It is important to pray for those who are given in to our care in the world. Each person walks a unique pathway through the world. You have your own work, gifts, difficulties, and commitments. In order to take your place and contribute to the light of the world, you need to honour all these different dimensions of your life. Adjacent to all your activity in the world, there is also present in your life a small group of people who are directly in your care. They are usually family and some intimate friends who come to dwell at the centre of your life. These people are sent to you with gifts and challenges. In turn, you have a duty to look out for them. These people are in your soul-care. When someone is really close to you, you are in each other’s soul-care. Because of the calling of your own life, you cannot be continually there. Yet in the affection of prayer, you can carry the icons of their presence on the altar of your heart. Often unknown to the world, you secretly carry these friends in your heart and from heart to heart you bless, mind, and care for each other. In the Celtic tradition, it was always recognized that if you sent blessings out from your heart, they multiplied and returned again to bless your own life. A generous heart is never lonesome. A generous heart has luck. The lonesomeness of contemporary life is partly due to the failure of generosity. Increasingly, we compete with each other for the goods, for image, and status. The one can only ascend if the other is put down; there is only so much room on the pedestal. The old class system may have largely vanished, but our new system has a more subtle but equally lethal need for hierarchy. We forget that competition is false. An old rule in thought is that you can only compare like with like. No two individuals in the world are alike. Consequently, it is false to compare people and continue to foster such a destructive ideology of competitiveness. We damage the sanctuary of each other’s presence by building such false standards of comparison and competition. We have been seduced by competitiveness. And so easily. Because of the bogus certainties it supplies.
It is a lovely gift when a person prays for you. One of the greatest shelters in your life is the circle of invisible prayer that is gathered around you by your friends here and in the unseen world. It is a beautiful gift to draw someone into the shelter of your circle of prayer. When you are going through difficult times or marooned on some lonesome edge in your life, it is often the prayer of your friends that brings you through. When your soul turns into a wilderness, it is the prayer of others that brings you back to the hearth of warmth. I know people who have been very ill, forsaken, and damaged; the holy travellers that we call prayers have reached out to them and returned them to healing. The prayer of healing has wisdom, discernment, and power. It is unknown what prayer can actually achieve.
When you meet someone at the level of prayer, you meet them on the ground of eternity. This is the heart of all kinship and affinity. When you journey in there to meet someone, a great intimacy can awaken between you. I imagine that the dead who live in the unseen world never forget us; they are always praying for us. Perhaps this is one of the ways that they remain close to our hearts: they extend the light and warmth of prayer towards us. Prayer is the activity of the invisible world, yet its effect is actual and powerful. It is said that if you pray beside a flower it grows faster. When you bring the presence of prayer to the things you do, you do them more beautifully.
After the absolution of night, the dawn is a new beginning. All the mystical traditions have recognized that the dawn is a special time. They all have had rituals of prayer for beginning the day. They do not greet the day with worry or the anxiousness of how many items are on the agenda before twelve. They literally take time to welcome the new day. Acknowledging the brevity of our time on earth, they recognize the huge, concealed potential of a day for soul-making. This space to recognize each unique day invests the day with a sense of the eternal. The monastic tradition blesses this beginning with prayer. As children, we were taught to say the “morning offering” prayer. Though quite traditional, this was a nice prayer of care for the new day. It would be lovely in the morning if you could give thanks for the gift of the new day and recognize its promise and possibility, and, at evening, it would be lovely to gather the difficulties and blessings of the lived day within a circle of prayer. It would intensify and refine your presence in the world if you came into a rhythm of framing your days with prayer.
