William A. Barry - Praying the Truth: Deepening Your Friendship with God through Honest Prayer

Copyright 2012 The Society of Jesus of New England
All rights reserved.

Imprimi potest : Very Reverend Myles N. Sheehan, SJ, provincial

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright 1993 and 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The quotations from The Spiritual Exercises are taken from St. Ignatius of Loyola. Personal Writings. Tr. and Ed. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean. London, New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Wild Gratitude by Edward Hirsch is from The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Parts of chapters 10 and 15 originally appeared in Human Development. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged.

Parts of chapter 16 originally appeared in Catholic World. Permission to reprint is gratefully acknowledged.

Cover art: Yevgen Timashov/moodboard/Corbis

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barry, William A.

Praying the truth : deepening your friendship with God through honest prayer / William A. Barry.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN-13: 978-0-8294-3624-2

ISBN-10: 0-8294-3624-3

1. Prayer--Catholic Church. I. Title.

BV215.B372 2012

242dc23

2011037336

11 12 13 14 15 EPUB 5 4 3 2 1

ePub ISBN 978-0-8294-3657-0

To the staff of Campion Residence and Renewal Center with admiration and great gratitude

This book is the third in a series of books that explore the metaphor of friendship as a way to understand and to engage in the relationship God wants with us. A Friendship Like No Other gave indications from Scripture that God desires our friendship, and it explored some of the implications of using this metaphor for our lives as Christians. In Changed Heart, Changed World I looked at how engaging in friendship with God changes our world for the better. In this book I explore how our friendship with God transforms personal prayer. I hope to help readers engage more confidently with God in the kind of conversation the best of friends have with one another. I put the book in your hands with great hopes that it will enable you to enjoy talking with God as friend to friend.

As usual, I am grateful to many friends who have been willing to read my drafts and provide helpful feedback. Robert J. Doherty, SJ, Daniel and Patricia Farrell, Meghan Farrell-Talmo, Kathleen Foley, SND., Robert J. Gilroy, SJ, Francis J. McManus, SJ, James Martin, SJ, and William C. Russell, SJ, provided this gracious service for this book and helped me greatly, especially when my confidence faltered. Vinita Wright of Loyola Press gave invaluable suggestions on how to make the book more accessible.

My provincial superior, Myles Sheehan, SJ, read the manuscript in one day and gave it a thumbs up; he continues the encouragement to write I received from previous provincials. Paul Holland, SJ, my local superior during most of the writing of the book, and his successor, Robert Levens, SJ, gave me strong support. God has blessed me in my superiors.

In this book I tell stories of people I know, many of them through spiritual direction. I thank all of them for entrusting me with their experiences of God and for giving me permission to use these stories (altered to preserve anonymity).

During the writing I reached my eightieth year of life and my sixtieth as a Jesuit. My annual eight-day retreat in the summer of 2010 was a chance to thank God for all the blessings of my life. Prominent were my parents, my sisters and extended family, the Sisters of Mercy who taught me in grammar school and the Xavierian Brothers who taught me in high school, and the priests of Sacred Heart parish in Worcester, Massachusetts, who nurtured my earliest religious longings. Since I was staying at the College of the Holy Cross for my retreat, I was able to visit the cemetery where my Jesuit teachers are now buried and to thank them personally for all that they did to help me grow as a Christian and as a writer. Going over my years as a Jesuit gave me countless reasons to thank God for many Jesuit friends over the sixty years. Some periods stood out, among them my five years in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, where I was nurtured as a psychologist and writer by so many friends in the Psychology Department and as a religious by the community of priests and sisters who were studying alongside me during those eventful years. I thanked God with great joy for the years at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge and especially for the colleagues who cofounded and developed the Center for Religious Development as a training center for spiritual directors; the work we did together at the Center has colored the rest of my life.

Remarkably at this stage of my life I find myself as happy as I have ever been. It is remarkable since, for the past fourteen years, I have lived at Campion Center in Weston, Massachusetts, which is a renewal center and a retirement and nursing home to elderly Jesuits of the New England province who now devote themselves to serving God by praying for the Church and the Society of Jesus. The center is a large operation in an equally expansive building. Needless to say, the center could not operate without a rather large nursing, maintenance, janitorial, and kitchen staff and other personnel. Rather amazingly, in spite of its size and its diversity, Campion Center is a house of warmth, cheer, and love. Surely the fact that the Jesuits who are assigned to the nursing facility take seriously their mission to pray and to help one another in ways that are very touching contributes to this atmosphere; I admire them very much and am immensely grateful to them for helping to make this present stage in life one of my happiest. But the staff, by their generosity, their care for the elderly Jesuits, their extraordinary kindness and cheerfulness, their prayerfulness, their humor, and their love, make the atmosphere of the center possible. Many of these dedicated men and women are immigrants who work two jobs to help their families back home and who suffer when they suffer. I salute all the staff and gratefully dedicate this book to them.

May God be praised forever!