March 1999 (Vol. XII, No. 3)

Prayer, the one language we all can use, is at its deepest a silent language.

Creator,
grant me the grace to long for You
and not my illusions of You,

to know You as love's questions
rather than as binding answers.

to rest in the hope
of what I do not understand about You,

and to be forever willing
to give up what I know about You
in order to seek You afresh.

In prayer we are neither on the one hand dialoguing with an outside source who utters messages from without, nor are we simply talking to ourselves. We are reaching deeply into ourselves and sensing more clearly that we are in God's knowledge and love. We are discovering the Divine within us. We are experiencing ourselves and our lives as uttered by God, and we listen.

This is the only message I've been getting in prayer these days: "Forget the experts for a while. Trust your own experience." You are an offspring of the One who said, "I am who I am." If the One who gave you birth lives within you, surely you can find some resources there in your sacred Center... Remember, you are splendor!

Those who are accustomed to meditate will know that at a certain point you can touch the great silence, the center, the source of all good... Would that men and women would seek silence more often, as we used to do in past ages. In our Indian days we who had the welfare of the people at heart would climb high into the mountains to meditate at the rising and the setting of the sun, and we would not leave our post until we had an answer to our prayer. We did not attempt to solve our problems amidst the noise of the camp fire, but repaired to the mountain top -- not only the physical mountain, but the mountain of high consciousness. We recognized the great power which lay in the silence.

Prayer is not a way to get what we want to happen, like the remote control that comes with the television set. I think prayer may be less about asking for the things we are attached to than it is about relinquishing our attachments in some way. It can take us beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It can help us remember the nature of the world and the nature of life, not on an intellectual level but in a deep and experiential way. When we pray, we don't change the world, we change ourselves.

By our prayer we share the life of God. True prayer demands that we be more passive than active; it requires more silence than words, more adoration than study, more concentration than rushing about, more faith than reason. The highest state of prayer is to be children in the arms of Love: silent, loving, rejoicing.