Graced Vision Sees Between Things
Prayer reveals a hidden world. The way we see things is heavily conditioned. The eye always moves to the object. In a landscape, the eye is drawn at once to a stone, a tree, a field, a wave, or a face. The eye has great affection for things. Only infants or adults lost in thought gaze lingeringly into the middle distance. These are moments when we literally look at nothing. This perennially neglected nothing is precious space, because it provides the medium and the trail of connection between all the separate, different things and persons. The artist Anish Kapoor, reflecting on his fascinating exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, said, “The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It’s very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. It’s a space of becoming.” This middle distance is not empty; it is a vital but invisible bridge between things. Distance is necessary to sight: bring a thing too close and it blurs to invisibility. If our vision were graced and we could really see between things, we could be surprised at the secret veins of connection which join all that is separate in the one embrace. We are a family of the one presence. This is the concealed belonging which prayer helps to unveil.
It is so important that prayer happens in the world, every day and every night. It is consoling to remember that there are old and feeble nuns in forgotten convents who live out their days by creating little boats of prayer to ferry nourishment to a hungry world. There are also monks in monasteries in cities and in lonesome mountains whose wonderful chorus of prayer keeps life civilized and somehow still balanced. In our precarious and darkening world, we would have destroyed everything long ago were it not for the light and shelter of prayer. Prayer is the presence that holds harmony in the midst of chaos. Every time you pray, you add to the light and harmony of creation. If you do not pray, if you do not believe in prayer, then you are living off the prayers of other people. Each day, when we wake to move out into the world, and each night, when we gather ourselves in sleep, we should gently send the light of prayer from our hearts. It is important that some light of prayer emanate from each individual. Prayer is the most beautiful poem of longing. Martin Buber said, “Prayer is not in time but time is in prayer.” Prayer is eternity and, therefore, time inhabits prayer.
“Behold, I Am the Ground of Thy Beseeching.”
Prayer is a light that once lighted will never fail. All prayer opens the Divine Presence: When you sit in prayer, the purest force of your own longing comes alive. Julian of Norwich has a wonderful poetic insight into prayer as longing. The Lord whispers to her, “Behold, I am the Ground of thy Beseeching.” In other words, your longing for God is not a thrust through empty distance towards a removed God. No. The actual longing for God is not a human invention; rather it is put there by God. The longing for God is already the very presence of God. Our longing for God brings the kiss of the Divine to the human soul. Prayer is the deepest and most tender intimacy. In prayer the forgiving tenderness of God gathers around our lives. God infects us with the desire for God.
You can pray anytime and anywhere. You do not have to travel to some renowned spiritual guide to learn how to pray. You do not need to embark on a fifty-five-step spiritual path until you learn how to say a proper, super prayer. You do not have to sort out your life so that you can be real with God. You do not have to become fundamentalist, and hammer away your most interesting contradictions and complexities before you can truly pray. You need no massive preamble before prayer. You can pray now, where you are and from whatever state of heart you are in. This is the most simple and honest prayer. Many of our prayer preparations only manage to distract and distance us from the Divine Presence. We always seem to be able to find the most worthy of reasons for not just being quite ready to pray yet; this means that we never get to prayer. Prayer is so vital and transforming that the crucial thing is to pray now. Regardless of what situation you are in, your heart is always ready to whisper a prayer.
We are always in the Divine Presence, every second, everywhere. In prayer the Divine Presence becomes an explicit companionship that warms, challenges, and shelters us. We do not have to skate over vast, frozen lakes of pious language to reach the shore of the Divine. God is not so deadeningly serious. We need to be gentle and smile, as Hopkins so beautifully writes: “My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind.” God is wild and must also have a subtle sense of irony. In the lyrical unfolding of our days, we remain in the Presence. The simplest whisper of the heart is already within the Divine Embrace.
The Celtic tradition always had a very refined sense of the protective closeness of God. Prayers like this: “No anxiety can be ours, the God of the Elements, the King of the Elements, the Spirit of the Elements closes over us eternally.” There was no distance between the individual and God. There was no need to travel any further than the grace of your longing in order to come into the Divine Presence. The Celtic imagination enfolded the prayer of Nature into the heart of their conception of God. It is the God of sun, moon, stars, mountains, and rivers. God has a dwelling in the earth and the ocean. He inspires all things, he quickens all things, he supports all things, and creates all things. The earth is the ever-changing theatre of Divine Presence. Celtic spirituality is imbued with a powerful fluency of longing and a lovely flexibility of belonging. It is the exact opposite of fundamentalism.
Prayer Is Critical Vigilance
Prayer is the liberation of God from our images of God. It is the purest contact with the wildness of the Divine Imagination. Real prayer has a vigilance that is constantly watching and deconstructing the human tendency towards idolatry. Despite our best sincerity, we still long to control and domesticate the Divine. Meister Eckhart says that the closer we come to God, the more it ceases to be God. He says God “entwird,” i.e., God un-becomes. In other words, God is only our name for it. Elsewhere he writes: “Therefore, I pray to God that he may make me free of ‘God,’ for my real being is above God if we take ‘God’ to be the beginning of created things.” Idolatry is the worship of a dead God. It is ironic that every human needs some God on the inner altar of the heart. We cannot live without some deity, whether it is Jesus, the Trinity, Allah, Mohammed, or the Buddha. The deity could also be money, power, greed, addiction, or status. The critical vigilance of real prayer endeavours to ensure that it is the flame of the living God that burns on the altar of our hearts. Such prayer longs for the real warmth of divine belonging. Real prayer helps you to live in the beauty of truth. It is a visitation from outside the frontier of your own limitation. The great Irish poet Sean Ó Riordan says, “Níl aon bhlas ag duine ar a bhlas féin,” i.e., No one can taste his own tasting. Though you are the closest and nearest person in the world to yourself, you cannot taste your own essence. When it comes to truly enfolding yourself, you remain a stranger. Only in the embrace of prayer are you able to unfold and enfold yourself in truth, affection, and tenderness.