Even though the body may kneel, or words may be said or chanted, the heart of prayer activity is invisible. Prayer is an invisible world. Normally, when we look at something with our eyes, we see it empirically. We notice its shape, colour, and limits. In prayer, we see with the eye of the soul. We see in a creative and healing way. A lovely way to pray is to engage this light of the invisible world. Because the body is in the soul, all around your body there is an embrace of subtle soul-light. When you pray with your breath, you breathe this soul-light into the deepest recesses of your clay body. When you feel isolated or empty or lonesome, it is so nourishing to draw the eternal shelter of soul-light deep into you. This helps to heal you and returns you to inner tranquillity. When you come into a rhythm of breathing, you get deeper than the incisions of thought and feeling which separate you. This prayer restores your belonging at the hearth of divinity, a belonging from which no thought or act can ever finally exile you.
The Bible respects and extols particularly the prayer of praise. It is interesting to ask why the prayer of praise is honoured. Perhaps the reason is to be discovered in a consideration of the nature of praise. There is a lovely saying in Irish: “Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sí,” i.e., Praise youth and it will blossom. Praise issues from recognition and generosity. It has nothing to do with the politics and manipulation of flattery. Praise is truthful affirmation. God has no need of your praise. Yet the act of praising draws you way outside the frontiers of your smallness. To praise awakens the more generous side of your heart. It draws out the nobility, the úaisleacht, in you. When the soul praises, the life enlarges. We know as individuals how encouraging praise can be. It is like watching Nature on a spring morning. At first, the flowers are all closed and withdrawn. Then, ever so gradually, as the rays of the sun coax them, they open out their hearts to praise the light. The diminishing of praise is an acute poverty in post-modern culture. With the swell of consumerism and technology and the demise of religion, we are losing our ability to praise. We replace praise with banal satisfaction. The absence of praise reduces culture to a flat monoscape; the magic of its creative and imaginative curvature gets lost. A culture that cannot praise the Divine becomes a bare, cold place. The demise of religious and spiritual practice has contributed hugely to this flattening.
One can understand how a culture that has come of age can find little shelter or resonance in the way many of the rituals of institutional religion are practised. Increasing numbers of people stay away. Others attempt to develop their own rituals. The difficulty here is that a deeply resonant ritual emerges over years out of the rhythms of longing and belonging in a community. Great ritual creates an imaginative and symbolic frame which can awaken the numinous otherness, the tenderness, and the danger of the Divine. It is a subtle and infinitely penetrating form. Scattered, isolated individuals cannot invent ritual. Consumerism has stolen the sacred ritual structures of religion and uses them incisively in its liturgies of advertising and marketing. Meanwhile the post-modern soul becomes poorer and falls even further from the embrace and practice of sacred belonging. The great thing about a community at prayer is that your prayer helps mine—as mine helps yours. This makes no consumerist sense, but it is one of the most vivid enhancements of Being available to us. Individualism of the raw competitive kind is ignorant of this dimension.
