First of all, a quick disclaimer: This form of scripture reading is Catholic only in the sense that Ignatius of Loyola originally had the idea. No acceptance of any quirky Catholic beliefs is required for this! Anyway. I haven't written much on here, not since a meme post early on during quarantine, but I'm back in a more serious light. Today I want to discuss a different take on reading God's Word that even many Catholics don't know about, simply because it is an older form of prayer. So what is Ignatian Contemplation? Ignatian Contemplation was developed, as I mentioned, by Ignatius of Loyola, who also founded the Society of Jesus, AKA the Jesuit Order. Ignatius believed that God can and does speak to us through our imagination as much as through anything else. The Gospels, are, in fact, littered with examples of Jesus using his listeners' imaginations to attempt to communicate ideas to them. All of His parables are fictions that use metaphors they understood mu