Prayer

An old man would sit motionless in church for hours on end. One day a priest asked him what God talked to him about.

  “God doesn’t talk. He just listens,” was his reply.

  “Well, then what do you talk to him about?”

  “I don’t talk either. I just listen.”

-       Anthony De Mello, Taking Flight

A few months before beginning this journey, I visited my parents in St. Petersburg, Florida. One evening, as I walked into their bedroom to retrieve something, I found my father kneeling beside his bed in prayer. The sight evoked great tenderness—and 50-year-old memories of my own early prayers.

As I reflect on that moving image of my father, it dawns on me that only one person has cited prayer as a primary path to God. “Music” is common and “meditation” comes up frequently—but not prayer.

Perhaps that’s because our approach to prayer hasn’t fully matured. We don’t understand it—or haven’t moved beyond asking and thanking.

In The Book of Awakening, Mark Nepo shares an expanded view of prayer. “This is what the heart knows beyond all words if we can find a way to listen,” he writes. “(B)eyond our small sense of things a magnificent light surrounds us, more than anyone could ask for. This is what prayer as gratitude can open us to.”

I like the notion of prayer as an opening to light—enlightenment as it were, rooted in stillness and gratitude. John O’Donohue extends this idea and offers a simple practice in his book, Anam Cara:

“…All around you,” O’Donohue observes,

“there is a secret and beautiful soul-light. This recognition suggests a new art of prayer: Close your eyes and relax into your body. Imagine a light all around you, the light of your soul. Then with your breath, draw that light into your body and bring it with your breath through every area of your body. 

“This is a lovely way to pray, because you are bringing the soul-light, the shadowed shelter that surrounds you, right into the physical earth and clay of your presence.”

The ultimate goal, I suppose, is that life itself becomes a prayer—or, put another way, that our lives and prayers are indistinguishable.

I was recently encouraged to write a prayer for myself. In the late-afternoon light of the desert, this is what emerged:

 O Thou,

the One Source,

the One Love,

let me be a ray of compassion

for all in whose paths I’m blessed to walk

each day of my life.

Do you have a prayer that you’re willing to share? I’d be honored to hear it.

(Bloomfield Hills, Michigan)

PS. Here are two other “prayers” I like. The first is actually a compilation of passages from Rilke’s Book of Hours, and the second an Irish “Blessing for the Senses” shared by John O’Donohue in Anam Cara:

“I thank you, deep power

that works me ever more lightly

in ways I can’t make out…

I yearn to be held

in the great hands of your heart—

oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,

and you, God—spend them however you want.”  (I, 62 and II, 2)

“May your body be blessed.

May you realize that your body is a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul.

And may you be peaceful and joyful and recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds.

May you realize that holiness is mindful, gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching.

May your senses gather you and bring you home.

May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here.

May the Eros of the Earth bless you.”