Developing Intimacy With God: An Eight-Week Prayer Guide Based on Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises

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Summary: A roadmap to friendship with God
Review: Although this book uses the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and is filled with helpful guidelines for an eight-week prayer guide, the impact is much greater than it would seem on the surface. I found it more than just acquiring knowledge about God but a way to intimacy with God through His Son, Jesus Christ. Although it is very comprehensive in its methodology, it allows for flexibilty in its use. We are all different. Therefore each of us will have a slightly different relationship with God. The book encourages each of us to find our unique spiritual path, using the exercises as guidelines. I highly recommend it.

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Summary: Life Changing!
Review: Dr. Aronis has written the finest book on prayer we have ever experienced. A must for anyone seriously looking to deepen their prayer life. It opens a person's eyes and heart on how to have an intimate knowledge of Christ so that they might be with Him, become like Him and live for Him. We have had the privilege of leading many people into a deeper relationship with Jesus as a result of doing this in-depth prayer guide.
In His Service, Jane and Jim Eilertsen, Captain, U.S. Navy (Retired)

Rating:
Summary: Life Changing!
Review: Dr. Aronis has written the finest book on prayer we have ever experienced. A must for anyone seriously looking to deepen their prayer life. It opens a person's eyes and heart on how to have an intimate knowledge of Christ so that they might be with Him, become like Him and live for Him. We have had the privilege of leading many people into a deeper relationship with Jesus as a result of doing this in-depth prayer guide.
In His Service, Jane and Jim Eilertsen, Captain, U.S. Navy (Retired)

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Summary: Is your spirit hungry?
Review: I was in my final year of seminary when I was first introduced to Dr. Aronis' book. Up to that point I had learned a lot about God but nothing about how to develop a relationship with God. My spirit was hungry for Jesus and I didn't know what to do. This book led me to Christ in a new way and taught me how to bask in Jesus' love. I could have never predicted how completely the concepts in Dr. Aronis' book would transform my ministry. I use the tools and insights I've gained every time I preach, pray, or talk about Jesus. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to God for teaching Dr. Aronis these concepts so that he could teach me. This fruit of the Spirit is unspeakably sweet. Taste it for yourself!

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Summary: Why I wrote the book
Review: It is customary for pastors to urge their congregations to spend time with Christ in prayer. They know that this is of paramount importance, that it is the better choice, the one thing needful, as Jesus, himself, said (Luke 10:42). But the exhorttions to pray and the instructions given by the pastors usually have to do with praying for others or praying for personal needs. Rarely does one hear instruction on how, specifically, one can increase devotion and adoration for God, how one can nurture and deepen one's relationship with Jesus. This is the challenge that has occupied me for the past twenty years. I have written this book to explain a process of prayer that will deepen your relationship with Christ and enable you to experience intimate communion with him.

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Summary: The Kingdom Among You and Within You
Review: The Kingdom Among You and Within You: Reaching Out and Diving Down

I feel reasonably confident in saying that there has never been a book quite like Developing Intimacy with God , certainly not a braver book. I say this not because the author was my roommate at the United States Naval Academy and a star athlete I have always admired and loved, but, I believe in my soul, for the reasons cited here.

Perhaps I should say that there is no other book like it as a guide to meditation and a disciplined knowledge of Christ except that on which it is based: The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. In many ways it is the same as Loyola's classic which, as Aronis points out in a note, has been published, either alone or with commentaries, some 4,500 times since its original publication in 1541, an average of once a month for four centuries, but it is also different, the same but otherwise (eadem sed aliter). Of course Spiritual Exercises has always been available for those outside the Catholic faith, but Developing Intimacy is designed to widen the availability of the same essential message and with the blessings of priests such as Father John McAnulty, S.J. who led Aronis, a Protestant, through the Spiritual Exercises, and Thomas Green, S. J., spiritual Director, San Jose Seminary, Manilla, who has blessed it with these words: "I thoroughly enjoyed the book and found especially helpful for me the linking of the Ignatian tradition to the various Protestant sources cited. We (Catholics and Protestants) do indeed have much in common!"

Here is the first reason for my enthusiasm for this work--its ecumenical character and intent. Indeed we have long been in need of the cooperation and communion that ecumenism requires as indicated satirically in an anecdote by Mark Twain in 1898: "What God lacks is convictions--stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something--not try to be everything."

The purpose of the book by the author and participants in workshops and retreats, now numbering in the thousands, is simple as stated by Aronis: To gain "intimate knowledge of Christ that I might be with him, become like him, and live for him." As announced at the outset, the focus is upon Christ and not upon self. Here is an irony as far as the modern world is concerned: The best route to gnosis, knowledge of self, is not by looking at one's self but at the trusted friend within, Christ and his life.

As the title indicates, its emphasis is upon "intimacy" in contrast to "ultimacy," a term much in use by sports apologists to express intense personal experience from involvement in what is currently called "getting in the flow" or "in the zone." The search for intimacy in this text does not ignore either the presence of the body or its role in matters of diet or posture but fundamentally the "exercises" require being still, mentally and physically, in the effort to know God. The journey toward the spiritual center of the universe is not outside amid the galaxies but inside where, as Emily Dickinson says, "the meanings are." Just as the book reaches out to an audience of any denomination or faith so it reaches down into the longing soul in order to come up again with a newness of vision.

As rationally structured as the book is with suggestions for times for prayer and meditation, it is also poetic in approach. The poet, as Arthur Koestler has said in Act of Creation, is "a skin diver with a breathing tube," one who descends and brings to others a boon of understanding. It is also the way of Christ who drew spiritual truths from lessons of ordinary things, "the plow , the seed, the yoke, the salt, the light, the leaven, the door, the coin, the jewell, the fire and many more" as stated by Elton Trueblood in The Humor of Christ." The words lead the individual seeker to the biblical scene in scripture, more or less serving as guide, and then leave the seeker and the scene together until change of heart occurs, what the Greeks called metanoia.

We tend to make words divine but they are only tools to convey us to pictures or scenes. As Einstein and others have said, thinking occurs beyond the realm of language in what we generally call the unconscious. According to William Faulkner, "memory knows before knowing remembers" so that the means of a deeper knowing become a matter of digging in the detritus within, personal and cosmic, to find the lode of the spirit and to make it conscious.

There is another reason that distinguishes Developing Intimacy and that is what Aronis calls "spiritual direction." When time came for Loyola to decide on the spiritual guide for his model, he chose Thomas à Kempis whose work became as famous as his own, Imitation of Christ , "like the gospels, an everlasting well of love and truth" (Joly 68).* With precursors of such genius, Alex Aronis could hardly have chosen any other kind of direction for his own distinctive guide to prayer. He stands on the shoulders of giants to keep alive spiritual truths of the ages and offers his own insights based on a ministry of half a century as a chaplain in the Navy, as a missionary, and as a pastor and as a scholar.
Developing Intimacy is not a book cultural prizes but about spiritual gifts deep within which, with the proper kind of help, can be reclaimed as a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

*Joly, Henri. St. Ignatius of Loyola. Trans. Mildred Partridge. 1899. New York:

Rating:
Summary: A Personal Prayer Mentor
Review: This book is one of the most personally significant books I have ever read. Aronis offers a personal guide to using scripture based prayer to enter into a profound encounter with God. It is much more than a book about prayer; instead it is akin to a "how to" guide, acting almost as a prayer mentor. I appreciated the fact that the book teaches flexibility in prayer rather than indicating "the" way to pray. Aronis also tackles other areas of spiritual discipline while keeping the overall focus on prayer. The eight weeks I spent with the book enriched my experience with God in ways I had never imagined before. I have often returned to it and I now use the book in my college hermeneutics class for a section on devotional prayer. I highly recommend the book for anyone who seeks a deeper spiritual encounter with God.

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Summary: Loving God
Review: While other pastors and Christian authors in their sermons and books focus more on doctrinal truths, Biblical stories and teachings or applied Christianity, Pastor Aronis is one spiritual leader who serves God by pursuing relentlessly the most essential and basic foundation of a Christian's spiritual well-being: loving God and who He is.
The principles and applications I learned from this book transformed my faithful though routine habit of daily prayer and Bible reading into spiritually uplifting periods of heart to heart communication with God, allowing the Holy Spirit to tenderly guide me in meditating His word, knowing Him more intimately and expressing my growing love for Christ. I experience a unique process of spiritual discipline unravel before me through the Prayer Exercises, which helped me to ultimately attain the objectives of being WITH Christ by spending time with Him, becoming more LIKE Him by following and obeying Him, and to continuously living my life FOR Christ by serving Him and His purpose. This book is an invaluable gift from God.