Simply Pray: A Modern Spiritual Practice to Deepen Your Life
128
Simply Pray: A Modern Spiritual Practice to Deepen Your Life
128Paperback
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Overview
Simply Pray offers fresh answers to the age-old question, “Why pray?” The practice of prayer appeals to something deep within many of us, especially those of us who grew up reciting Catholic prayers on a rosary, or those of us fascinated by the mala beads carried by Buddhist practitioners. But what if our journey has taken a path different from the traditional religions and the often-moving rituals they provide? In Simply Pray, Erik Walker Wikstrom reveals the universal qualities of prayer and offers a way to incorporate this spiritual practice into your personal journey. Simply Pray is an excellent guide for anyone seeking a unique spiritual practice that is deeply rooted in all of the world’s great religions.
The first two sections of the book unravel the meaning and practices of prayer within world religions and consider how these ideas are relevant to the individual. The third section, Making a Practice of Prayer, describes how to make your own set of prayer beads and begin to use them. The fourth section, Pray Like This, insightfully translates traditional prayers, such as the Lord's Prayer, into fresh new language, demonstrating how the practice of prayer may be shaped for your individual needs.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558964693 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Unitarian Universalist Association |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2005 |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Why do people pray? What does it bring to spirituality? Is there a “someone” or “something” that we encounter in our times of prayer, a “sacred something” that is yearning for relationship with us? Is prayer, as Anthony Bloom says, the building of a relationship or sim-ply an internal monologue with one’s own subconscious mind?
The Buddha’s answer—“That is a question which does not tend toward edification”—is only a partial answer. The reason it does not “tend toward edification” is that it distracts our concentrated energy from the truly important task before us. We want to know with whom we are engaging—or whether or not there is a“ whom”—before we will engage, yet to paraphrase Episcopal priest and author Martin Bell, “You cannot engage the sacred and then commit; commitment is the one and only way of engaging the sacred.” To use another example, you can’t find out what “wet” feels like unless you get into the water. There’s simply no way to talk about it. There’s no explaining it. There’s no understanding it, even. There is only getting wet.
Similarly, you can’t talk about a meal to someone and give them the taste of the food, or describe a symphony and expect them to experience the hearing of it; you can’t explain what it feels like to run on the beach and hope that their muscles will know the feeling, or recite a poem about a rose with the intention that the hearer’s nose will smell it. You can talk, describe, explain, and recite, of course, and doing these things will impart some measure of understanding. But in order for the other person to really know what you’re talking about—deeply, fully—she or he will have to experience it directly. So it is with the spiritual journey. No words can truly describe it; you must experience it for yourself.
This is not the approach most people associate with “religion. ”Instead, after having been given a lot of concepts they are expect-ed to understand—or at least memorize—people are often invited to fit their experiences into prefabricated cubby holes. This is what God is, they are told, now go and find him. This is what a spiritual experience feels like, now go and have one. For a lot of us this doesn’t work too well—at some point we get stuck in the concepts, unable to see beyond them, and so we find nothing.
Not all religions are like this, however. In his interview with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell told the story of a Shinto priest who was attending an interfaith religious conference. Someone asked him if he could explain the Shinto theology or ideology. The priest thought for a moment and then replied, “We don’t have atheology; we don’t have an ideology. We dance.”
There are other traditions like this, of course, that do not put such weight on the working of the mind, traditions that do not imply that we can think our way to a spiritual life, but many of us do not come from such a tradition. So what can we do?
If we start our search with the idea, the ideology, the theory, or the theology, we may find ourselves unable to find anything. As Theresa of Avila said, the biggest obstacle to finding God is our assumptions about what we are looking for.
The African American spiritual “Over My Head” offers a key that can help us take advantage of the full freedom that is our spiritual birthright:
Over my head, I hear music in the air.
Over my head, I hear music in the air.
Over my head, I hear music in the air.
There must be a God somewhere.
It’s because we hear the music—because we have had a first-hand, unqualified, unfiltered experience of the sacred and the holy—that we can say with conviction, “There must be a God somewhere.” The experience precedes the theology. Rather than trying to fit the experience into a predefined concept, we can define the concepts only in light of what we have learned in our lives. This may seem radical, yet it is the path that mystics and contemplatives have been suggesting from time immemorial.
If you long to connect with the Sacred, if you desire to live a life that is more in touch with the Holy, stop listening for some-thing and start simply listening. If you have given up on an anthropomorphic deity—the old white guy with the long whitebeard, or any of his stand-ins—yet can’t figure out what to put in its place, stop looking for something and start simply looking around you. Notice those places in your life where you have felty yourself in the presence of the Holy, remember those experiences in which you have heard your connectedness; seek in your own life—your own feelings, your own moments—those places where you have encountered, or are encountering, the Sacred. In other words, simply pray. Pray without any preconceived notion of what you’re doing or why. Simply do it, and see what happens.
Table of Contents
What We Yearn ForWe Call It Prayer
Naming
Knowing
Listening
Loving
Spontaneous and Recited Prayers
Making a Practice of Prayer
Beads in Prayer
A Modern Prayer Bead Practice
A Practice of Your Own
Pray Like This
The Lord's Prayer
The Twenty-Third Psalm
Thomas Merton's Prayer
A Bodhisattva's Prayer
Starhawk's Prayer
Simply Pray