Prayer Is Complex

The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on June 29, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.

In prayer, we tap into the eternal, the “more,” reality beyond. Thus, while on one hand prayer is simple, it is also wonderfully complex.

Because we are finite, we experience time as sequential and space as laden with dense matter. Though we may seek to tap into the eternal in our prayer, for us, the experience of prayer carries the weight of our past, right through the burden of the present, and straight into the chaos of the future. Within the continuum of our particular history, we presume that the Holy One is constantly working both with us, and on our behalf, to accomplish healing and wholeness.

We do some of this work consciously, especially in petitionary prayer: “Lord, help me to stop swearing so much,” or “Holy One, help me to see what I cannot see in order to become a better person.” When this healing work is done unconsciously, Thomas Keating calls it “Divine Therapy.”

In this sense, the unresolved tensions and wounds, often from somewhere deep in our past, get worked on “beneath the surface.” The anger that I once carried, due to trauma in my youth, softens and perhaps yields into a fervor for helping others.

In this way, we see another layer of the complexity of prayer. That is to say, our prayer is not just about us. When our particular stories are healed and whole-d, the entire interwoven tapestry of histories that have touched us also mend. Those threads that we have touched reach other threads, and the pattern continues in a Kaleidoscope of healing.

Often, when I look deep into the forest from the window of the Oratory, with the shadows and the light and the layers of vegetation all heaped together, I am struck by the complexity of our reality.  With reality being so complex, perhaps our prayers that try to tap the eternal are simpler than we thought!