Fred Power, SJ

For 56 years, Fr Fred Power,S.J. promoted the Canadian Apostleship of Prayer Association and edited its Canadian Messenger magazine for 46 years. He is now Chaplain at the Canadian Jesuits Infirmary at Pickering, Ontario.


66 posts

    24 Apr

    Someone writing about mental composure for the beginning of prayer compared it to one of those novelties in a souvenir store. A container of water has a scene inside. When the container is shaken, particles like snow fly all around. When the particles settle, the original scene is restored. If we enter into prayer with a flurry of ideas about everything, we can hardly expect to be able to concentrate on the topic chosen for prayer. There has to be a settling down of one's imagination. How to do it requires a strategy....

    20 Mar

    Praying and the problem of distractions seem to go together. We begin to pray by raising the mind to God, but often our attention on God does not last very long. The other element, raising the heart, is more constant provided we do not deliberately turn to doing something else....

    20 Feb

    Prayer is a raising or lifting of our minds and hearts in a loving conversation with god. For most of us, the usual topic of this conversation is asking for something from God. We were encouraged by Jesus to do so fr He assured us to "ask, and it will be given to you"(Mt. 7:7): :And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith" (Mt. 21:22). His prayer to the Father during the agony in the garden was asking the Father to be released from the need for suffering. But Jesus added a condition that we must include in our own asking--"not my will but thine be done" (Lk. 22:42)...

    16 Jan

    Where to begin in this almost limitless topic about praying? Why not look to Jesus who often went off by Himself to pray and usually by night? His disciples were so attracted by the example of Jesus that they asked Him to teach them how to pray. Jesus responded by teaching them the "Our Father." This is the first in an eleven part series on praying....

    28 Apr

    The problem of why God allows suffering never seems to go away. Why are innocent children allowed to suffer? Why deformities in the newly born? And the list goes on. God did not intend that we should have sufferings when He created the world as a place for humans to live. At the same time, God did not make us robots to live on earth with an automatic response to eating when hungry and propagating the species. The Church teaches that we were made like God with the ability to love stemming from a free will. We can choose what we want to do. It is because of our free will that the Church teaches that we are made like unto God....

Subscribe to igNation

Subscribe to receive our latest articles delivered right to your inbox!