(33) Being a Prayer

"To learn how to pray is not to learn new poetic words. To learn
how to pray is to learn how to pronounce your own sacred word--
go speak yourself! To learn to pray is not to learn some method.
It is to know who you are and to be who you are supposed to be!
You are prayer. You are a special and sacred word of God made
flesh. To pronounce your own unique word is to pray the most
beautiful--if not the holiest--of prayers."
[Quoting Father Ed Hays, by Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O., in
CENTERING PRAYER: RENEWING AN ANCIENT CHRISTIAN
PRAYER FORM, Image Books, 1982, p. 57.]

Comment: More years back than I wish to confess, I had occasion
to hear the Cistercian Basil Pennington give a talk on Centering
Prayer. Then a monk at Spencer, his abbot (I believe) then was
Thomas Keating, who eventually established a Centering Prayer
movement. I have tried Centering Prayer, but eventually I returned
to Father Hays idea about prayer--as quoted above.

Maybe I am just not that much of a contemplative, at least when it
comes to my prayer style. Indeed, when I read about prayer I oft
feel confused. I stand amazed at "true" contemplatives who follow
a totally dedicated life of meditative prayer. Perhaps I'm just too
much a practical person to understand this kind of dedication;
but, nonetheless, I honor such in others who can do it.

I guess I like Father Hay's approach to prayer, because I sincerely
believe that we are literally "consciousness points" in a living
universe in which the Holy is present, in which there is not only
vast systems of inter-relationship, but that ever present Connection
with That Beyond us. I suspect as Time moves on, if we are
fortunate enough to grow into ever Greater Understanding, we
will come to *know* ever better who we are--Part and Parcel of
the All of it, standing within the Whole, the Holy.

Hence I believe that our life "being a prayer" is singularly important.