I am going to make an admission.
I can count on two sets of hands the number of times, in my adolescent and adult life that I have, on bended knee, offered up supplication to a higher power in the form of prayer. I have always felt at odd...s with this proposition, felt uneasy, phoney and especially when asked to do so in front of others; although when a minister (as ironic as that sounds), I often prayed from the pulpit, sometimes on behalf of hundreds even thousands. But that was for the benefit of others looking on, not for the more authentic reasons one might imagine prayer would be the most useful for. Even in the days of my early recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, I rarely, if ever, formally prostrated myself with bowed head at the foot of my bed and performed the obligatory communication. Indeed, as far as my private prayers went, they were always lacking...or so I used to think.
This morning as I awoke, thoughts of worry for the future began their perennial attack on my mind and I did, as I have learned, to immediately channel my thoughts towards gratitude. Thinking on the things I have and the life I enjoy NOW as opposed to projections of what might come to pass always seems to crowd out the fears. For fear and gratitude cannot exist in the same moment within the same mind. As the fear ebbed and I began to feel good again, a cognition struck me as they often do...I was in prayer!!!!
I have been praying all along! In fact, now that I review my life, it is evident that even through my darkest years, all my thoughts and contemplations, however skewed, were spent in the inward groaning and the reaching for the awareness I currently enjoy. All of those inward groanings and horrible moments of confusion and mental agony led to my recovery and all that reaching during that recovery nearly seven years ago led to my growth as a more whole human being that I now experience. In essence, I guess what I'm saying is all the while I WAS praying...and those same prayers have been and will continue to be answered. My whole life has been spent in prayer and supplication but because I was not doing it the way way others said it needed to be done, I felt it was absent and meaningless and therefore null and void. But NOTHING could have been further from the truth!
You see, it was my awareness, struggling deep from within me yet unbeknownst to me, reaching desperately to surface so the man I always wanted to be could make his appearance... THAT was me praying!!! And it doesn't matter that I am still uncertain as to who or what I may be praying either! For all I know, and I know so very little, I AM the divine accessing my very own divinity from within me as is my divine right. But, all I really know, and it is an existential knowledge, not one that can be learned from a blackboard but only from personal experience, is that prayer works!!!!
To be aware is to be in prayer!
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