As we enter another year of great promise and great change, I invite you to join me in a daily practice designed to guide you with prayer and ground you with the peace that helps restore you to balance.

Covering the timespan between winter’s end and spring’s new beginnings, this 40-day period is known in spiritual traditions and literature as a time of transformation. Meaningful change needs time to unfold and 40 days has long been one measure of its maturation.

To engage the power of that mystical number, I am calling this practice, 40 Days & 40 Nights, A Journey of Prayer and Contemplation, and I now invite you to walk its path with me. This journey begins in the traditional time of Lent and ends in the rapture of the Resurrection. Lent has long been known as a time of going within, of simplifying and purifying our lives, exposing our deepest shadows to the light of transformative grace, helping us empty ourselves out and allow in the healing truth of that grace.  

Each day begins and ends with a prayer. I suggest you devote thirty minutes each morning and evening as follows:

• First, before reading the prayer, spend 10 minutes in silent meditation to clear your spirit, allowing you to receive the power and imprint of the prayer.
• Next, read and re-read the prayer for 10 minutes. Dive deeply into each holy word or phrase, asking for guidance and healing. Note the feelings, emotions or images that present themselves.
• Finally, for 10 minutes pray calmly and with passionate focus, keeping your heart open; pray the prayer again, letting it flow through you. Sit calmly for any time left. Rest and when you are ready, jot down any thoughts or images you want to include in your journal and write about more fully later. 

Before you begin this journey, have a journal on hand so you can track what arises in you as the days pass. This becomes a valuable record not just of memory but of your own transformative experience during this stage of your soul’s journey, one that will inspire you as you continue on your own unique path.

At the end of this prayer journey, I will offer two optional integration sessions. I strongly recommend them because nothing is more wonderful or deeply helpful than sharing the feelings and insights you have experienced with others who have been on the same journey.

For my own part, I love these sessions because they give me the opportunity to engage with you in a more focused way to be what help I can as precisely and individually as possible. I love these sessions also because they remind me how many sincere and passionate seekers there are, and this is what I wish for you—this sense of solidarity with all those who love and want to serve God in this immensely challenging time. We need both our deepest and most solitary connection with grace as well as an ever-deeper connection to others and the grace that comes through them.

I hope that our integration sessions will be feasts of depth and truth that we will both be able to nourish ourselves from, to do our own unique work ahead.

Two live online integration sessions:

April 30 12pm CST / 10am PT
May 7 12pm CST / 10am PT

My dearest friends, please join me on this mystical prayer journey inspired by spiritual traditions through the ages and designed in this time of great change to give you all the strength, stamina and inspiration you will need.

Let us begin this deep journey of prayer and contemplation—for ourselves and all we love in this life.

With boundless love,
Andrew