|
Being Peace
* * *
She was struggling in her prayer life and asked, "What am I to do?" Said the Sage, "It's time for you to stop praying." Astonished, the student said, "But are we not supposed to pray?" "You pray," replied the Sage, "until it's time for prayer to do the praying... through you, not by you."
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Meetings with an Anonymous Sage."
* * *
Once you get used to not trying to pray
properly, imagine what it feels like
to be free of what you thought you
should be doing in the first place.
When you begin with this, you'll
find that every pore in your body
begins to pray with you.
*"The Proper Way to Pray." In Jon M Sweeny, Mark S. Burrows. Ed. & Trans. Meister Eckhart's Book of Darkness & Light: Meditations on the Path of the Wayless Way.
* * *
The way to freedom and rest in prayer is the dropping of the right way to pray. I say "the dropping," not "you dropping" or "our dropping," for the so-called proper way drops of itself.
How does the ripeness for the dropping happen? The dropping includes trying to pray correctly. For a time, "correctly" likely worked. Then, it does not. You struggle to get it right again and again. Finally, one awakens to being united with the prayerful spirit itself. The struggle was essential, thankfully not permanent.
* * *
The most challenging shift in my prayer - by which I include any form of spoken or unspoken - has been to relax into this dropping of a correct technique. Then, prayer feels like an absence of prayer.
Then, we discover prayer in a different light - likely after an extended period of trying to revert to the proper way. Doing nothing becomes prayer, for prayer is not first a doing.
Prayers can arise from this nothingness and take many shapes - the metaphor above of all your pores praying with you indicates this. Hence, prayer precedes prayers. Simply being present becomes prayer.
* * *
Hu Ching Ni renders from Tao Te Ching 11, "The substance of your body is enlivened/by maintaining the part of you that is unoccupied." Absence is the space for manifestation. Nothingness is the absence from which prayer arises as alive and animating. Prayer enlivens bodily.
Prayerlessness - the "unoccupied" - is the fountainhead of prayer, so simply being present can be prayer. Being present itself is a manifestation of the nothingness.
* * *
I spread seeds, and the birds come to eat. I sit and watch them. That is dialogue. Sometimes, I talk with them. Sitting, silence, and talking with the birds is prayer. Such is prayer by embodying prayer before prayer, living shrouded in prayerfulness. The whole world can become a temple, any meeting with another being an altar of worship. For this, you become a temple, you become an altar.
* * *
To grow in this prayerful nothingness, which is everything, feel the urge to get prayer right. That is the ego. Relax. Let the spirit of prayer teach you prayerfulness. That spirit is already prayer. What it does - all it does - is prayerful.
* * *
*©Brian K. Wilcox, 2023
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photograph.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
*Lao Tzu. The Complete Works of Lao Tzu: Tao Teh Ching and Hua Hu Ching. Ed. & Trans. Hu Ching Ni.
|
