This painting is designated "Barns2" (see url below)
- Yet I didn't see barns... I immediately think of flooded fields, homes and people and those who've lost all of these. Maybe that's part of the work of prayer to help us see our own environment become the universal or another's particular come close to home?
Just a little on my understanding of prayer over the years. (With more aspects coming...)
This is from a group devoted for life to prayer with a most universal understanding. I am deliberately leaving out the source to emphasize the wide application. These are not my own words except for just a few - yet get close to part of what I understand about this great resource for touching the invisible.
'If we take one kind of prayer in the narrowest sense, it means facing God alone in privacy. "When you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret". Obviously, this kind of prayer is incompatible with ordinary work or with being with others even when they are praying.
Everything and everybody else is excluded from this prayer. In fact, this kind of prayer is a completely personal and private exercise. Probably no one knows what we are up to except God. "Your Father who sees in secret will repay you," Yes, but you don't do this kind of praying in order to get repaid. If you do, the whole thing collapses, for prayer for a reward is really a work...(without faith).
'Nor is this kind of prayer done primarily for one's own mental health. Unlike most modem techniques of meditation, you don't pray in order to achieve peace of mind or to gain new calm or to acquire inner coherence. As desirable as those goals may be, they are not this sort of deep, private) prayer. Prayer turns outward to Another (the OTHER - before coming back again inward on the self. As in human love and friendship, prayer is relationship; if it is done for an ulterior motive, the other person becomes secondary and the whole enterprise is vitiated...
'Yet in another sense, prayer is work, hard work! Like work, private prayer takes premium time and energy. To repeat the modem term, it takes quality time. If we try to short-change our prayer by giving it only the dregs of our time and energy, we will find that we ourselves are the losers. Why does prayer take so much energy? Partly because it requires concentration, and that does not come easy for us. We find it much easier to allow ourselves to be engaged by the random physical stimuli that surround us; but prayer must focus on the transcendent God who is beyond all the sense objects that make up our environment.
'But there is another reason why prayer is hard work. It is difficult because it gradually reveals to us our true selves; and the truth hurts! In fact, it is quite possible to define prayer as the discovery of the true self amid the debris of the false self or selves.
'The assumption here is that it is an ordinary occupation of human beings to fabricate a false ego-self that we present to others and to ourselves instead of the real self... to find our way out of this hall of mirrors is a mighty labor (requiring)..an openness on our part to let Light speak to our inmost selves.
'Of course, everything we read has the potential to change our lives, but with praying via the Holy Scriptures we deliberately put aside our usual insulation and defense to let God speak to our heart.
'The mere fact that some set aside two or three hours a day for this activity should tell us that it is serious business. When we open ourselves up to God, what can be harder and more rewarding?"
Soon after posting this, I noticed this sign: "Truth will set you free but at first it will make you angry"...that too is the hard work part of prayer...to allow self to feel...yet to navigate through these various emotions yet not alone.
And then there are so many rewards for this hard work they can't be named and the "flow" does come from time to time as little smiles that our highest intentions are being heard and helped along...
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Next: "We are all artists when we pray"
Credit for this (coming) title and the painting above from here
5 comments:
Very important and interesting points, I would just add my reflections on this. Prayer is thanksgiving, thanking God for what He has given and also thanking Him for what he has not given for which we might not be ready to receive. So praying is also cultivating a platform for development and progression. But as very well put prayer is about developing and nurturing a relationship, a relationship that brings trust in oneself and trust in the world, trust in what is good and trust in that life is meaningful only if one finds meaning in it. Prayer is finding a contact with the most known yet most unrealized, so it brings in the feel of all that which we know but never felt.
How I love the way you highlight and deepen what is so often given. I want to do a series for my own discipline and others of the many aspects as well as kinds of prayer.
Given your reminder, I would in retrospect discuss the thanksgiving aspects. My only "excuse" is that in developing and nurturing relationship is not the thanksgiving inevitable and are there not often other ways to express the same than the usual and the pat? Well, I already know you'd say, yes, so just deepen this train of tho't if you would..:)
And I love the way you carry this foundational relationship into all the others, including trust of oneself. I find Iqbal and even the "primary stages" of what I'm learning from/on Quran, the original to early understanding of Rumi and at RR so helpful here...
That a false sort of humility is perhaps sometimes worse than arrogance and disallows the wherewithal to get anything done at all of significance...
Let's discuss this a little more here if you get the chance and wish?
Another lovely and beautiful post by you Connie. Whatever i have learned about prayer and prays in these years of my life, you just summarized it beautifully.
When we feel lonely and there is no one to understand us, we are certain that Allah understands. When we even happy without any physical reason no body knows but He knows very well. So, feeling His Love inside our heart in every moment no matter what that moment contains for us whether pain and miseries or smiles and joys, is something i experience and that's the most important prayer time i have in the whole day and the best time to pray for anything i want to have.
Thank you so much.
Also i have talked about your comments on my blog, do check it and let me know what do you think about that.
Prayer is remembrance not only of the best Friend and Mentor but also of all those who constitute our league. When we remember God we also recall all those whom we had inadvertently forgotten, this is the power of prayer that it makes a significant uplift in our psychological and neurotic health. The warmth of prayer evaporates coldness of fear and cools fire of hatred on one hand and on the other it makes others look friendlier and more animated individually and collectively. World looks a palace of the Beloved and each and every creation of the Beloved looks as a personal treasure and as a personal pride. Prayer brings a deep silence in the inner recesses which transform meanness into kindness, envy into appreciation, guilt into awareness and all these into gold of love. Prayer makes the one who prays into an alchemist.
What a refreshing gift the comments from two friends who are so consistent and purely passionate in their faith and love of God and people!
Urooj, the fact you experience and participate in such a profound relationship with Allah "shows" in your lovely balance and joy in the small - easily ignored parts of life. You never fail to inspire me.
THANK YOU so much for coming by this post. And yes, I will go back to your blogsite soon.
Dear Dar Sahib, again and again you gently challenge me. You bring up patterns either new or older yet always in fresh ways of expressing--your writing knows no limits that I can see...
Just before reading this from you, I had this experience you describe here "When we remember God we also recall all those whom we had inadvertently forgotten.." and could not do anything today at all until I'd responded to the one who keep coming up. A not unsurprising yet lovely "Divine nod" was to find immediately in bookstore just the perfect little book. Having sent it with letter gave the contented sense this little "work"
out of prayer was done in this case. (by the way, the book describes our personal life as a spiral staircase. Our circling around still going upward, not futile at all.)
How I recognize also these other values of prayer you mention: prayer making significant uplift in our psychological and neurotic health." I just mentioned to someone dear why with a particular tendency, I'd rather use spiritual insights where at all possible than to take on something which may make me dependent on a chemical. (I know this is not always possible for many...yet for my purposes best.)
I also love you mentioning that prayer is "warm" evaporating the chill of fear and paradoxically "cooling" the fire of hatred...
(A kind of thermometer of equanimity for each purpose?)
Wow: This is sheer poetry all the way...I must come back soon to read and re-read: "World looks a palace of the Beloved and each and every creation of the Beloved looks as a personal treasure" and all the rest...You, Dar Sahib, are an alchemist of the Divine love in the most universal sense...You help me to gather more easily the "gold of love" in my own little world...
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