September 16, 2009:
Spiritual Directors International is featured in The New York Times magazine article, "The Right Way to Pray?" by Zev Chafets!

Read Chafets' experience of spiritual direction, four ways to pray- "Gimme!" "Thanks!" "Oops!" and "Wow!", along with insightful interviews and reflections.

Article quotes to tickle your interest:

• Quoting Joy Carol, an Anglican spiritual director, Chafets writes: “I would hope that you would find yourself moving to a deeper level of questions, insights, spiritual growth, and with that a yearning for the Presence of the Divine. Prayer would naturally be a part of the process — and we would work out a way for you to pray that would fit your style of life and your unique spiritual journey."

• “People once learned to pray from priests and ministers and rabbis,” Liz Ellmann, executive director of Spiritual Directors International, told me.

• "After 90 minutes of spiritual discussion, the sun was sinking over Broadway, a sure sign that my time was almost up. “What do I do now?” I asked. “Just ask yourself: ‘What is really meaningful to me in my life? Is there something I’m longing for?’ Let it roll around in your brain. If you would like to come back, you’re very welcome to.”

• “I’m saying that techniques can make a difference,” Rabbi Gellman said. “Like wrapping yourself in a prayer shawl if you want to shut out the world. But really, when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”

• “What about adults who want to learn to pray?”

• “Prayer is like other activities,” the Rev. Daniel Henderson told me when we met at the tabernacle the week before Easter. He was visiting Brooklyn with a group of seminary students from Virginia. “You learn from people who are already good at it,” he went on."

• "Catholic prayer has not only become more accessible to the laity, it seems; it has also become more private and personal. Janet Ruffing, a member of the Sisters of Mercy, is the director of Fordham’s program on spirituality and spiritual direction. “In America, among Roman Catholics, roughly 80 percent of those doing pastoral ministry in Catholic parishes are women,” she says. “Women religious have been very active in promoting deeper contemplative, mystical prayer. Until Vatican II, that was reserved for the very few. Now it is becoming the ordinary expectation for people with a regular prayer life.”"

• "There are some 300,000 churches in America, and I could have picked any one to attend on Easter morning, but I liked being in this one. Especially the kids. They didn’t need Reverend Henderson’s prayer techniques, or the high-tech mantras of the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Their prayers weren’t Rabbi Gellman’s suburban Jewish prayers of Thanks! offered to whom it may concern. They didn’t pray to de-center their egos or find transcendence or to set off on a lifelong therapeutic spiritual journey. They prayed to a God with whom they were on a first-name basis, and they believed their prayers gave them power, which they used on behalf of their asthmatic sisters and infirm grandparents and a kid they knew with burns on his body."

Click here to read The New York Times magazine article, "The Right Way to Pray?" by Zev Chafets.

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