What can’t prayer do? — Try this at home.
“Music, prayer, sexual passion — all the great wordless experiences — uncover this terrible pattern. Words are the way of bearing it, and those of us who are most addicted to words are those who have felt most threatened by the numinous. When we turn away from words we are making the journey home. Books about prayer are about as unappetising as books of sexology, and for the same reason. It is only from inside the experience that sex and prayer are fitting and fine. From outside they are chilly and and incomprehensible. One thinks of the total bafflement of children at the open secret shared by the grown-ups.” — Monica Furlong, The Journey In, p.51
Whatever you might believe about the power of prayer on the external world of causes and things, one thing can be said for sure: the one-who-prays is changed. Consciousness is expanded in prayer, both during and in the after-time. Awareness beyond the narrow purview of our two eyes, ears, nostrils, and one skin-mind can be a very difficult to thing to achieve. What is it like to be something else when we only have ourselves to go by?
But we are not bounded individuals. Did you invent the language you speak? Did you choose the name you give God? Even if you answered ‘yes’ to both these questions, and are indeed the archetypal hippy individualist, such solipsism will not service the mother’s breast, the luck of your being here now, or your very next breath. What many have termed the ‘circle of empathy’ has been expanding for individuals since childhood with every misstep, and for society since homonids first decided to speak to That Thing which (mostly doesn’t but very occasionally and glimmeringly) Speaks Back.
In everyday consciousness, we look first to hearth and home — family, friends, housemates. Next perhaps we look to school or work — those with whom we have to spend much time and thus take up our minds with thought. In the middle circle of empathy we might look to tribe, or nation, or religious creed. We might feel more in common with Europeans or with Shi’a Muslims or evangelicals than with those on other continents or in other denominations. Yet to some extent we feel at moments kindred warmth to all humanity — we all cry, we all smile. Finally, in moments of truly expanded consciousness, we feel at one with life at large, even with things and matter, a word which itself comes from ‘mother.’ In prayer, one begins at the outermost reaches of familiarity — with the Gaian mind, and moves gradually inwards, towards its expression as us.
But what, we must ask, about the silence? Cynically, we can say many things — are we just drowning out the silence with our own projections? Worse, is it a shouting or poetry contest for God’s attention? Quite the opposite — as we breath in the love of God in meditation, we breath out our expressions of hope and love for our world. George Herbert’s image of ‘/God’s breath in man returning to its birth/’ proves insightful here. Prayer is the tug at our created source. Prayer is the expression that things have been and thus can be better. Prayer is the story that makes itself real, prayer is CCRU’s hyperstition in praxis, prayer is Borges’ imaginal ingression into consensus reality. Prayer is being the change. In the words of Rowan Williams,
“How we pray and how we live is not just our business, it injects into a broken and chaotic world something which is going to heal and pull-together…The universe around us is frustrated, it’s ‘in bits’, it’s not where it ought to be, and somehow God’s purpose of bringing the whole material universe together in an order of beauty and reconciliation involves you and me saying our prayers…[and] it’s not you doing that, it’s the holy spirit within you…the universe is waiting for the children of God…and we are the beginning of this story, we are given that energy, that force which begins to draw things together.” [Rowan Williams, On Prayer 5:00–5:25+6:32]
There’s never any one way to pray. Sometimes we shoot up power-prayers in moments of pain, stress or ecstatic joy. Sometimes we drag our feet and tongues in the motions of ritual performance. But what makes prayer consciousness transformative, transportive, even transcendent, is the admixture of gratitude and other-centredness. In Furlong’s timeless comment, ‘The religious man is the one who believes that life is about making some kind of journey; the non-religious man is the one who believes that there is no journey to take.’ [p.14]
As a broad framework, in order for consciousness to access the flow-state, this order of mental events I find to be incredibly useful.
1.Gratitude->2.Forgiveness->3.World->4.Known Others->5.Self
->6.Promise->7. Act
So what is it that prayer cannot do? Well, you won’t fly — but your fancy might. You won’t get superpowers — but you may well exceed your expectations. You won’t immerse into the omni-consh right away, but you might start feeling more at-one’d, atoned, connected. For
“…higher than soul can hope or mind can hide
…this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)”
(e e cummings’ i carry your heart)
The most important thing to remember is that prayer ought not merely to be seen in the conventional, cordoned-off, momentary tick-off the daily or weekly bucket-list. Prayer can be doing the washing up, making love, any service, any freely-given creative-act. The more we pray, the more life itself offers itself up as prayer. And the more the world, so to speak, winks back, for ‘those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.’ (Roald Dahl)
Process
Start by getting comfortable. Take three or four deep breaths in and out — fill your lungs completely with air, and then let it out at whatever rate feels right.
…
And with the next outbreath, as your body relaxes, close your eyelids gently. Feel gravity pulling you down.
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Listen to any sounds nearby, then further away. Whether the song of birds, the rush of traffic, the whistle of wind. Let them flow over and past you, without getting trapped by any one earworm.
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Focus for a few moments on the rhythm of your breath.
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Notice how each breath is different. Notice what happens when your breath changes from in to out.
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1. Think of all the people, places, things, events that have brought you joy, especially the ones which you had no control over. Fill yourself with those memories. Let them brim you. Breath in the love of our created source.
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In whatever way, use your next breath to say ‘thank you.’
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2. We all make mistakes. No one is perfect. In our thoughts, in our words, in the ways we have used people. Bring them to your mind’s life. Not so as to wallow or dwell. Doing this at all is to come-to-terms. Accept yourself worts and all. Sometimes we meet, exceed or fall short of our expectations. The point is to know those expectations.
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In whatever way, use your next breath to say, ‘Forgive.’
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3. Each day we are bombarded with images from across the world of suffering — weapons with which our economies are embroiled , ecological disaster the human family have helped to author, natural disasters of which we cannot make head-or-tail. This suffering can seem senseless. We pray for those who need strength, remembering in this era especially the climate refugees, the proxy wars in north Africa and the middle east, the ancient woodlands under threat from the UK to the Amazon, the economic insecurity, the poor.
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As we picture the troubles of our broken world, use your next breath to say, ‘Give them strength.’
4. We call to mind all those we know who are hurting. Friends and friends of friends and family in hospital, hospice, nursing home. Those sick in mind, sick in body, sick in spirit. We hold them in our hearts.
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In whatever way, use your next breath to say, ‘Bring healing.’
5. We have strengths, we have weaknesses. We have desires, we have tendencies. Tempt us to do good, love mercy, do justly. Give us the strength we need to meet this adventure with our whole hearts, so that we can one day say, ‘it is good to have been me, and I return to the All content.’
6. We promise_
…And know that your fulfilling that promise is prayer.
Our mother,
Who art in forest
Hallowed be thy name
Thy forest Queendom come
Thy will be done-and-dusted
In heaven as on earth
Give us this day our daily being
And forgive us our wrongs
As others give us
Tempt us towards good
For thine is the Queendom
Tree power and glory
Forever and ever
Amen
Bibliography
Furlong, Monica (1993[1971]) Travelling In, Cowley Publications: Cambridge
Williams, Rowan (2014) On Prayer, Lecture Given to the University of Sheffield, https://www.sheffield.anglican.org/videos/rowan-williams-on-prayer
