Wonder, as the child of mystery, is a natural source of prayer. One of the most beautiful forms of prayer is the prayer of appreciation. This prayer arises out of the recognition of the gracious kindness of creation. We have been given so much. We could never have merited or earned it. When you appreciate all you are and all you have, you can celebrate and enjoy it. You realize how fortunate you are. Providence is blessing you and inviting you to be generous with your gifts. You are able to bless life and give thanks to God. The prayer of appreciation has no agenda but gracious thanks. Nothing is given to you for yourself alone. When you receive some blessing or gift, you do it in the name of others; through you, they, too, will come to share in the kindness of Providence.
You Cannot Step Outside Your Life
The unknown evokes wonder. If you lose your sense of wonder, you lose the sacramental majesty of the world. Nature is no longer a presence, it is a thing. Your life becomes a dead cage of fact. The sense of the eternal recedes, and time is reduced to routine. Yet the flow of our lives cannot be stopped. This is one of the amazing facts about being in the dance of life. There is no place to step outside. There is no neutral space in human life. There is no place to go to get out of it. There is no little cabin down at the bottom of the garden where the force and familiarity of life stop, and you can sit there in a space outside your life and yourself and look in on both. Once you are in life, it embraces you totally.
This is most evident in the mystery of thinking. You cannot step outside your own thought. As Merleau-Ponty says, “There is no thought to embrace all thought.” Most of the time, we are not even aware of how our thinking encircles everything. When we wake up to how our thoughts create our world, we become conscious of the ways in which we can be blind and limited. Yet even when we decide to be critical and objective about our own thinking, thinking is still the instrument we use in the practice of this criticism. We live every moment of our lives within this relentless reflexivity. Even when we are tired and weary of the patterns of our own thinking, they still shape our vision and guide our actions.
Amidst the Unknown Prayer Builds an Inner Shelter
Wonder at the unknown also calls forth prayer. The unknown is our closest companion; it walks beside us every step of our journey. The unknown is also the place where each of us has come from. From ancient times, prayer is one of the ways that humans have attempted to befriend the unknown. Prayer helps us to build an inner shelter here. Nature is the kind surface, the intimate face of a great unknown. It is uncanny to behold how boldly we walk upon the earth as if we are its owners. We strut along, deaf to the silence in the vast night of the unknown that lives below the ground. Above the slim band of air which forms the sky around our planet is the other endless night. Wonder makes the unknown interesting, attractive, and miraculous. A sense of wonder helps awaken the hidden affinity and kinship which the unknown has with us. Ancient peoples were always conscious of the world underneath. Special sacred places could be doorways into that numinous region. Odysseus and Aenaeas, the two mystical voyagers of classical antiquity, knew where to go in order to enter the world underneath. In Celtic mythology, this is where the Tuatha de Dannan secretly lived. They were residents at the roots of the earth. They controlled all fertility and growth. Offerings and libations were regularly made to them. In ancient culture, nature always had an elemental divinity which demanded respect and reverence. While holding its reserve, the unknown revealed dimensions of its numinosity. Places can be numinous, but so can people.
The Celtic Art of Approaching the Unknown and Nature
The Celtic tradition was powerfully aware of the numinous power of the unknown. It had refined rituals for approaching it. The Celts had no arrogance in relation to mystery. The people who mediated the unknown were called Druids. They helped the people to understand that the elemental divinities were not anonymous or impersonal. The earth was a Goddess and all the elemental forces took on personality. The Druids offered gifts to the Gods and the Goddesses. They interceded for the people and initiated them into the rhythm of belonging that the Celtic deities required. The Druids often worshipped in sacred groves. They are associated with sacred trees, especially the oak. They were also skilled in the art of interpreting the dreams of the people. They frequently undertook shamanic feats. They were able to change into different shapes, and they could enter smoothly into the air element and escape from all force of gravity. They lit the sacred fires and watched to see how the flames would turn. In this way, they were able to divine the future of the people. The Celtic world had a deep sense of the appropriateness of approach to the unknown. The lyricism and sacredness of the approach drew from the unknown the blessings that the people needed.
Nature Is Always Wrapped in Seamless Prayer
Celtic wisdom was deeply aware that Nature had a mind and spirit of its own. Mountains have great souls full of memory. A mountain watches over a landscape and lures its mind towards the horizon. Streams and rivers never rest; they are relentless nomads who claim neither shape nor place. Stones and fields inhabit a Zen-like stillness and seem immune to all desire. Nature is always wrapped in seamless prayer. Unlike us, Nature does not seem to suffer the separation or distance that thought brings. Nature never seems cut off from her own presence. She lives all the time in the embrace of her own unity. Perhaps, unknown to us, she sympathizes with our relentless dislocation and distraction. She certainly knows how to calm our turbulent minds when we trust ourselves into the silence and stillness of her embrace. Amongst Nature we come to remember the wisdom of our own inner nature. Nature has not pushed itself out into exile. She remains there, always home in the same place. Nature stays in the womb of the Divine, of one pulse-beat with the Divine Heart. This is why there is a great healing in the wild. When you go out into Nature, you bring your clay body back to its native realm. A day in the mountains or by the ocean helps your body unclench. You recover your deeper rhythm. The tight agendas, tasks, and worries fall away and you begin to realize the magnitude and magic of being here. In a wild place you are actually in the middle of the great prayer. In our distracted longing, we hunger to partake in the sublime Eucharist of Nature.
Prayer: A Clearance in the Thicket of Thought
In prayer, we come nearest to making a real clearance in the thicket of thought. Prayer takes thought to a place of stillness. Prayer slows the flow of the mind until we can begin to see with a new tranquillity. In this kind of thought, we become conscious of our divine belonging. We begin to sense the serenity of this clearing. We learn that regardless of the fragmentation and turbulence in so many regions of our lives, there is a place in the soul where the voices and prodding of the world never reach. It is almost like the image of the tree. The branches can sway and quiver in the wind, the bark can drum to the frenzy of rain, and yet all the while at the centre of the tree, there pertains the stillness of its anchorage. In prayer, thought returns to its origin in the infinite. Attuned to its origin, thought reaches below its own netting. In this way prayer liberates thought from the small rooms where fear and need confine it. Despite all the negative talk about God, the Divine still remains the one space where thought can become free. There we will be liberated from the repetitive echoes of our own smallness and blindness. Prayer sets our feet at large in the pastures of promise. When you pray, the submerged eternal melody in the clay of your heart rises from the silence to infuse with blessing your life and your friendships in the seen and in the unseen world. Blessed be God who made us limited and gave us such longing! This is where prayer can heal thought. Prayer can make us aware of the clusters of presence that make up our secret companionship. Prayer is the path to the secret belonging at the heart of our other lives.