ourselves. Integration only happens at the soul-level, as we recognize we are not even the culmination of our thoughts, feelings, or actions; but what we have been taught makes us “us” is united by something deeper than them all.