Where I worry
Where glory
isn't
When wonder won't
Joy just stands still
Then
In prayer
Stare, at
Myself
No longer
I outraged a few people when I mentioned that I prayed the other day. Have worried a few friends like that too. Anyway, this time in panicked tones they asked me to clarify. It didn't fit. Yes it's true I don't like certainty, have a mistrust of it. A recalcitrant knee jerk is my impulse to the ambition of certainties dominion. I consider it a narrower of possibility. On the face of humanity certainty is too often grimace, too often violence. I am with Ben Okri on this, if the towers of certainty were ever to fall it would mark the triumph of Time over the 'insane arrogance of human certainties'. So it would seem that people often tend to merge prayer life with a certain life, from the outside a pray'er has certainty, or a suspicious desire for the feeling of it. Well the desire is not suspicious but human, that aside I know that prayer and certainty are not synonymous in my own vocabulary, nor am I trying to recruit or borrow existential guarantee's when I pray. No, for me prayer is something utterly different. It is a place I enter. I understand those who are disturbed by the narrowness of the word prayer and its fixed superstitious associations. Speaking personally I feel content to still use the word. For me it is wide enough still, offering us a way of talking about something we all do or rather a place we all go. The transcendent nature of certain moments, that over-spilling, when reaching lunges of undefined desire draw out an up welling of what feels like my deepest self. For me prayer is not about certainty, I ask for nothing and don't expect to be heard. Prayer is the domain I step into to abide in wonder, to transmit gratefulness, tap strength, cultivate kindness, own joy, know peace, tangle with desperation, explore pain and maybe melt into oneness. Before I step in to this place I don't know which of these will flow. I know some might find it unfair that I have appropriated such universal human experience and draped a religious word like prayer on it. Of course meditation is a word that might serve us. We could use mindfulness even, though if we do then it needs to draw from the great traditions of mindfulness across the religions, else the same pitfalls await us and we loose refined insight too. What ever words are used to explore this posture I have described let them all be shared, my word is prayer yet it is something more and it is everyone's. If they are to transform us (enhance community's) uncertainties sometimes need names.
