One Step Prayer
When the body fails to perform as it should (or as we would like) it can be terrifying: as if a friend turns away from us. Our way of seeing and relating to everything is disrupted. When it happened to me, I became more self-centred and therfore, of course, felt more alone. The self-protecting line between inner and outer began to dissolve.
There is no real distinction between the inner and the outer. The magnificent temple of the body teaches us this whether through affliction or pleasure. Nevertheless, we are usually lop-sided, unbalanced and so too ‘outer-directed’. We feel compelled to look for the way of truth in the activity of the external dimension. We think that it is there that problems are solved. Problems are actually dissolved through a change of perspective.
And so, it is useful to talk about the ‘inner path’, the ‘journey within’ and so on, not because it exists separately but because it brings us home to the nature of reality, the complementarity of inner and outer. Of course, the very idea of interiority can be irritating when we feel under pressure to solve problems externally. To open to a healing wholeness through the ‘interior path’ may make us feel that we are losing opportunity, wasting time or risking ourselves in new ways we are not prepared for. Better to be prepared with an ‘inner practice’ so that when challenging times come we are prepared. Fix the roof while the sun is shining.
‘I am sorry to have to tell you..,’ the doctor will say one day. It shocks, shakes and disorients us radically. Yet it is the dawn of an opportunity to expand and deepen. To be plunged into this new and uncertain perspective through physical sickness can be cataclysmic and painfully lonely even if you are fortunate to be held in a communion or community of love (as I was). Vivid new forms of the old questions arise: Who am I? What I am becoming? What next? What’s going to happen? These questions flood in as our usual sense of self and perception of others tremble like an earthquake. The wonder of the true self will eventually emerge through this process but the journey will take us through rough, uneasy, uncertain and powerless places.
There were times when I also felt freed by it and I embraced my times of meditation with great peace. Other times, I felt almost unable to meditate, maybe falling asleep or feeling that the connection we rely on for meditation had disappeared just when I most needed it. This connection can never broken. When it reappears we understand it better. Its absence, like the dark cloud of the Rothko paintings, needs to be entered not escaped.
There is one step, just one, in the simple, un-self-reflective ‘prayer of the heart’ which we call meditation. It leads into the boundless, gracious freedom and joy of contemplation which is the simple enjoyment of the truth. However, just as we have the inner and the outer to unite, or like every step we take when we are walking, there are two parts before it is complete. One forward, one waiting behind.
We may hope that meditation will help us get us what we want. Instead it shows the illusory nature of desire, then shows us that we already have what we really want and need. To desire is still praying ‘for something’. True prayer is sufficient in itself. It is not instrumental or a means of achieving something, although of course it will change everything.
Jesus took this step in his existential crisis in the Garden of Gethsemane (Mt 26:39) when
After going a little farther, he fell face down and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me..
Key words: he fell face down. In the first step we have to fall flat on our face, wholly accepting and expressing what we feel and letting go. The more powerless we are the better. Then we know we are not performing, posing or bargaining with a projected image of God. The other half happens spontaneously:
yet not as I will, but as you will.
Dante said ‘nella sua voluntade è la nostra pace’ : in his will is our peace. I am not sure if God has a ‘will’ but we get the point, which is that our ego-will must dissolve. With this our resistance to accepting reality yields and there comes peace.
Once we have taken this step, we do not need to take the first step again.
