Anam Cara

On That Day You Will Know as You Are Known

The shape of each soul is different. No one else can ever get inside your world and experience firsthand what it is like to be you. This is at once the mystery of individuality and its great loneliness. Those close to you can best sense and imagine what it is like to be you, but they can never feel, see, or know your life from the inside. The deeper ground of individuality is to be sought in the originality of the Divine Imagination manifest in the relish of beginnings. The Divine Artist is utterly creative, makes each thing new and different. Each individual expresses and incarnates a different dimension of divinity. Each one of us comes from a different place in the circle of the Divine. Consequently each one of us prays out of a different inner world and each one of us prays to a different place in the Divine Circle. This is the place we left to come here. This is the empty nest in the Divine where the secrets of our origin, experience, and destiny are stored. When we pray, we pray to that space in the Divine Presence which absolutely knows us. This could be what is suggested by that lovely moment in the New Testament when it says of our return to the invisible world: “On that day you will know as you are known.”

All our time here, we are on a constant threshold between the Divine and the human. The Divine knows us totally. We only know ourselves partially. When we return home this disproportion and blindness will be healed. Then our knowing will be equal to the divine knowing of us. This recognition confers great permission on the individuality of prayer. You can only pray through the unique lens of your individuality. There is no need for you to be in any way guilty about your reluctance or inability to mimic the formal prayers of your religion or the pious prayer of others. If you listen to the deep voice of your heart, that voice is at one with the unique melody of your soul. Your deepest prayer is the prayer of your essence. When you move deeper into the inner world and enter the temple of your essence, your prayer will be of one pulse beat with the Divine Heart.