Rhythms of Prayer, Rhythms of Love

. . . in open marriage with the world

One way to approach the Holy Instant, which A Course in Miracles suggests is "all of time there is" (T-15.I.9:5), is to find the rhythm of the natural world, which includes your own rhythms - your heart, your lungs, your mind, your psyche. There is a harmony, a coherence, inherent in the world and, when we give attention to it, it summons us into a stillness that is, in a real way, outside of time altogether.

At what pace do the horses move? The moon through the Heavens? What about the wind in the hemlocks? The river out back beyond the pasture? What is the rhythm of sunflowers and apple trees?

How often do you blink? Draw a breath? How often do the chickadees cry their two-note spring song? The bald eagle gliding over the far hills - how long is each slow and graceful loop through the air? Does the eagle know time the way you do? The way a blade of grass does?

When I sit quietly and attend the world in this way, I realize these questions - about rhythm, pace, tempo and time - are really just a form of asking: how long does it take the heart to open up in love for the one I have forsaken? Left unforgiven? Nailed to a cross? Kept from the fire? Banned from the table?

What is the rhythm of the mind recognizing itself in the other and remembering it is the other?

The Wholeness of God, which is His peace, cannot be appreciated except by a whole mind that recognizes the Wholeness of God’s creation . . . Exclusion and separation are synonymous, as are separation and dissociation (T-6.II.1:2-4).

To sincerely and carefully raise these questions - which is also to be open to answers we don't already know or couldn't have expected - is radical. By "radical" I don't mean politically extreme (although, fair warning, Love does not tolerate the status quo - this is a dangerous spiritual practice if our goal is safety and comfort). I mean radical as in deeply rooted, having its origins in the cosmos, in a way that extends beyond the narrow range of the human frame.

These questions - and their answers - place us in opposition to constructions based on human ignorance, which is always blindly devoted to utility, efficiency, profit, et cetera. That’s the nightmare from which we are awakening. We are taught to be doers; we are taught to look at life in terms of means and ends. Don't just sit there - do something! But if you enter, as I have, an open marriage with chickadees and violets, apple trees and crows, then you realize the instability, the lunacy, of things like weekends, overtime, vacation and credit. You realize there is another way.

The invitation is to discover what time is (or is not) before all that conditioning floods our nervous system and drives us into postures of consumption and conflict, whose fruits are always loneliness, injustice and violence.

It is helpful to ask these questions outdoors. For me it is. I love sitting quietly by the horses and listening to the river at midnight. I love trailing my fingers over luminous ferns on the north side of the house; I love putting out teacups at night so they can fill with moonlight. My heart flows New Englandly through the seasons and my mind - as Sister Emily observed - is wider than the sky, deeper than the sea and vaster than the cosmos.

When I give attention to the natural world, my sense of time as contained by or measured by clocks and calendars - and the brutal world that containment and measurement imposes on us - loses its hold and I begin to relate differently to life. I become happier and more peaceful. Hope is not an ideal but a recognition of what will be because it always has been. Dreams merge with Creation.

Giving attention is a form of prayer. The way we notice the world - from flowers to family, from friends to inner feelings - the way we hold them in awareness, the way we extend them in awareness - reflects our openness to God, Who holds us, and extends us.

This is not an intellectual inquiry! It’s bigger than the words I use to gesture at it. It's an inquiry that transcends the mind and the body in order to observe - to make welcome, in and through attention - the world they bring forth together, which is the world in which we learn - in which we remember - that there is no separation anywhere.

Therefore, in prayer, simply be curious and, to the maximal extent possible, don't judge. Notice when you are judging (it’s not a crime against God or nature) and then set the judgement aside. Like the clock which is its parent, judgment gets in the way of effective prayer. True prayer is a way of being vulnerable; it always involves a degree of risk. All true communication does.

Shortly before he died, Thomas Merton spoke about prayer to the community at the Redwoods Monastery in California.

In prayer, we discover what we already have. You start where you are and you deepen what you already have and you realize you are already there. We already have everything, but we don’t know it and we don’t experience it. Everything has been given to us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess.

As I have been saying for the past year or so, "Christ" is not private or personal. It's not a being, historical or otherwise. Christ is a collective. Christ is what happens when we join and commit to extending our joining to the world, welcoming others without exception. Christ is the condition of service and joy we remember and extend together, a "common state of mind where both give errors gladly to correction, that both may happily be healed as one" (T-22.III.9:7).

Prayer occurs mostly in solitude but it is fundamentally an act of solidarity. You are with me when I pray and - if you are willing - I am with you. Others, too. And our prayer goes with us, it goes in and out of us. It lights up the world and the light transforms us. Suddenly all we want to do is help each other. Catherine of Siena said that "whatever you do in word or deed for the good of your neighbor is a real prayer." How much clearer could it be?

Part of what I am saying is that as our prayer begins to harmonize - first with our surroundings, then with the contents of our mind, and then with the cosmos, something in us slows down and opens up and this slowness, this openness, makes possible a mode of relationship in which the illusion of separation dissolves, leaving only awareness of Creation which is Creation.

Really really what I am saying is that when we attend these rhythms, we eventually perceive in them the healing presence of God, and then we learn that they are the healing presence of God and - on my honor - once you have sipped from that river, you will never get off your knees again.

And yes. The work of healing goes on. Life goes on. It’s okay. Problems and solutions come and go, empires and religions come and go. Even coming and going comes and goes. But over and above and beyond all that is God, Who is Love, Whose healing presence - here, now - creates us anew again and again and again. If I don’t tell you, how will you remember? And if you don’t remember, how can I?

Love,
Sean