Evolving Prayer with an Evolving God

“The image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15-17) by Chris Powers

Integral Prayer Part 3: Praying into, with, and from the Three Faces of God

Prayer is communication and communion. It is the WeSpace between God and us. This divine meeting place usually changes throughout our lives as we grow and develop. We change, and so does our understanding and experience of God. Often we don’t quite know how to pray in a way that seems to resonate fully with these changes. 

Can we still find an evolving God in prayer? Can we still meet God in the dynamic unfolding of our relationship with the divine?

While at times we may need to demythologize, deconstruct, and differentiate through our ideas of God, hopefully, we can continue on our journey without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We can find our way to more liberating ways to meet with the divine, which can include and reintegrate the healthy gifts of traditional prayer. 

This becomes possible through recognizing The Three Faces of God, which gives us the freedom to hold an understanding of God that encompasses the breadth of divine presence and manifestation. Moving then from this understanding into the WeSpace, into the participatory experience of communing with each of these faces is what we call Integral Prayer.

Our prayer can evolve with each of these three faces, meeting God in transcendence, relationship, and participation.

Let’s look at these evolutions in prayer with each of our faces of God.

Praying Into the Infinite Face of God-Beyond-Us in Transcendence

Many prayers to the great God beyond are usually akin to shooting rockets into the sky. Or throwing out a message in a bottle.

Some non-religious people—well, and a good number of religious too—find themselves praying to this impersonal, “God in the sky” cosmic force, especially in moments of desperation. There is no real expectation of response, perhaps other than a bolt of lightning. And there certainly isn’t any listening for return communication. It is almost a sort of magical incantation.

This is quite often also true of scripted prayers, or repetitious liturgical prayer offerings, including The Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary’s, The Jesus Prayer, and more.

This is prayer at God.

Eventually, praying at this “God in the sky” doesn’t seem to make sense. Between the vast and sheer expanse of the cosmos and the understanding of the mythic nature of many of the Zeus-like pictures of God in our heads, we discover the need for a much bigger God than the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, one that is beyond the previous understandings of our minds.

This is the Infinite Face of God. Not a distant and unknowable God, but certainly one who is constantly beyond us. This is God as infinite mystery. Mystery that continues to unfold, that is infinitely discoverable, that is inviting us further and further into that mystery.

What does prayer look like with God-Beyond-Us? How can we commune with the great beyond?

Through transcendence.

In Integral Prayer, we go from praying at the “God in the sky” and begin to pray into the infinite God-Beyond-Us though transcendent prayer and meditation.

We can move into transcendence through each of our four centers of spiritual knowing in Whole-Body Mystical Awakening, which we’ll explore in depth in a future article in this series.

Praying with The Intimate Face of God-Beside-Us in Relationship

Personal prayer to God is one of the earliest and most traditional forms of prayer. We talk to God, make requests, ask for blessings, and more.

As we grow up, often these types of direct, personal prayers get left behind. Do we still believe God or Jesus is there with us? Or is that just an imaginary friend from a childlike naivety? Often the messages of modern materialism cause us to doubt the reality of such nonphysical presences.

Many even give up on this type of prayer entirely, moving to more of a meditative spiritual practice that embraces silence and the God within. This is certainly a helpful way of praying, which we’ll look at more in the next section, but it need not require the loss of intimate, relational prayer with God’s motherly/fatherly presence, Jesus, Mary, or other spiritual guides.

Are they really here with us? How can we know?

As long as we’re simply praying to someone, we quite likely will begin to doubt the reality of their presence. Intimate prayer really comes alive when we open up to the relational dynamic where we don’t just talk to God, but pray with God. Any good relationship isn’t one-sided, and these personal presences of the divine—they have a lot to offer us as well!

If you’ve gone through some “demythologizing” or simply were raised in Western rationalism, trying to pray in this way may be difficult at first, almost like you’re imagining it all. That is the message your logical mind wants to keep putting before you.

The tricky part is that there’s a truth in that, but it’s not all of the truth. Engaging in the subtle realm with spiritual presences is a cocreative act, which means that we participate in the form of the reality that is presenting itself. We have to choose to be open to that nonphysical reality arising in our senses—the mind (what we sometimes dismissively call “the imagination”), but also our hearts, spiritual wombs, and body. They will look a little differently to each one of us.

At the same time, the presences themselves also have a separate, ontological reality. They are very real, and countless billions have connected with them down through the ages, including Jesus. We discover relationship with these spiritual presences the more we open to it, and the more we go to that meeting space, just like any spiritual practice.

We may be surprised at who shows up there. As we evolve, we may need new and different presences as guides. Jesus is the primary form of God-Beside-Us for Christians, but some may carry baggage or triggers with him for various reasons. We may need a feminine presence, someone from another tradition, an ancestor, or others who emerge from the great cloud of witnesses.

In Integral prayer, we go from prayer to the God of our imagination to praying with God-Beside-Us, with personal spiritual presences, learning to listen and engage in relationship—in both communication and the deep communion of simply being with a loving, caring presence.

Praying from the Inner Face of God-Being-Us in Participation

Moving in prayer practice into the reality of God-Being-Us is not usually something we experience early in life—though we may have had mystical moments of oneness at a young age.

Owning our identification as a divine being, an expression of God ourselves is more than likely still a growing edge for most of us. Many forms of contemplative prayer seek to help us move beyond our limited identities and help us accept and identify more as this divine self. Do we believe it?

We can hear it from Catherine of Genoa, “My deepest me is God.” Or perhaps Meister Eckhart, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye that God sees me.” Or Jesus, “I and the Father are one” (“That they may be one, just as you and I are one”).

While it may be hard enough to dare to claim our divine identify, there is even another step further. It is to take the step from identification to active participation.

As 2 Peter 1:4 says, “We are participants in the divine nature.”

So how would we actually participate in our divine nature?

In Integral Prayer, we take seriously our identification as divine and then seek to pray from this immanent God-Being-Us, from our Christ consciousness.

Learning to pray from this incarnated, divine consciousness is a primary practice in our WeSpace groups. We do this in a fully embodied way, learning to listen from each of our centers of spiritual knowing—not simply from our constructed self, but from the knowing state of divine arisings—and then sharing that with one another.

We are not speaking for God, like the prophets of old—we claim no such authority (and would be right to suspect such assertion, as they usually are an abusive attempt to wield power). We are doing what the apostle Paul refers to in his letters as “speaking forth.” This can be verbal or simply engaging in the flow of transmission, shining the light of love silently to one another. More about that in a future writing.

Integral Prayer

Praying from this consciousness of God-Being-Us, with God-Beside-Us, and into God-Beyond-Us are the movements of the spiritual practice we call Integral Prayer. 

Integral Prayer liberates us to pray in each of these ways, into/with/from each of these perspectives. We don’t have to pick just one. And we can then develop and deepen our understanding and practice in each of these perspectives, or faces of God. Or whichever is needed at the moment. 

Sometimes one of these ways of prayer is at the forefront for us. It could be at this time we need to focus in on our WeSpace into the transcendent God or maybe from the Immanent God. And that is wonderful and beautiful. 

When the time comes, God may turn again. You find another face before you. And you can welcome the gaze of God beckoning you onward, into further communion. Into the salacious audacity of divine participation, ecstatic intimacy, and celestial transcendence.

“The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27) by Chris Powers