Prayer as a tool for Spiritual Resiliency

 

In the beginning there was One God.  That One, desiring to know It's self, created life; and then there were two.  With two a relationship exists - and now there are three.  One, two, three...that is the description of all that is - God, life and the relationship between them.    

 

Humans have always sought ways to define this relationship.  Depending upon cultural or religious background God is called by different names; but whether that be God, Goddess, Spirit, Jehovah, the Tao, Shiva, Allah, Brahman, Buddha, Lord, Life, or any other Holy Name, we are still referring to the One - because there is only One. 

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Each of us has our own idea of God, or whether there even is a God.  The Tao Te Ching teaches that it is not possible to define God (the Tao) because the more we attempt it the further away from truth we travel.  Yet, here I am trying to clarify in my own mind and on these pages what the Source of all life is, perhaps I’ll find some hidden gem that you will be able to relate to as well. It would be helpful to have a few agreements here, at the beginning of this book.

 

God is often spoken of as being omnipresent – everywhere all the time.  How could God be otherwise?  If God weren’t everywhere then things could happen, or come into creation, that God didn’t know about.  To know God as the Creator of All That Is implies that it wouldn’t be possible for anything to have been created that God didn't do.  Therefore, if God is creating everything, then God must be everywhere all the time. If God is everywhere, there can be no place that God is not - no home, no church, no mosque, no mountaintop, no country, no heart… God is everywhere.

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God is also omnipotent – all-powerful.  That would go without saying… how could the Creator of All That Is be anything but all powerful?  The universe is so immense that our little human brains cannot even begin to understand its magnificence.  Looking at pictures taking by the Hubble telescope serves to reinforce this truth. There are places in this universe so amazingly beautiful that even seeing them brings wonder and awe into our experience and imagination. If God is the all-powerful Creator then there is no one, anywhere, and no thing that has ever, or will ever, happen that God did not bring into manifestation.  This idea is difficult because we all want to believe that there are people and things in the Universe that are not of God. Yet they are as completely God as anything else.  Separation happens only within our minds, in truth, there is no separation.  Believing that there is anything outside of God diminishes the Holy Spirit, bringing God to our level, which may make it easier for us to take God personally, but in the process also diminishes the power and grace of the Creator.

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God is omniscient – all knowing.  While this is similar to our first understanding, it goes beyond God simply being present to God as an active participant in the creation of life.  An omniscient Creator is the intelligence of the Universe.  It is this knowingness that allows a seed planted in the ground to take water and sunshine and recreate itself as an oak tree or a lettuce leaf.  It is this same wisdom that allows humans to build bridges and spaceships, and the same wisdom that teaches children to talk, birds to know the best flight path to take, and gives devotees of God the desire to learn to worship in whatever way draws them nearer to the Divine.  

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Does understanding that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient tell us what God is?  Let us look a little deeper.  Perhaps we have such a difficult time understanding the nature of God because we keep attempting to attach human qualities to something that is not human.  It is our nature to anthropomorphize our world.  We watch movies where animals have human characteristics; we give gender identification to ships and cars, when we think of God we think in terms of human form and function.  But, according to our three agreements this simply can’t be true.  There are no omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient humans (regardless of what some of us would like to believe).  And yet, God is in all of us (everywhere, all the time).

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I am going to propose that God is the very essence of Life itself.  Life meets all of our criteria of omnipresent, omnipotent, & omniscient.  Life is everywhere and is at work in the creation of all that is.  As far as we know, there is no place in the Universe where there is not some essence of life whether mineral, gas, liquid, tissue, or some form of consciousness. 

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We can’t really see Life, just as we can’t really see God, we can only know of its presence by the ways in which it animates form. The beauty of saying that God is Life is that God & Life can take on any form, persona, or quality possible.  God can be as personal as our own beloved, or as impersonal as images of interstellar nebulae.  Allowing that God is Life removes our egocentricity, reminding us that just because we are at the top of the food chain it doesn’t mean that we are also at the apex of creation.  If we can accept that perhaps there is more to creation, more to Life, then we can see, taste, touch, hear, or know about, perhaps that realization will lead us to know that God is everywhere. 

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Another implication of this idea is understood by using the ocean as a teaching metaphor.  If we take a drop of water from the ocean, we know that the drop is not the entire ocean; yet the inherent nature of the drop remains entirely ocean.  We are that drop.  We are not all God is, and yet God is all we are.  God is so much more then each of us individually, because God is all there is.

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I can’t help but think about the Joan Osbourne song: What if God was One of Us? If you knew that God was living in the heart of your children, your neighbors, your enemies, how would you talk to them today?  If you could see that we are each simply the disguise that God has chosen to show up in today, what would be your response to God’s disguise as a homeless person sitting on the street corner asking for help; or your boss saying they don’t have the money to give you your well-deserved raise?  If you were to look at everyone you saw today and know that they are God, what would you say to them, what would you be willing to do for them? If you knew that you are also wearing one of God’s disguises, what would you do to bring more Life affirming Love into the world?  What would you choose to create today?

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Each of us has our own personal understanding of the relationship we have with God.  Some will devote their lives to this, while others ignore it completely.  Most of us hope and believe that there is some power greater than ourselves that we can turn to in times of confusion and suffering. For many of us, those challenging moments are the only times we turn within to deepen and develop our most sacred of relationships.

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It can be said that there are as many ways of knowing God as there are people.  Even those of us who worship in the same faith traditions will have our own individualized understanding based upon our unique combination of personality, beliefs, experiences, and other influences.  Just as we have developed our personal manners in relationship - each of us will also personalize our relationship with God.

One of the most widespread methods of relating to the Divine is through the practice of prayer.  Iyanla Vanzant says that "Spirituality is the call of God in your Soul."  Prayer is our response to this call.  There is no right or wrong way to pray, but there are certainly some ways that may be more effective than others. 

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Why do we pray? 

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We pray for many reasons. Perhaps we are undergoing some personal trial for which we are seeking clarity; or maybe we feel that we are in need of something yet having difficulty in manifesting it.  We could be using our prayers as "insurance".  We don't really know if there is anything to this concept of God, but just in case there is we want to be sure that we are making ourselves known.  Prayer can be used to give thanks, to acknowledge circumstances, to bring peace, love, or truth into the room, and to celebrate life in general.

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Prayer can be done privately, publicly, loudly and silently.  We can use specific words that have been spoken by millions throughout time in expressing the human relationship with God, and we can create our own personalized prayer.  We can use a mantra, meditate, or simply sit in receptive silence.  Prayer will lower our blood pressure and heart rate; reduce stress, and heal ourselves or others, even if they don't know they are being prayed for.  It can help us to clarify our intent, provide comfort to our broken hearts, and connect us to a deeper truth that we are a part of something greater than our own limited life.

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Prayer evokes our spiritual resiliency.  This is when our faith becomes so strong that we can live through anything.  When my son was murdered my resiliency was strong because my prayer practice had made me that way.  My response to this heartbreak was to spend more time in my practice and, I suspect, most spiritually resilient people do the same.  Their response to difficult circumstances is to go to prayer.  I don't think that it is a coincidence that many of the most spiritually resilient people have also had lives that were, or are, greatly challenging.  Poverty, illness, heartbreak, and suffering can all be catalysts, sending us to our knees in prayer.

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Prayer gives us a buffer against the circumstances of Life.  In some ways it is like stretching before exercise.  In yoga classes, I teach that our practice of yoga stretches our tendons, ligaments, and muscles so that if we are walking down the street and fall off the curb, our connective tissue will be pliable, flexible, and able to withstand the sudden pulls of a fall - allowing a stretch without tearing or significantly damaging those tissues.  Prayer helps in much the same way.  When our practice is strong, a sudden fall will not cause us to suffer beyond our capacity to manage, we will have the resiliency to know that we are still a part of life, that life doesn't happen to us, for we are life expressing.  Through the practice of prayer we are changing the very structure of our mind, along with our beliefs and intentions.  When we change our mind in this way, our entire world begins to shift in order to reflect our evolving change in consciousness.