The Wider Context of Prayer

The poem by Rumi presented in the last post holds the mystic’s view of reality in a grand context, not least cosmological: “For to-night the teeming world gives birth to the world everlasting.” It presents an upward-trending vector—from dust to spirit and on beyond—call it evolutionary, if you like. Rumi suggests that we are slumbering, asleep—and that this sleep is due to the nature of this dimension (“A heavy slumber fell upon thee from the circling spheres.”) To set out on the quest right here and now, we must awaken and stay watchful. And that, I propose, is the wider context of prayer. We find the same linkage in the New Testament: “Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man” (Luke 21:36); and “Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation” (Matthew 26:41). In these contexts prayer is not petition but something else—attention directed at something. But at what? Not the sensory environment but something beyond it. It is presented as a technique—in Matthew emphasizing the resistance (temptation, the weakness of the flesh) in Luke and in Rumi (“O soul, seek the Beloved, O friend, seek the Friend” “the Son of Man”) pointing to the goal.

Brought into the humdrum world of immediate experience, these teachings suggest that participation in the cosmic process laid down by the Creator involves an effort of attention to a reality that is not immediately perceived. Prayer, which is initially triggered in us by very ordinary if sharply felt needs, may with practice become a watchful consciousness, a contemplation of a range of reality we may only at first access by means of symbols. The practice of watchfulness, however, will persuade the determined person that the attention directed in one direction is also answered from there—but as with all experiential matters, you have to taste it before you know it.

Rumi speaks of this experience as we reach the end of the poem. “Mine eye,” he says, “is from that source and from another universe; here a world and there a world: I am seated on the threshold.” I like that word, threshold. In this blog I call it the borderzone.