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 November 9th, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Sometimes, I catch my son (or myself!) staring off into space, and I wonder, to what strange world he has been transported? Thomas Merton referred to a sacred, untouchable space, like a diamond blazing like sun, within each of us—always there, always shining.
When I get caught in that spacey stare, or observe others there, I cannot help but wonder if the allure of that shining diamond, brilliant from the subtle Truth of reality, might not be calling us, inviting us deeper and more often into the nothing that is also everything.
In these deceptively simple moments, when prayer is spontaneous, we sense the paradox of wholeness, when opposites teach us, such as in the fullness of emptiness or the luminousness of darkness. Sometimes, the strange depths of spontaneous prayer carry a trace of sorrow. At other times, tints of joy and delight.
In particular, the changing seasons are good teachers of prayer as spontaneous. What force lures the bud from the branch in the spring? What force fills the heavens with hues of green in the treetops of summer? What force informs the fall leaf, full in color, to know when to let go? How do the sleepy, still, and dark forces of winter set the whole cycle up to run through all over again? Certainly, there are scientific explanations for these changes. Yet on the other side of explanation, is a sense of wonder, a teacher of prayer as spontaneous.
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