The Lake of Stillness

One of the problems sometimes voiced around the practice of prayer actually has nothing to do with its practice at all, but more to do with its metaphysics. What I mean is that all too often someone will feel that they cannot pray because they don't understand "how it works", or because they can't quite fathom whom they're supposed to be praying to.

But prayer is the most natural thing. In the stillness of our own heart - whether in Quaker Meeting for Worship, when we are deeply involved in liturgical worship, or when we are alone and quiet - our awareness rests in a stillness that is infinitely more than ourselves, however we might want to describe that. (Actually it might be better if we didn't try to describe it, at least to ourselves!) In our heart also are those we love, whether personally,  or generally, as in awareness of those who suffer, friends who are ill or alone, the anguish of war or our anxiety for the planet. All our stillness becomes a place where the concerns of our heart lie in the greater stillness within which we worship, like pebbles on the floor of a vast, silent lake.

Ruth Burrows writes:

We must remember that prayer takes place at the deepest level of our person and escapes our direct cognition; therefore we can make no judgement about it. It is God's holy domain and we may not usurp it.  We have to trust it utterly to God... We must be ready to believe that 'nothingness' is the presence of divine Reality; emptiness is a holy void that Divine Love is filling...

Eckhart Tolle, in a moving response to a questioner at a public meeting makes the point that to be conscious is to suffer, and to be involved with the suffering of all beings, within the "one consciousness" that is the ground of being itself. And this is the point; simply to be there, to be with all that is, consciously. How that "makes a difference" is not the point; our heart knows, and in that conjunction within stillness prayer is.