For the Lord will not forsake his people, for his great name’s sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself. Moreover, as for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you, and I will instruct you in the good and the right way. Only fear the Lord and serve him faithfully with all your heart. For consider what great things he has done for you.
1 Samuel 12:22-24
Photo by Samuel Martins on Unsplash
When you think about spiritual activities–what do you prefer to call them: habits, practices, or disciplines? It doesn’t matter to me what you call them, I want you to realize that ideas initiate actions. Habits, something we do regularly without thinking, automatically? Maybe not. Disciplines? That word has too much baggage, maybe we’ll return to it later. For now, let us call them practices because they take training, they take practice.
Prayer is the most popular of all disciplines. It crosses almost every tradition, every religious perspective, and worldview. When we are attentive to the presence of the divine and the sacred, we open ourselves up to communion, to communication with an ancient and infinite Presence. Think about the most common image of prayer. Closed eyes, folded hands, bowed and bent knees— most everyone has been there. While the position may not matter, it still has a way of helping us to focus, helping us to be humble, and reminding us that we come with nothing more than our attention to the Divine. We ask, we confess, we seek direction, lean into the One Source of Life, desiring to make a change, make a difference. Most of all, we want to be in tune, to transcend our lowly place, and to get beyond our situation.
When we realize the things in the world that trigger our hearts and minds toward God we have a kind of, dimensional shift toward transcendence—going beyond our ordinary experience and circumstance. It may be a sense of the miraculous or even a new idea about the mundane, the ordinary. Whatever your trigger, take a moment to be at peace with that idea, draw it out of yourself and lift it toward God. These prepositions are insufficient, we cannot lift it toward because the divine is something that is all around.