Notes on Prayer

I. Introduction

Last month, when it seemed like winter would never come, somebody asked me to clarify an earlier reference to prayer, and I began writing instantly and intensely.

But I didn’t answer their question. I didn’t even try.

Sometimes it’s like that. The Holy Spirit gives you an assignment and you respond with all your heart. Nothing else matters.

What I wrote follows, mostly unedited. It speaks as clearly as I can at this juncture about how prayer functions in my life. It bears witness to the cry for help that underlies all my study and practice, and to the response to that cry.

II. Silence is More Than the Absence of Sound

My prayer life has changed this past year in two significant ways. The changes are fundamental to the peace and happiness currently expanding and stabilizing my experience. There is more clarification and less confusion.

I am incredibly grateful.

The first (and most significant) change has to do with silence. Tara Singh spent a year in silence before he encountered A Course in Miracles. He writes that during this time, while out walking, he would occasionally be asked by folks for directions here or there and he would do it.

How do you observe a vow of silence and talk? This bothered me for years. Tara Singh was (still is, really) the only person whose understanding and practice of ACIM made sense to me but this approach to silence felt hypocritical. I couldn’t square it.

It took me a long time but I learned that Tara Singh was right. You can be silent while speaking. It has to do with understanding what silence actually is – it is not merely the absence of sound – and how helpfulness is itself a form of silence.

Somewhat paradoxically, silence is a form of relationship. It’s a way of being in relationship that gathers into itself all the many forms of relationship, so what sugars out is awareness of the One Relationship, which is what we are.

When I give attention to silence, I find a stillness which is creative and alive. It holds everything. It gathers what falls and nurtures what rises. It’s closer to me than my mind or my body. I am in it the way light fills a prism, like a nun in her cell, whose prayer flows easily through the cosmos.

At the beginning of the day and at its end I sit quietly in darkness, legs folded, on a chair with a good back and offer myself to God. I offer myself and the space to God, to whatever end He sees fit.

I’ve done various forms of this for a long time – zazen, Transcendental Meditation, MBSR – but it’s only the past year that I have figured out how to get sufficiently out of the way enough for God to actually enter and heal me. Which He does, reliably.

In this space I am an observer and not a judge. The observer can’t be let go but the judge can be (this is a subtle but important distinction I think a lot of folks gloss over or neglect entirely). That’s what I mean by getting out of the way. The observer stays but the judge goes. When we no longer judge, then it doesn’t matter what happens; what happens is what God wants to happen. It’s another way of living, one that’s easier and happier for all of us.

It doesn’t matter what I think or feel in that space; what matters is making the offer of myself, in a sincere way, to God for healing. When I do this, the healing comes. It always comes.

This is a very natural, intuitive and human way of being still. It’s okay to push past the rules and traditions and find your own way in it. With practice, we begin to recognize God and give welcome to the healing that God’s presence is. And that recognition and welcome transform the prayer. It is no longer a space of struggling with ego, with expectation and judgment, with grief and confusion. It is a space of joyful sharing with God, unhindered by all the ways “Sean” can be a block to sharing.

The word I use for this experience of prayer is communion. I used to use contemplation – and what I am talking about does neatly fit into a Christian contemplative prayer model – but communion feels more accurate because it reveals the underlying relationship which is based on communication. Something nurturing and empowering is exchanged, and the exchange enlarges our hearts and minds.

How this happens is very intimate and hard to talk about. In part it’s hard to talk about because from inside the experience it’s crystal clear that the specifics necessarily vary, and it’s easy to confuse the specifics with the generalized tenor of the relationship. What matters is the willingness and the offer. What matters is our availability.

Maybe it’s like falling in love? It’s natural and easy; it’s part of the human experience. But the form changes from person to person, culture to culture, and age to age. No two love stories are the same, and yet the experience of the story is ubiquitous.

So I think the safest thing to say is that this form of prayer involves simply making oneself available – in whatever way seems reasonable and accessible – to God for God. He has already heard our cry, and He has already responded. Prayer, as I am describing it here, is consenting to realize this truth about God, and our self, through the medium of silent relationship with our brothers and sisters.

That’s the first thing that has changed.

III. Pray as You were Taught to Pray

The second thing I am learning is “pray as you were taught to pray.” As summer was ending, I stood outside on the porch, well after midnight. The village was asleep; you could hear the river murmuring beyond the pasture. I was watching clouds pass the yellow moon and without thinking said aloud, “God I love you so much – thank you for sharing this moment with me.”

And I was heard. God heard me.

I hate saying that because it is not defensible in worldly terms, and most people hearing it either ignore it or demand it be defended and both responses, while understandable, arise from the same confusion. The phrase “God heard me” arises from – while speaking into being – a form of prayer that is as natural and familiar as breathing. You become as a child.

I don’t know what “pray as you were taught” means for you. I was raised by relatively liberal but devout Catholics; they taught me about a God who actually hears your prayers and really wants you to share everything with Him. All you had to do was open up and talk, like with a grandparent or a friend. I prayed regularly in this way as a child; it was not a burden or a duty.

As I grew older, I moved away from this kind of prayer. It washed away with the whole, “when I was a child I spoke as a child but now I am a man I speak as a man” idea. I studied meditation, read broadly in nonduality. I drove to remote monasteries for mass and retreats.

But what I have learned is that the mode of prayer I was given as a child remains – of course it remains! – intimately bound to my conception of God. Indeed, it gives life to that conception. Using it as an adult evokes the innocence and purity of childhood in ways that are not sentimental but powerfully healing.

Praying in this simple direct way also calls on a community of elders – parents and grandparents – who taught me this way of praying. It calls on their parents and grandparents, all the way back to ancestors I cannot name but whose practice and study inform my simple prayer even now. My innocent awareness of God as a close friend, a good listener and a trustworthy parent is a living connection with all life. It is an illusion that we are separate. Prayer makes this beautifully clear and plain.

IV. Sweeping Up the Threshing Floor

Prayer is a form of opening and offering myself to God. It is a form of vulnerability that hinges on consent. I have to say yes but more than that, my yes has to be authentic. It can’t be faked. It’s good to want to get to yes but wanting to get to yes isn’t yes. Not yet.

The yes really matters because God cannot come join with us until we are totally willing. He will draw near, sure. He will send guides and companions like teachers, angels, prophets and healers. But in the end, it has to be our yes, and it has to come from a space in our living signified by the heart, not the mind.

In other words, this yes is not verbal. Nor is it even conceptual. It’s not a product of reason but of love – not the special love predicated on differences – but a holy love in which the gaps between become fire and light.

. . . it is to Love you go in prayer. Prayer is an offering; a giving up of yourself to be at one with Love. There is nothing to ask because there is nothing left to want. That nothingness becomes the altar of God. It disappears in Him (S-1.I.5:4-8).

That yes – and the holiness which creates it, and which it reflects – are found in silence. It’s not personal; it can neither attack nor be attacked. Disciples and saints visit, undoing the bonds of time and space, helping me understand how to pray even more deeply, simply and openly.

The thing about prayer is, it eventually takes over our lives. It becomes a way of living. The prayer originates outside time and space and is not subject to them. It has no need at all for personality. It calls to us; it restores to us a memory of God and Love which are our real home.

Be still an instant . . . My Arms are open to the Son I love, who does not understand that he is healed, and that his prayers have never ceased to sing his joyful thanks in unison with all creation, in the holiness of Love (S-3.IV.7:4, 3).

When I listen in and to silence in this way I do hear the Song of Love. I say “song;” it is more like a note – or a note deep within another note – whose gentle pulse is the cosmos.

Now there are no distinctions. Differences have disappeared and Love looks on Itself (M-28.4:8–5:2).

When we pray as we were taught to pray, and when we also make consistent time to be open and available to God, we are gently made aware of deeper levels of being and sharing which A Course in Miracles analogizes to “song.”

For me, I hear and share this song especially at night outside. In the quiet and stillness – the moonlight and stars, the wind in the hills, the river out back, the horses passing back and forth – I sense a vibration. There is a note – beneath the sounds, beneath the silence – and I feel it vibrating. It transcends the duality of mind and matter or, better, it unifies them – which alleviates a lot of the anxiety around what to call it or am I making a mistake.

I find it possible to align with that vibration – to be at home in the impossibly vast cosmos, which is the mind of God, which is Love. When I harmonize with this note (this OM) – when I bring my whole self into harmony with it – the joy is so deep and clear.

Really there is nothing for us to do but make ourselves available to God, call it what you will. God waits on us to complete Him.

V. Calling

Do you know what I am talking about?