Prayer issues from that threshold where soul and life interflow; it is the conversation between desire and reality. It is not to be reduced to the intermittent moments when we say prayers in words. Prayer is a deeper and more ancient conversation within us. In this sense, the inner life of each person is prayer that commences in the first stir in the womb and ends with the last breath before returning to the invisible world. In a similar sense one could consider prayer as the soul-narrative of a people issuing from that threshold where the desire of a people negotiates the constraints and sufferings of its history. This is echoed in the haunted prayer of Lear: “Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, / How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you / From seasons such as these? O I have ta’en / Too little care of this.”
Near us is the ruin of an old penal church. It is a two-room limestone ruin set in a hazel wood on the side of the valley. It is called “coilltín phobail,” i.e., “the little wood of the people.” This was the church where our people gathered to pray in Penal Times, when there was a war against the faith (Penal Laws were those passed from the sixteenth century onward, prohibiting the practice of the Catholic faith in Britain and Ireland). There was a price on the head of every priest. My father often told us that during the Mass, watchmen kept lookout at different points on the horizon. The priest celebrated the Mass in one of the rooms, but never showed his face to the congregation. Remaining unknown, he protected himself and his people. This little penal ruin stands as a poignant metaphor of resistance and desire for the Divine that an empire could not kill. Prayer is often the space from which the poor and the oppressed retrieve and express their nobility and graciousness. Prayer awakens the soul and opens doors of possibility. In bleak and brutal times, it keeps the dream and longing of the heart alive. It is the only refuge of belonging in extreme times.
One Sunday morning in Manhattan, a friend took me up to a gospel community in Harlem. As an outsider, I felt that we might be intruding on their sacred space. But there was a wonderful, warm welcome. Up front, on the altar, more than fifty people in vestments led the congregation in singing the liturgy. The gospel singing was magnificent. The ebb and flow of its easy rhythm brought us gently and gradually into deeper tranquillity of soul. Yet there was such poignancy to the singing, because one realized that these were some of the songs that had kept the soul of these people alive in the brutal times under the slave owner’s whip. These deep-hearted, earth-resonant prayer songs kept meaning in the kingdom of the heart. Though their bodies were owned as objects, prayer kept their souls free and their minds dreaming of a time when the new day would break and the shadows flee.
It is often at the extremes that the eternal comes alive. When we are safely cushioned in our daily routine of duties and expectations, we forget who we are, and why it is that we are here. When suffering chooses you, the fabric of self-protection tears. The old familiarities and securities fall away as if they had never been there. The raft of desires that guided daily life become utterly insignificant. Suddenly they seem like fantasies from another era. Every ounce of energy gathers into one intention: the desire to survive. In some subtle, animal sense, we always secretly know how precarious and vulnerable our presence here is. Suffering absolutely unveils this fragility. E. M. Cioran writes, “Without God, all is night, with him light is useless.”
Our desire to endure and survive is a powerful instinct and it shows how desperately we long to belong to life. It takes immense pain to dislodge that ancient desire to belong. When that desire is driven to the edge of its own endurance, it can often endure there, turning to its own depth and taking the form of prayer. The prayer that calls out of this wilderness is one of the deepest cries of the human heart. Often this prayer is answered excruciatingly slowly. At the first stage, just enough light is released to enable you to hold on at the edge of the cliff. Then over time a stronger light gathers to guide you back to shelter. Such suffering radically refines the way you belong in your life. The true essence of your life becomes present to you. Real prayer opens at the heart of desire, at a level below your image, words, and actions. Real prayer is the liberation of that inner voice of the eternal.
