The shape of each soul is different. No one else can ever get inside your world and experience firsthand what it is like to be you. This is at once the mystery of individuality and its great loneliness. Those close to you can best sense and imagine what it is like to be you, but they can never feel, see, or know your life from the inside. The deeper ground of individuality is to be sought in the originality of the Divine Imagination manifest in the relish of beginnings. The Divine Artist is utterly creative, makes each thing new and different. Each individual expresses and incarnates a different dimension of divinity. Each one of us comes from a different place in the circle of the Divine. Consequently each one of us prays out of a different inner world and each one of us prays to a different place in the Divine Circle. This is the place we left to come here. This is the empty nest in the Divine where the secrets of our origin, experience, and destiny are stored. When we pray, we pray to that space in the Divine Presence which absolutely knows us. This could be what is suggested by that lovely moment in the New Testament when it says of our return to the invisible world: “On that day you will know as you are known.”
All our time here, we are on a constant threshold between the Divine and the human. The Divine knows us totally. We only know ourselves partially. When we return home this disproportion and blindness will be healed. Then our knowing will be equal to the divine knowing of us. This recognition confers great permission on the individuality of prayer. You can only pray through the unique lens of your individuality. There is no need for you to be in any way guilty about your reluctance or inability to mimic the formal prayers of your religion or the pious prayer of others. If you listen to the deep voice of your heart, that voice is at one with the unique melody of your soul. Your deepest prayer is the prayer of your essence. When you move deeper into the inner world and enter the temple of your essence, your prayer will be of one pulse beat with the Divine Heart.
Prayer helps us to belong more fully in our own lives. Ingeborg Bachmann said, “It takes so long to learn to take your place in your own life.” The more we come to recognize the subtle adjacencies in our lives, the more easily they can enter our belonging. The more we recognize the neglected and unseen dimensions of our lives, the more enriched and balanced we become. It takes a lifetime’s work to belong fully in your life. It is almost as if each event, encounter, and experience is a pathway to be explored and lived. Then the wisdom of the soul harvests it and brings its treasures back in along that pathway until they belong to the deepest circle of your self. Each day we voyage outwards, and at evening our souls bring home what we have suffered, learned, and created. The soul is more ancient than consciousness and mind. Each day your soul weaves your life together. It weaves the opaque and ancient depth of you with the actual freshness of your present experience. The soul is the home of memory. When you pray, you enter that sanctuary where the repository of unlived and lived things opens to embrace the mystery of what you now live. You cannot break into this place inside you. All attempts to force entry will be circumvented by your wily soul. However, when you pray into your own depths, they might open for a moment to offer you a glimpse of the eternal artistry that is at work in you. This eternal longing is put beautifully by Fernando Pessoa:
So all recalls my home self and, because
it recalls that, what I am aches in me.
Because prayer comes from such a deep space within you, it can afford you glimpses of yourself. Prayer satisfies the longing of the unknown to find you. It helps transfigure the barriers to your inner world. You come to discover that there is no distance between you and the deepest core of your being.
