You can pray anytime and anywhere. You do not have to travel to some renowned spiritual guide to learn how to pray. You do not need to embark on a fifty-five-step spiritual path until you learn how to say a proper, super prayer. You do not have to sort out your life so that you can be real with God. You do not have to become fundamentalist, and hammer away your most interesting contradictions and complexities before you can truly pray. You need no massive preamble before prayer. You can pray now, where you are and from whatever state of heart you are in. This is the most simple and honest prayer. Many of our prayer preparations only manage to distract and distance us from the Divine Presence. We always seem to be able to find the most worthy of reasons for not just being quite ready to pray yet; this means that we never get to prayer. Prayer is so vital and transforming that the crucial thing is to pray now. Regardless of what situation you are in, your heart is always ready to whisper a prayer.
We are always in the Divine Presence, every second, everywhere. In prayer the Divine Presence becomes an explicit companionship that warms, challenges, and shelters us. We do not have to skate over vast, frozen lakes of pious language to reach the shore of the Divine. God is not so deadeningly serious. We need to be gentle and smile, as Hopkins so beautifully writes: “My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind.” God is wild and must also have a subtle sense of irony. In the lyrical unfolding of our days, we remain in the Presence. The simplest whisper of the heart is already within the Divine Embrace.
The Celtic tradition always had a very refined sense of the protective closeness of God. Prayers like this: “No anxiety can be ours, the God of the Elements, the King of the Elements, the Spirit of the Elements closes over us eternally.” There was no distance between the individual and God. There was no need to travel any further than the grace of your longing in order to come into the Divine Presence. The Celtic imagination enfolded the prayer of Nature into the heart of their conception of God. It is the God of sun, moon, stars, mountains, and rivers. God has a dwelling in the earth and the ocean. He inspires all things, he quickens all things, he supports all things, and creates all things. The earth is the ever-changing theatre of Divine Presence. Celtic spirituality is imbued with a powerful fluency of longing and a lovely flexibility of belonging. It is the exact opposite of fundamentalism.
Prayer is the liberation of God from our images of God. It is the purest contact with the wildness of the Divine Imagination. Real prayer has a vigilance that is constantly watching and deconstructing the human tendency towards idolatry. Despite our best sincerity, we still long to control and domesticate the Divine. Meister Eckhart says that the closer we come to God, the more it ceases to be God. He says God “entwird,” i.e., God un-becomes. In other words, God is only our name for it. Elsewhere he writes: “Therefore, I pray to God that he may make me free of ‘God,’ for my real being is above God if we take ‘God’ to be the beginning of created things.” Idolatry is the worship of a dead God. It is ironic that every human needs some God on the inner altar of the heart. We cannot live without some deity, whether it is Jesus, the Trinity, Allah, Mohammed, or the Buddha. The deity could also be money, power, greed, addiction, or status. The critical vigilance of real prayer endeavours to ensure that it is the flame of the living God that burns on the altar of our hearts. Such prayer longs for the real warmth of divine belonging. Real prayer helps you to live in the beauty of truth. It is a visitation from outside the frontier of your own limitation. The great Irish poet Sean Ó Riordan says, “Níl aon bhlas ag duine ar a bhlas féin,” i.e., No one can taste his own tasting. Though you are the closest and nearest person in the world to yourself, you cannot taste your own essence. When it comes to truly enfolding yourself, you remain a stranger. Only in the embrace of prayer are you able to unfold and enfold yourself in truth, affection, and tenderness.
