One of the fascinating things to ask about prayer is, What do you pray with? Put more tenderly: What is it that prays within you? If prayer is but the voice of the superficial mind, the result is endless inner chatter. Prayer goes deeper. More precisely: prayer issues from an eternal well within you. The presence that prays within you is your soul. It is interesting to read in the New Testament that the soul is always seen as a continuation of the Holy Spirit. No place does it ever say that we should pray to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not different from the activity of your prayer. You pray in the Holy Spirit. The little preposition suggests how you are suffused with the Holy Spirit. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and the deepest level in you is spirit.
One of the deepest longings in the human heart is the longing for a foundation to things. Because we sense how fragile and uncertain life can be, we long for a foundation that nothing can shake. The first stage in building a house is to dig out the foundation. If the house were simply built on surface ground, the walls would crack and come away from each other. Yet the irony is that we never penetrate past the surface layer. Being on earth, we feel we are on solid ground. Yet at its deepest foundation, the earth rests again on the nothingness of the empty air—but it is held there by the invisible force fields of gravity. In the inner world, the deepest foundation of the mind and the heart also rests on the invisible nothingness of the soul. The roots of all intimacy and belonging are planted powerfully in the invisible spirit. You belong ultimately to a presence that you cannot see, touch, grasp, or measure.
When you forget or repress the truth and depth of your invisible belonging and decide to belong to some system, person, or project, you short-circuit your longing and squander your identity. To have true integrity, poise, and courage is to be attuned to the silent and invisible nature within you. Real maturity is the integrity of inhabiting that “immortal longing” that always calls you to new horizons. Your true longing is to belong to the eternal that echoes continually in everything that happens to you. Real power has nothing to do with force, control, status, or money. Real power is the persistent courage to be at ease with the unsolved and the unfinished. To be able to recognize, in the scattered graffiti of your desires, the signature of the eternal. True prayer in the Holy Spirit keeps the graciousness and splendour of that vulnerability open.
Prayer and Wonder: The Art of Real Presence
Prayer is the art of presence. Where there is no wonder there is little depth of presence. The sense of wonder is one of the key sources of prayer. Wonder at the adventure of being here is one of the special qualities of humans. Plato said, “All thought begins in wonder.” Even our older sisters and brothers, the animals, often seem to be enthralled in silent wonder at creation. Sometimes in humans profound wonder can only be expressed in silence. Perhaps the huge silence of the animal world is their expression of wonder at creation. It certainly seems that the excitement of being here often overcomes them. Animals at play express pure joy. When you see young foxes tussle and tumble with each other, or a brace of lambs frisk and canter in the spring, you sense the innocent delight of the animal world. Animals often seem so contemplative in their presence. Often, when one goes out to the mountains to herd cattle, one comes upon them grazing slowly on the tough mountain grass. They raise their heads and look lingeringly into the middle distance. That still gaze resembles the human gaze of wonder. At times, they look at us not just with wonder, but in amazement. How strange we must seem to them, so full of talk and trembling restlessness.
Wonder is a beautiful style of perception; when you wonder at something, your mind voyages deep into its possibility and nature. You linger among its presences. You do not take it for granted and are not deceived or blinded by its familiarity. The sense of wonder keeps experience fresh and original. It is lovely to see a relationship that even after years has still retained its wonder. When the person you love still causes you to feel wonder, you are still alive to his or her mystery. Wonder is the child of mystery. It calls your heart to thanks and praise.
Wonder Awakens Us to the Magic of the World
Wonder enlarges the heart. When you wonder, you are drawn out of yourself. The cage of the ego and the rail tracks of purpose no longer hold you prisoner. Wonder creates a lyrical space where thought and feeling take leave of their repetitive patterns, to regain their original impulse of reverence before the mystery of what is. Such a tiny word; yet is confers the highest dignity and mystery. Most other words have such personal colour and promise. Is looks so tight; it is a little splinter of language. Yet the word is holds all reality and is the dividing line between existence and non-existence, truth and falsity. To say something is means that it has real presence, it is not a fantasy nor a mere notion. The greatest distance in the world is the distance between is and is not.
You have often had the experience of driving somewhere, your mind absorbed. You come over a hill and suddenly the wild ocean is there. When you leave the house on a frosty winter’s night, you find outside the dark heavens braided with starlight and the silent moon presiding over the sleeping fields and mountains. Sometimes we abruptly wake up to the magic of things!
The Shawshank Redemption is a film about friendship in a depressing prison setting. Every kind of brutality operates there. In that prison, the sounds are sinister and the silence is eerie. One day, a prisoner who is working in the library manages to get into the main office. He locks the door and puts on a piece of wonderful classical music, a duet from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and plays it over the loudspeaker into the prison yard. As if from the eternal spheres, like an invisible manna, this beautiful music falls onto all the haunted lives in this dreary place. All the prisoners stop, entranced, and listen. There is total silence and stillness to receive the full visitation of the music. This is a moment of startling epiphany. The visit of the music is such a surprise. In the lovely shock of its beauty, the lost grandeur of creation is suddenly present. This is a moment of pure wonder in a black world.
Wonder never rests on the surface of a fact or situation. It voyages inwards to discover why something is the way it is. In this sense, wonder kindles compassion and understanding. When you meet someone with a difficult or abrasive personality, you move away from him or her. If you begin to wonder what made a person become like that, you may be more open to the hidden story that has shaped this awkward presence. Wonder can often be the key to compassion.
Wonder Invites Mystery to Come Closer
The sense of wonder can also help you to recognize and appreciate the mystery of your own life. There is always a vitality and excitement about a person who has retained a sense of his or her own mystery. They have passion to explore and discover new aspects of themselves. Such a person is a living presence. It is deadening to be trapped in the company of someone who has a predictable and ready-made reaction to everything. Conversation is carefully framed and directed. Should you risk leading the conversation into uncharted areas, you draw a blank. It is as if a whole inner domain has been robbed of its natural resonance. One gets the same feeling from people who have explored their inner world and describe their identity in terms of whichever syndrome is in vogue at the moment. The words they use to describe their self-discoveries are all borrowed. This jargon has no colour and no resonance of any mystery, opaqueness, or possibility. Real wonder about your soul demands words which come from the more submerged inner thresholds where different forces meet. These words would be stamped with the unique signature of your presence. They would be imaginative and suggestive of the depths of the unknown within you. Unlike the fashionable graffiti of fast-food psychology, they hold the reverence to which mystery is entitled. Respect is a close companion of wonder.