Prayer: Robert Harvanek, S.J.

It is frequently remarked that there is no particular form of prayer peculiar to the Society. I have never been able to understand this. It has always seemed to me that all Jesuit prayer, in all its modes, is prayer of the governance of God. What we do is respond to God’s grace and open ourselves to His action as He uses us to further His plan for His Kingdom. The consolation of the prayer is not in the prayer itself but in the way in which we are supported in the mission or the work that is given us.

What I am trying to communicate here is expressed in the formula found in Hevenesi’s Sparks from Ignatius. It is popularly known in its somewhat heretical form, “Pray as though everything depends on God, act as though everything depends on you.” Hevenesi’s formula avoids the heresy and expresses the Ignatian insight: “Trust in God, but with the awareness that, if the work is to be done, you will have to do it; give yourself to the work, but in the knowledge that, if it will be accomplished, it is God who will do it.”