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Prayer arises from a relationship and forms that relationship. The entire universe, as science is demonstrating, is intensely personal. This personal universe is, Dallas Willard notes, “a Trinitarian universe, one where infinite energy of a personal nature is the ultimate reality” (The Divine Conspiracy). This can have more power for many readers when they realize Willard is an evangelical Christian, not a New Age person talking about energy. Willard is speaking of nothing other than what the ancient church called “divine energies,” a reality that Willard frames in the context of physics, even as he interacts with that understanding in speaking of the universe being Trinitarian. Science is helping Willard reframe ancient Truth.
Therefore, to pray is to be forming a relationship with the Energy, or Spirit. Prayer is not just about getting something for someone or myself. Prayer is an active, intense, and intimate relationship with the universe in relationship with the Trinitarian Presence. The Trinitarian Presence is an intensely evolving relationship with the universe and each creature. No wonder the Old Testament speaks of the Presence of God as plural in nature: "Presences" (panim).
To pray is to participate in the transformation of creation into the theosis, the re-forming, of nature into the potential wholeness inhering at every level from matter to Spirit. This means that I cannot be transformed apart from myself as a part of the over-all transformation of everyone and everything. A personal relationship with the Creating One is only personal as subsumed in my relationship to the whole as likewise personal, bearing the personableness of the Sacred. Otherwise, prayer is simply narcissistic.
This means that prayer, while intensely personal is, likewise, a cosmological rite. My prayer is the univese seeking wholeness, seeking God. Prayer moves beyond the confinements of religion into the Temple of the Cosmos. Here, I am freed from seeing myself as a separate being relating to other beings and things. I sense wholeness in sensing that Love loves every aspect of the universe, so much so that God is pouring the divine energies through all life in agreement with the essential nature of God as Out-Pouring Love. In Christ, all beings are held as one, for Christ is the Wholeness that holds all, the container that is uncontained. My prayer, indeed, is possible only as an expression of that Out-Pouring Love making the prayer itself possible and as expression of the Love. My prayer is only true prayer as contained in the Christ and only worthy of Christ when an act of loving.
Spiritual Exercises
1. What is prayer?
2. What is meant by speaking of prayer arising from and forming a relationship?
3. How might prayer participate in the transformation of nature?
4. How has your prayer practice been transformed over time by your spiritual transformation? By insights into the nature of the universe?
Prayer
Keep me open to see new truths
Keep me open to seeing old truths in new ways.
*Brian K. Wilcox
OneLife Ministries is a pastoral outreach and nurture ministry of the First United Methodist Church, Fort Meade, FL. For Spiritual Direction, Pastoral Counseling, spiritual formation workshops, Christian meditation retreats, or more information about OneLife, write Rev. Dr. Brian K. Wilcox at briankwilcox@comcast.net.
Brian's book of mystical love poetry, An Ache for Union, can be ordered through major bookdealers.
Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors
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