Another beautiful thing about prayer is the way it changes space. Physical space is full of distance. It is distance that separates people and things. Even between two people who love each other and live with each other, the short distance between their bodies is the colossal distance between two different worlds. The magical thing about prayer is that it creates spiritual space. This alters physical distance. In spiritual space there is no distance. A prayer offered for someone in New Zealand reaches her as swiftly as the prayer offered for someone right beside you. Prayer suffuses distance and changes it. Prayer carries the cry of the heart innocently and immediately over great and vast distances. William Stafford evokes this in his poem “An Afternoon in the Stacks.” He describes the aftermath of reading a book. The act of reading becomes a wild symbiosis of the reader’s longing and the wise configuration of words. Stafford knows that the reverberation of this intimacy will continue: “…the rumour of it will haunt all that follows in my life / A candle flame in Tibet leans when I move.” In spiritual space, the trail of intimacy can traverse any distance and still retain the intensity and belonging.
Prayer reveals a hidden world. The way we see things is heavily conditioned. The eye always moves to the object. In a landscape, the eye is drawn at once to a stone, a tree, a field, a wave, or a face. The eye has great affection for things. Only infants or adults lost in thought gaze lingeringly into the middle distance. These are moments when we literally look at nothing. This perennially neglected nothing is precious space, because it provides the medium and the trail of connection between all the separate, different things and persons. The artist Anish Kapoor, reflecting on his fascinating exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, said, “The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It’s very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow
It is so important that prayer happens in the world, every day and every night. It is consoling to remember that there are old and feeble nuns in forgotten convents who live out their days by creating little boats of prayer to ferry nourishment to a hungry world. There are also monks in monasteries in cities and in lonesome mountains whose wonderful chorus of prayer keeps life civilized and somehow still balanced. In our precarious and darkening world, we would have destroyed everything long ago were it not for the light and shelter of prayer. Prayer is the presence that holds harmony in the midst of chaos. Every time you pray, you add to the light and harmony of creation. If you do not pray, if you do not believe in prayer, then you are living off the prayers of other people. Each day, when we wake to move out into the world, and each night, when we gather ourselves in sleep, we should gently send the light of prayer from our hearts. It is important that some light of prayer emanate from each individual. Prayer is the most beautiful poem of longing. Martin Buber said, “Prayer is not in time but time is in prayer.” Prayer is eternity and, therefore, time inhabits prayer.
Prayer is a light that once lighted will never fail. All prayer opens the Divine Presence: When you sit in prayer, the purest force of your own longing comes alive. Julian of Norwich has a wonderful poetic insight into prayer as longing. The Lord whispers to her, “Behold, I am the Ground of thy Beseeching.” In other words, your longing for God is not a thrust through empty distance towards a removed God. No. The actual longing for God is not a human invention; rather it is put there by God. The longing for God is already the very presence of God. Our longing for God brings the kiss of the Divine to the human soul. Prayer is the deepest and most tender intimacy. In prayer the forgiving tenderness of God gathers around our lives. God infects us with the desire for God.
