All our time here, we are on a constant threshold between the Divine and the human. The Divine knows us totally. We only know ourselves partially. When we return home this disproportion and blindness will be healed. Then our knowing will be equal to the divine knowing of us. This recognition confers great permission on the individuality of prayer. You can only pray through the unique lens of your individuality. There is no need for you to be in any way guilty about your reluctance or inability to mimic the formal prayers of your religion or the pious prayer of others. If you listen to the deep voice of your heart, that voice is at one with the unique melody of your soul. Your deepest prayer is the prayer of your essence. When you move deeper into the inner world and enter the temple of your essence, your prayer will be of one pulse beat with the Divine Heart.
The Soul Is the Home of Memory
Prayer helps us to belong more fully in our own lives. Ingeborg Bachmann said, “It takes so long to learn to take your place in your own life.” The more we come to recognize the subtle adjacencies in our lives, the more easily they can enter our belonging. The more we recognize the neglected and unseen dimensions of our lives, the more enriched and balanced we become. It takes a lifetime’s work to belong fully in your life. It is almost as if each event, encounter, and experience is a pathway to be explored and lived. Then the wisdom of the soul harvests it and brings its treasures back in along that pathway until they belong to the deepest circle of your self. Each day we voyage outwards, and at evening our souls bring home what we have suffered, learned, and created. The soul is more ancient than consciousness and mind. Each day your soul weaves your life together. It weaves the opaque and ancient depth of you with the actual freshness of your present experience. The soul is the home of memory. When you pray, you enter that sanctuary where the repository of unlived and lived things opens to embrace the mystery of what you now live. You cannot break into this place inside you. All attempts to force entry will be circumvented by your wily soul. However, when you pray into your own depths, they might open for a moment to offer you a glimpse of the eternal artistry that is at work in you. This eternal longing is put beautifully by Fernando Pessoa:
So all recalls my home self and, because
it recalls that, what I am aches in me.
Because prayer comes from such a deep space within you, it can afford you glimpses of yourself. Prayer satisfies the longing of the unknown to find you. It helps transfigure the barriers to your inner world. You come to discover that there is no distance between you and the deepest core of your being.
To Breathe in Your Soul Light
Even though the body may kneel, or words may be said or chanted, the heart of prayer activity is invisible. Prayer is an invisible world. Normally, when we look at something with our eyes, we see it empirically. We notice its shape, colour, and limits. In prayer, we see with the eye of the soul. We see in a creative and healing way. A lovely way to pray is to engage this light of the invisible world. Because the body is in the soul, all around your body there is an embrace of subtle soul-light. When you pray with your breath, you breathe this soul-light into the deepest recesses of your clay body. When you feel isolated or empty or lonesome, it is so nourishing to draw the eternal shelter of soul-light deep into you. This helps to heal you and returns you to inner tranquillity. When you come into a rhythm of breathing, you get deeper than the incisions of thought and feeling which separate you. This prayer restores your belonging at the hearth of divinity, a belonging from which no thought or act can ever finally exile you.
Praise Is Like Morning Sun on a Flower
The Bible respects and extols particularly the prayer of praise. It is interesting to ask why the prayer of praise is honoured. Perhaps the reason is to be discovered in a consideration of the nature of praise. There is a lovely saying in Irish: “Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí,” i.e., Praise youth and it will blossom. Praise issues from recognition and generosity. It has nothing to do with the politics and manipulation of flattery. Praise is truthful affirmation. God has no need of your praise. Yet the act of praising draws you way outside the frontiers of your smallness. To praise awakens the more generous side of your heart. It draws out the nobility, the úaisleacht, in you. When the soul praises, the life enlarges. We know as individuals how encouraging praise can be. It is like watching Nature on a spring morning. At first, the flowers are all closed and withdrawn. Then, ever so gradually, as the rays of the sun coax them, they open out their hearts to praise the light. The diminishing of praise is an acute poverty in post-modern culture. With the swell of consumerism and technology and the demise of religion, we are losing our ability to praise. We replace praise with banal satisfaction. The absence of praise reduces culture to a flat monoscape; the magic of its creative and imaginative curvature gets lost. A culture that cannot praise the Divine becomes a bare, cold place. The demise of religious and spiritual practice has contributed hugely to this flattening.
One can understand how a culture that has come of age can find little shelter or resonance in the way many of the rituals of institutional religion are practised. Increasing numbers of people stay away. Others attempt to develop their own rituals. The difficulty here is that a deeply resonant ritual emerges over years out of the rhythms of longing and belonging in a community. Great ritual creates an imaginative and symbolic frame which can awaken the numinous otherness, the tenderness, and the danger of the Divine. It is a subtle and infinitely penetrating form. Scattered, isolated individuals cannot invent ritual. Consumerism has stolen the sacred ritual structures of religion and uses them incisively in its liturgies of advertising and marketing. Meanwhile the post-modern soul becomes poorer and falls even further from the embrace and practice of sacred belonging. The great thing about a community at prayer is that your prayer helps mine—as mine helps yours. This makes no consumerist sense, but it is one of the most vivid enhancements of Being available to us. Individualism of the raw competitive kind is ignorant of this dimension.
Prayer Changes Space
Another beautiful thing about prayer is the way it changes space. Physical space is full of distance. It is distance that separates people and things. Even between two people who love each other and live with each other, the short distance between their bodies is the colossal distance between two different worlds. The magical thing about prayer is that it creates spiritual space. This alters physical distance. In spiritual space there is no distance. A prayer offered for someone in New Zealand reaches her as swiftly as the prayer offered for someone right beside you. Prayer suffuses distance and changes it. Prayer carries the cry of the heart innocently and immediately over great and vast distances. William Stafford evokes this in his poem “An Afternoon in the Stacks.” He describes the aftermath of reading a book. The act of reading becomes a wild symbiosis of the reader’s longing and the wise configuration of words. Stafford knows that the reverberation of this intimacy will continue: “…the rumour of it will haunt all that follows in my life / A candle flame in Tibet leans when I move.” In spiritual space, the trail of intimacy can traverse any distance and still retain the intensity and belonging.