What is prayer?

What is prayer? The unbidden Presence.

My first memory of “there!” is at about the age of 14. I am coming of age physically, experiencing the torment of hormones. My body and mind are filled with nameless longing and restlessness, a yearning for more, an urge to see and taste and experience the world, feelings that in some sense never again left me. These longings were the arrival of the Holy Spirit in a very real sense. At 14 years, I feel I am on the outside of the gate somehow, and that never left either. And always, I sense You there, outside the gate.

(I did not know then that Simon Weil refused to become Catholic because Catholics taught that only Catholics can be saved, and she was convinced that Christ would be outside the gate, with those who had failed to be saved. She wanted to be there too, where she thought Christ would be. It is one of the most beautiful thoughts I know of, and when I came to it in my early adulthood, I resonated.)

It was at this age that I first remember standing on the porch railing, in the early spring, as the snow thawed, watching the sunset unfold over the still-bare trees up on the hilltop next to the Dogtown bar and tap, across the street from Mr and Mrs. Beecher’s gas station where I worked weekends trying to save money for college. The sunset was rich in depth, velvety, green, blue, violet, orange. The trees were silhouetted there, no leaves yet, just the faintest outlines of the new buds, in the changing air. Then, there, I came into the present moment. The trees. There. Thought stopped. I looked around me with no thought. I sensed that there was something “there” there! There was Presence here. There was Reality all around me. Here, around me now, was the Ultimate. Always. Joy. Exhilaration. My heart was full, and I never wanted to leave this place. Right here, I was transfixed by the Nameless Presence! I stood in awe and joy, no words or way of knowing what this meant.

This experience returned to me many times. It was often available to console, heal, and transform. Near as my breath, always, the Divine Present. This was too vivid to be imagined. It was, in fact, pre-imagination, more like a direct apprehension of the Real here and now. Beyond words, these words so poor at saying it.

I did not know what that meant. I had no one to guide me in this thing. Over time, it became faint sometimes, but then at other times I secretly found this Presence, and rested there, not fully recognizing it as connected to my religious faith. Most of the time I was obsessed with anxieties, fears, phobias, longings, revenge fantasies, nameless anger. I was unable to “be” in the Presence. But when I did, joy was there.

Life became too busy too early for me. I was a young workaholic I guess, or at least an activity-acholic. Always doing. Too many years were spent busy, at things that were always pressing, all spent “away from this home.” I never really fully recovered. In some sense I missed out on the best of life by missing out often on this ever-present Present.

Even now, though, I sometimes return to (or am hurled into) the present. And all becomes real. All falls away. The Zen writers describe moments like this as a beginning. The mystics talk about it as a beginning too. A place to rest, at the edge of a great journey. I am not sure I have done any of that journey. I have surely wandered the desert, though. After 40 years of my own wandering, I now can grasp a story of 40 years wandering, looking for a promised land.

But even as I think about all this, a blue bird calls through the window. A blackberry swings in the wind on the back fence. The breeze rises over the hedge, and the clouds clear. It is dusk out there. It is time for dinner. I get up to cook a little pasta.