People so often feel truly sustained by the prayers of others during difficult times. But the core of prayer’s miraculous power is first of all the transformation of the person who prays.

While Saint Ignatius was still a soldier, he was wounded in battle. Laid up at his castle in Loyola, he spent much time in fantasy. Sometimes he would imagine a heroic worldly life as a knight, at other times a heroic life as a disciple of Jesus. He enjoyed both of these fantasies.

His world would forever be changed when one day he realized that the fantasy of discipleship left him feeling consoled and peaceful. But the fantasy of a worldly life left him feeling depressed. He did not bring about the consolation or depression himself. While he could choose to take either path into fantasy, he was genuinely surprised by where the two different paths took him!

Ignatius understood these results to be the work of spirits, either God’s spirits or evil spirits. He would learn that the good Spirit builds us up, consoles, and affirms when we are trying to live the good life. The evil spirit tries to seduce us with pleasures but ends by pulling us down and leaving us miserable. Ignatius chose to stay in conscious contact with God’s Spirit, and he chose to follow the path of consolation.

Seeking conscious contact on a daily basis, he gradually became more sensitive to God’s gentle action in his soul and could more easily recognize it consciously. At times he experienced intense consolations or profound insights. He felt that God was his teacher, taking him step by step toward a new understanding of being a Christian. At one important moment in his life, he was released from a painful struggle with scruples. He felt led to found the Society of Jesus. His writing of the Jesuit Constitutions was a day-by-day response to consciously experienced inspirations of the Spirit. His way of life and the richness of his ministry to others confirm that indeed these experiences were the grace of God.

Jesuit spirituality is based on the continuing experience of God’s activity in our soul. When we open ourselves toward God, God speaks to us, and we can experience God’s Word to us.

Today women and men continue to enter into just such conscious contact with God. Perhaps on occasion a word of Scripture heard countless times suddenly, for no apparent reason, seems peculiarly and specially addressed to me. During prayer, someone might experience gentle warmth and love that they accept as coming from God. Or a freeing insight comes unexpectedly. A dream or a meaningful synchronicity between an outer and inner event brings consolation or affirmation. Often there is simply the felt presence of God, confidently believed.

Many women and men are taking their religious experience seriously. They are carefully taking the time day by day to be open to God’s grace. Some choose a spiritual director to help them discern God’s desire for their lives. People are joining groups in which they pray together and share their experience and faith. Like Ignatius, they are learning to be more sensitive to the presence and action of God within themselves. Their lives are truly lived out of their friendship with God.

The power of prayer is wholly and exclusively the power of God! More than anything else, the power of prayer manifests itself in the transformation, the healing, of the person who prays. The greatest miracle is always the miracle of a personality transformed in God!

When we are open to the transforming power of God in ourselves, that power is highly likely to break out in the lives of other people near and far from us. How it will do so may not always be visible to us. But it will always exceed what we ask or can even imagine!

I was surprised to see it. It’s not something seen very often in Roman Catholic prayers. In the prayers of the Eastern churches it’s there several times a day: “God, Lover of Mankind.” I love that expression, and so I smiled to read it in the intercessions for Morning Prayer just after Ash Wednesday.

God is, indeed, our Lover. We tend to ignore or even reject that reality. We are more comfortable with God as our Creator, our Lord, or our Father. But Lover? It seems profane or too intimate, partly because our culture tends to equate sex with love. Yet, from St. Paul to Pope John Paul II, the Church has taught that the union of a man and woman in marriage symbolizes the intimate union God wants with us.

This is the reality I feel at the heart of the “Suscipe,” a prayer we encounter near the conclusion of The Spiritual Exercises in a meditation called “The Contemplation to Attain the Love of God.” This is not so much a technique designed to win God’s love as it is a summary of the Exercises in which the retreatant reflects on how God has loved him or her through the wonders of creation and redemption, and the wonders of one’s own life and history. It is a reflection designed to increase our awareness of how much God loves us. God,Who is Love (1 John 4: 8, 16), created human beings to share that love and, even when we reject that love, does not reject us in turn, but loves always.

I start every morning with this prayer. After my alarm rings, and before I get out of bed, I pray the Morning Offering and the Suscipe and offer my day and my life to God.

I began doing this after reading a letter that my friend and mentor, Fr. John Eagan, SJ, sent me in March 1987 just after learning he had terminal cancer, less than a month before he died. He wrote about a calm he was experiencing even in the face of death, a calm he attributed to praying the Suscipe at the beginning of each day. After years of surrendering his day and his life to God through this prayer, he was able to make his final surrender with great peace.

The power of this prayer is the power of love. Praying it, aware of God’s overwhelming love for me, frees me to return that love through all I am and do.

It allows me to accept the “little dyings,” the losses that are part of life – from hair and energy to loved ones and family.

The first two lines of the “Prayer for Generosity” encapsulate my struggle in the novitiate from 1956-58 and remind me of my vocational grace. I was having second thoughts about becoming a priest when I arrived on the Jesuit doorstep with James Dean’s role in Rebel Without a Cause as my icon. A life of chastity, poverty and obedience wasn’t high on my wish list. Guilt and fear pointed me toward the Society of Jesus. I hoped my stay would be mercifully brief.

But this prayer burrowed deep into my psyche. I quickly memorized it. However, I didn’t feel generous. I imagined myself as a small island of selfishness surrounded by generous, eager novices. Lacking their strong desire for a religious vocation, I prayed “teach me to be generous” with great ambivalence. At that point in my life I was unaware of the Ignatian principle of praying for the grace to desire being generous, a concept perhaps too subtle for my primitive religious instincts to grasp.

The second phrase, however, tapped something inchoate in me. The line “Teach me to serve you as you deserve” made me aware that Christ deserved the best I had to offer. This gave me an inkling of Jesus as a person.

Four years later my spiritual director asked a question that reoriented my life. After I described a personal struggle to him, he asked: “What does Jesus think of that?” I responded: “I never thought of asking him.”

Suddenly I realized how my resentments stemmed from an ego injured by life and ministry. My experiences of being rejected, or failing, or being unappreciated became not just hurts, but the means by which God was purifying my heart while inviting me to follow Christ, poor and humble, more closely.

More and more I feel myself drawn to pray for the grace to desire more intensely to “give and not to count the cost . . . to fight and not to heed the wounds . . . to labor and not to ask for reward.” This unexpected grace continues to amaze me. It is so unlike me. Since God is the teacher, all things are possible.

This prayer might only be “attributed” to Ignatius but it has been a steady, if not always visible, beacon in my life.