It is only in prayer that we can communicate with one another at the deepest level of our being. Behind all words and gestures, behind all thoughts and feelings, there is an inner centre of prayer where we can meet one another in the presence of God.
*Bede Griffiths, India, Christian Benedictine Sannyasi, b. 1906
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I drive away, in time I feel almost tears. I park the truck. Still feeling almost tears, then weeping. I feel the wetness flowing down my cheeks - prayers, flowing prayers. No one should die like this. I cry for her, maybe for everyone like her. Is this weeping for someone I just met prayer? Where does it come from? Can that be named? I think these tears are prayer, too, as many tears are. Maybe a tear can hold a thousand wordless prayers, arising from the Center, the Silence alive and pouring Itself out to us even through tears. Maybe that one tear can hold an infinity of prayers. Maybe that much Love, too. Yes, seems so, yes, thankfully. And, maybe, these flowing, silent prayers, this Love, are for me, too, I who cry. Maybe, I am not simply touched by her pain, but by her healing, also. I sense this to be so, thankfully, yes.
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What is Pure Prayer, or spiritual Contemplation? Douglas Steere (b. 1901), a Quaker, wrote as good an intuition on this as I have read. He intuited Contemplation as, "A continual condition of prayerful sensitivity to what is really going on."
The logical destiny of any religion or spirituality, then, is to transcend itself, or unfold into the Truth that is before and outside it, yet, at the same time, the Center of its center. As the Christian Contemplative Abhishiktananda (b. 1910) wrote, after arriving in India to live as a Christian Sannayasi, "I do not know how to adore the Trinity, for I am within it, and I do not know which way to turn to make the sashtangam [full prostration]. I am at the very centre in the centre who is the son."
All life is awakened to and by the Center, in Love and by Love and for Love, and all is seen arising from and revolving around that Center that is everywhere. Pure Prayer arises from the Center, and tears as the herald of a Love in Whom we knew one another before we ever here met. This Prayer, where we all meet, is Pure Sensitivity, feeling so pure no feeling it can contain or come near to express.
