Where to find God

A life of prayer that awakens to the essence of the spiritual life---happiness, inner peace, and the most meaningful kind of exterior action in daily life---awakens to the presence of the Beloved within. St. Teresa of Avila heard Christ speak these words: "Teresa, buscate en mi, buscame en ti" ("Seek for yourself in me, seek for me in yourself").

Where do you seek God?  Here in the midst of your daily life, in this moment.

And how?  By awakening to what's within you--the shadows and the radiance.

Prayer, then, is not a pious exercise divorced from daily life.  Nor are you to wander here and there in search for God.  Prayer is life, and life is prayer.  God is near as the beating of your heart, close as your next breath.

Here's God's whisper to Teresa . . . and to you:

Soul, you must seek yourself in Me And Me you must seek in yourself. . . . . You were created for love Beautiful, gracious, and thus In my heart painted, Should you love yourself, O my beloved, Soul, you must seek yourself in Me. . . . . But if perhaps you should not know Where you may find Me Do not go hither and thither, But, if you should wish to find Me, Me you must seek in yourself.

Translated by Raimon Panikkar in Christophany: The Fullness of Man, 2004: 27-28

When you become fire

Here's a poem I wrote in 2009, expresses the intention of prayer.  It joins both the necessity of human effort in the pursuit of God, yet meets our effort with grace---without which there will be no real meeting, no holy fire, no true prayer.  It also joins together the three elements of the person in a fully Christian psychology---body, mind (or soul), and heart (or spirit).

Unless these three unite and meet grace, there is only a superficial meeting with God.  We bring our full humanity to meet God's full divinity.  Only then can we become what we are made to be.  As both St. Athanasius in the Eastern Church and St. Augustine in the Western Church teach: "Divinity became humanity that humanity might become divinity."  This is the goal of prayer---Fire.

The Pyre

Desire Fire, and God will send a spark.

When body, mind, and heart unite,

You become the Pyre.

October 2009

A prayer when entering into silence

It's one thing to offer a prayer expressing your intention to love God in prayer (see previous post). The form of prayer that follows that little prayer may be a meditation on Scripture, holy conversation with your Beloved, or intercession for others. But, at some point Love will invite you into the Silence where no words can ever go.  It is the Silence from which words come, the home of the Word.  To go there, you'll want to express your intention clearly for that journey as well. Here's a prayer I often whisper as I ready myself for stillness before the Beloved:

I still my lips that my mind may seek; I still my mind that my heart may seek; I still my heart, and hide inside the Great Silence, till What I seek finds me.

It expresses my intention to gradually move from the outer parts of my body toward my deepest inner self, where Christ awaits. Such a prayer charts the path I will walk toward the divine encounter, every step a renunciation of self-will, self-interest, and self-control---a yielding to God who alone can carry me across the threshold of what I've known, into the Mystery I cannot know except through the blindness of unknowing, the renunciation of all previous ways of knowing.

As any good lover, express your intention clearly

As you enter into prayer, express your intention to love God with all you have (Luke 10.27). I will often improvise on some alluring passage of Scripture that arouses my love, my devotion, my pursuit of the Beloved. Song of Solomon 1.1-4 or 2.8-14 are my preference. These intimate love letters once used between two lovers are, in the history of spirituality, invitations to the divine romance. Express them to God, your Beloved, and let them set your heart aflame.

Obviously, your heart will not always "burn within you"--especially at dawn after you've stumbled out of bed, and perhaps haven't slept well or had your morning coffee. You may have difficulty focusing at the end of a long and troubling day. No matter, you've expressed your intention.  That's what matters.

Your body and mind will follow your words eventually. If not today, then after the hundredth time you've mumbled the words.  One day you'll speak the words as you have ninety-nine times before, but this time there's a sudden brush of wings, a gentle nudge, a voice that comes to you.  You look up and see your Beloved running toward you, and you'll feel yourself rising up with a desire you've not engineered. Love has come for you, unexpected, unforced.

You expressed your intention, then waited. And Grace has come to you; your prayer becomes a dance, or better, a holy bed for lovers.

A window on an active person deep in prayer

Here's a helpful description of an active person at prayer. It's from George Eliot's Adam Bede. Dinah's a Methodist minister. She's getting ready to leave the community where she's cared for people for quite awhile. Eliot shows her sitting by her bedroom window thinking of the people she's loved through good times and bad.

"The pressure of this thought soon became too strong for her to enjoy the unresponding stillness of the moonlit fields. She closed her eyes, that she might feel more intensely the presence of a Love and Sympathy deeper and more tender than was breathed from the earth and sky. That was Dinah's mode of praying in solitude. Simple to close her eyes, and to feel herself enclosed by the Divine Presence; then gradually her fears, yearning anxieties for others, melted away like ice-crystals in a warm ocean" (quoted in Martin Laird's, Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation, p. 31).

I'm guessing a number of you pray this way and know this experience. There are others who have tasted once or twice, but don't think it's real prayer. It is real prayer---the deepest, highest kind.