Anam Cara

What Is It That Prays in Us?

In every breath and in every moment of your life, the Divine is in conversation with itself. You carry a world in your mind, which you only catch glimpses of on occasions. Your own mystery is never fully present to you. This means that your prayers in wishes and words are always partial and often blind. Yet the deep prayer of the heart continues within you in a silence that is too deep for words even to reach.

One of the fascinating things to ask about prayer is, What do you pray with? Put more tenderly: What is it that prays within you? If prayer is but the voice of the superficial mind, the result is endless inner chatter. Prayer goes deeper. More precisely: prayer issues from an eternal well within you. The presence that prays within you is your soul. It is interesting to read in the New Testament that the soul is always seen as a continuation of the Holy Spirit. No place does it ever say that we should pray to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not different from the activity of your prayer. You pray in the Holy Spirit. The little preposition suggests how you are suffused with the Holy Spirit. Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and the deepest level in you is spirit.

One of the deepest longings in the human heart is the longing for a foundation to things. Because we sense how fragile and uncertain life can be, we long for a foundation that nothing can shake. The first stage in building a house is to dig out the foundation. If the house were simply built on surface ground, the walls would crack and come away from each other. Yet the irony is that we never penetrate past the surface layer. Being on earth, we feel we are on solid ground. Yet at its deepest foundation, the earth rests again on the nothingness of the empty air—but it is held there by the invisible force fields of gravity. In the inner world, the deepest foundation of the mind and the heart also rests on the invisible nothingness of the soul. The roots of all intimacy and belonging are planted powerfully in the invisible spirit. You belong ultimately to a presence that you cannot see, touch, grasp, or measure.

When you forget or repress the truth and depth of your invisible belonging and decide to belong to some system, person, or project, you short-circuit your longing and squander your identity. To have true integrity, poise, and courage is to be attuned to the silent and invisible nature within you. Real maturity is the integrity of inhabiting that “immortal longing” that always calls you to new horizons. Your true longing is to belong to the eternal that echoes continually in everything that happens to you. Real power has nothing to do with force, control, status, or money. Real power is the persistent courage to be at ease with the unsolved and the unfinished. To be able to recognize, in the scattered graffiti of your desires, the signature of the eternal. True prayer in the Holy Spirit keeps the graciousness and splendour of that vulnerability open.