Anam Cara

“Behold, I Am the Ground of Thy Beseeching.”

Prayer is a light that once lighted will never fail. All prayer opens the Divine Presence: When you sit in prayer, the purest force of your own longing comes alive. Julian of Norwich has a wonderful poetic insight into prayer as longing. The Lord whispers to her, “Behold, I am the Ground of thy Beseeching.” In other words, your longing for God is not a thrust through empty distance towards a removed God. No. The actual longing for God is not a human invention; rather it is put there by God. The longing for God is already the very presence of God. Our longing for God brings the kiss of the Divine to the human soul. Prayer is the deepest and most tender intimacy. In prayer the forgiving tenderness of God gathers around our lives. God infects us with the desire for God.

You can pray anytime and anywhere. You do not have to travel to some renowned spiritual guide to learn how to pray. You do not need to embark on a fifty-five-step spiritual path until you learn how to say a proper, super prayer. You do not have to sort out your life so that you can be real with God. You do not have to become fundamentalist, and hammer away your most interesting contradictions and complexities before you can truly pray. You need no massive preamble before prayer. You can pray now, where you are and from whatever state of heart you are in. This is the most simple and honest prayer. Many of our prayer preparations only manage to distract and distance us from the Divine Presence. We always seem to be able to find the most worthy of reasons for not just being quite ready to pray yet; this means that we never get to prayer. Prayer is so vital and transforming that the crucial thing is to pray now. Regardless of what situation you are in, your heart is always ready to whisper a prayer.

We are always in the Divine Presence, every second, everywhere. In prayer the Divine Presence becomes an explicit companionship that warms, challenges, and shelters us. We do not have to skate over vast, frozen lakes of pious language to reach the shore of the Divine. God is not so deadeningly serious. We need to be gentle and smile, as Hopkins so beautifully writes: “My own heart let me more have pity on; let / Me live to my sad self hereafter kind.” God is wild and must also have a subtle sense of irony. In the lyrical unfolding of our days, we remain in the Presence. The simplest whisper of the heart is already within the Divine Embrace.

The Celtic tradition always had a very refined sense of the protective closeness of God. Prayers like this: “No anxiety can be ours, the God of the Elements, the King of the Elements, the Spirit of the Elements closes over us eternally.” There was no distance between the individual and God. There was no need to travel any further than the grace of your longing in order to come into the Divine Presence. The Celtic imagination enfolded the prayer of Nature into the heart of their conception of God. It is the God of sun, moon, stars, mountains, and rivers. God has a dwelling in the earth and the ocean. He inspires all things, he quickens all things, he supports all things, and creates all things. The earth is the ever-changing theatre of Divine Presence. Celtic spirituality is imbued with a powerful fluency of longing and a lovely flexibility of belonging. It is the exact opposite of fundamentalism.