FROM THE BOUNDARY - Hiya! – Part six
We can’t be cavalier with the divine ‘Word’ we claim we’ve heard. It’s about childlike trust and humility: yes, trust that God loves us, trust that if He wishes us to know Him the divine whisperings will be clear enough – and humble enough to acknowledge we may be wrong. And sure, it may mean questioning what we’ve been conditioned to believe no matter the source.
There are things we can do to test the awesome reality of revelation. We can ask whether what we believe will serve His greater glory. We can ask whether love, compassion, justice and forgiveness lie at the root of it all. We can ask whether it’s all consistent with the life, teaching and character of Jesus. We can ask whether conscience is troubled, whether we’re being true to our truest selves. We can seek scriptural support and the guidance of those who direct our spiritual lives. Yes, and we can pray without ceasing, acknowledging that communication is two-way.
Praying without ceasing. God isn’t an idol. He’s not an abstraction. He never stops speaking to us. He’s within us and outside us. He speaks in the beauty of natural things, when we hold out our hand in friendship, in the wonder of a child, in the still small voice which nags us, in countless ways. To hear Him, we don’t have to hear voices in our heads like Joan of Arc. We don’t need words. They’re like a forest. But, as Kabir reminds us, we must never forget the trees themselves. The individual trees are all the divine promptings, nudges, whisperings, tinklings, murmerings as the divine exhales and warms us with His breath. Very well – we also breathe, and breathing really doesn’t require bowing our heads. But it does require a FORM of language, at root the language of love and trust, the language of ‘I AM’ in Him, and the ‘I am’ in us as we eventually understand Him as the Breath of our every breath.
Praying without ceasing. Let it be the prayer of the Name, the Name in our every breath, the Name which brings life, love and peace, the Name which robs death of its fear. Jesus. Jesus I love you. Jesus have mercy. Jesus my Lord. Jesus, my God and my All. Jesus, thy Kingdom come. Jesus my Sacred Heart. Jesus, I trust in you. Jesus, remember me.
We don’t need to live in a monastery, or sit in church, to say any of those words. We can say them at any time, in any place, in waking or sleeping, in love and adoration, in gratitude, in need. There’s no one formula. We choose it. Whichever we choose, it’s ours, from the heart, the very depths of our being, in every breath – breathing it in, and out, again and again. Its become part of us. Through the prayer, the divine makes itself known and insists it will never leave us.
It’s known as the ‘Jesus Prayer’ and is to be found in a book, ‘The Way of a Pilgrim’. The manuscript of that was found in the cell of a monk after his death, and it’s become a classic. The book relates the pilgrim journeyings of a homeless wanderer in Russia. In church one day he heard Paul’s words in 1 Thess 5:17: “Pray without ceasing”. On his wanderings, he asked those he met how to do it, but none could tell him – until, that is, he met a staretz, a holy man. The prayer? ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me a sinner’. It’s a prayer of the Desert Fathers of the third and fourth centuries, and contained in the ‘Philokalia’, their writings on prayer. Our mendicant obtained a copy, and learned to say the prayer thousands of times a day. I wear a silver ring from Estonia with the prayer engraved on it. It’s very special to me.
The prayer by constant repetition becomes inseparable from our breathing, and finds its way into our hearts so that it becomes part of us. It’s an ‘ejaculatory’ prayer – it shoots straight to God. Whatever words we actually use, the overarching sense is ‘I love you Jesus’. Maybe it sounds too mechanical to you. But then, the repetition inevitably works on our subconscious and we become ‘prayerful’ in a way we never were before. God becomes ever in our focus, a conscious reality, and we find our hurts are healed. We no longer rely on the narrowly verbal, mere words, hearsay book texts, to reach for the divine, for language has been displaced. It will never unite us to Him. But inexorably we become sensitive to His promptings through the Spirit in all we do. We become ‘present’ for each other. Through our breathing we become aware that our bodies have truly become temples where love is exchanged and the scales of unknowing fall from our eyes. It’s our yearnings, insights, sense of connectedness which have taken over, and they all record the moonbeams of light which are ‘We’ for each other. It’s all deeply personal – but isn’t that what our relationship with Him is meant to be? Isn’t that what love’s meant to be?
Go safely then – until the next time.
Listening, from the boundary: “The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it” (Kabir).