What, Finally, Is Prayer?
O Lover,
In a recent conversation a friend raised a question as old as faith: what is prayer? Although this is a query the answering of which finds a lifetime too brief a time, being in Your Presence amid my anecdotage on the cusp of The Feast seems like a propitious time for an interim response.
My intro to this question, O Lover, presupposes a spirituality shift, pervasive and seismic, which I am continuing to undergo, most consciously in the last decade. That shift, affecting everything, involves at its most basic level the relationship of You as Creator with the creation, You the Infinite with the finite cosmos. Is that relationship essentially dualistic or unitive, primarily about transcendence or immanence, centrally about You and the many or a Oneness beyond enumeration? In the language of the Hindu Vedantic tradition, I am increasingly leaning toward it being more about “neither two nor one” (advaíta), on the one hand, than about subject vis-à-vis object or unítas distinctiónis, on the other. It is this massive shift toward indistinctiónis, one repeatedly explored by Christian and nonChristian mystical traditions alike, which has implications for several derivative issues.
First, O Lover, there is the issue of requests. While I include prayer elements of both petition (on behalf of myself) and intercession (on behalf of others), who You are as the Abyss of Love, as Reality Itself, has become incompatible with asks for intervention, stuff or other “goodies” a la an ATM, especially when characterized by quid pro quo. Rather, my growing longing is that petition and intercession might express an ever-greater love for You, neighbor, and self (Mt 22:34-40). Who You are experienced to be, O Lover, must be the principal shaper of what prayer is.
A second issue involves the personalized aura of much prayer. Given the personhood of Your Christ, I warily use such language for You, this blog included, despite awareness that You infinitely transcend that quality in myself. While in the spirit of Buber’s Ich und Du I lean toward language both personalized and yet ever-beyond rather than focusing on subject/object, I seek to discard any use which delimits or otherwise dualizes You. While You infinitely transcend my personhood, I experience Your unitive vastness as including my finite version. Stated otherwise, I as a person experience Your ineffability as personal.
A third issue entails the variedness of prayer. A short list of expressions offered to You ranges from the formulaic to the silent, the kataphátic to the apophátic, the mediatory to the immediate, the active to the receptive, the rosary to the rapturous, a life-long fixture to an ever-expanding exploration. Amidst the myriad of personality types, cultural contexts, and historical faith traditions, I seek to participate in, or at least respect, all prayer. I want each of us to follow with authenticity a journey into You, not presume to prescribe it to one another. At the same time, while joining my prayer to the entire planetary family, I want to do so in my own way by being alert and responding to how You are seizing me. All prayer, after all, is somehow response to Your impinging.
The above three issues having been touched upon, the focus of the query is hopefully more clear: what, finally, is the core of prayer, O Lover, for me? In this my anecdotage it consists of practicing an awareness of the Love-saturated and splendiferous “interpenetration” (circumincéssion) of You in the cosmos, of You as Creator in all of us creatures, with Your disposition amid that pervasion being Love Itself (I Jn 4:8,16) as rendered concrete in the Christ. To “abide” (a la Jn 15:1-11), whether briefly or protractedly, in that awareness is at least as much a state of transcognitive being as it is of activist doing. Employing the image of Augustine, to pray then is primarily to rest in You, to “pray without ceasing” (II Thes 5:17) even while acknowledging that “we do not know how to pray” (Rom 8:26), and in so doing to sustain the practice timelessly embodied in the words of Julian of Norwich: “all shall be well.”
More than ever, O Lover, my “sacred word” (The Cloud), the taking flight beyond thought, image or theology, is Tu Sólus (“You alone”). That mántra, panentheistically all-inclusive and thus seemingly in the spirit of St. Francis’ Deus Meus et Omnia (“My God and all things”), best points to and beyond the state and core of prayer for me.
