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 5, 2026 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
In different times and diverse places, people notice and name the Divine in a variety of ways. Polytheism, monotheism, pantheism, atheism, and non-theism traditions are just a few examples of the many ways to identify God. How we name the Holy One will impact our experience of prayer.
In the early Christian tradition, a noticeable shift in naming God occurred when the context of the first followers of Jesus, mostly Aramaic & Hebrew speaking Jews, shifted into the Hellenistic, Greek-speaking contexts of Rome and the surrounding areas. Language about God became increasingly static and informed by dogma, and less dynamic and informed by experience. While the almighty and all-knowing and all-powerful traits of God were certainly reflected in the socio-political structures, and consequently, the lived experience of the people of those centuries, recent and modern theological reflections, returning once again to dynamic and experiential namings of God, can look to the experience of the natural world in creation for inspiration to name God.
We can observe the wind moving across fields of long grasses, in shimmering waves of green, or the air lifting branch and bough, up and down, on the edge of the forest, or one’s own body, rising and falling in each cycle of breath, and be inspired again by Ruach, the Hebrew word for wind, breath, and Spirit, as a dynamic flow of the Holy One’s presence underlying the flowing cycles of the natural world.
If flow marks our experience of the natural and supernatural, surely it also shows up in our prayer! The flow of words, of gestures, of sounds, of silence, of movement, of stillness, of longing, of rest, of change, and of remembrance, are all layered and taken up, like sediment impacted by the flow of water, in our prayer life. May our minds, hearts, and senses also be taken up in the life-giving flow of dynamic prayer!
