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 <link>, 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.
Read MoreSpiritual Energy Part 4
“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other, so that the world may come to being. This is no metaphor; and it is much more than poetry.”
–Teilhard de Chardin
As we awaken to the spiritual energy within us, we find ourselves drawn more and more to the radial energetic dynamic, the drawing forward and further. This is no solo affair or hero’s journey. This radial energy “bundles.” It draws us together. It is the antithesis to the fragmentation, separation, and loneliness so pervasive today.
This attraction is not only for companionship but for the discovery and mutual expression of the evolving realities that are emerging in our midst. They more easily arise and can be discovered in a collective context. Even more, the community itself, the combining of energies, is instrumental to this movement forward.
Read MoreIt is dusk in the information age. The sun has already set. Its time has passed. With the amount of information generated increasing to an unprecedented degree, it is not the end of information, but the flooding of its darkness. It’s become increasingly clearer and clearer that the answers to our problems do not come with more information. And yet we keep going, passing far beyond the point of information “overload” and into a reality of information enslavement.
Information is frequently referred to as the food of the brain. We believe that we need a continual influx of stimulation, often in the form of new facts and findings, ways to perform better or know more, as if these new learnings will give us the edge we need to succeed, or the sense we crave to make meaning of our lives, or simply to feel like a more productive or better person. We buy another book, listen to another podcast, read yet another article, excited about the prospect of learning something we didn’t know before.
The trouble is, the more we learn, the more we realize how much more we don’t know. And on further down the rabbit hole we go. Is it possible we are feeding the monster who holds us captive? The mind that always seeks to acquire more and more? Have we become addicted to the stimulation, without asking where it’s taking us?
Read More“This is the most dangerous prayer you can pray, you know?”
I remember the words but not the speaker. I remember because I was bold enough and perhaps naïve enough to think I was up to the task. My spiritual ego was still quite strong and my zealous traditional Christian upbringing had prepared me well for the moment. Yes, I was ready. I could do this. I knew enough to know that I didn’t know what the consequences would be, only that they would be beyond what I could imagine at the time.
I’m pretty sure I literally, physically got down on my knees. And I opened my mouth to pray:
Read MoreSpiritual Knowing: Part Four – Developmental Learning
When I was in school, I decided to try my hand at the drums. I say “hand” fairly literally, as I could never get myself to play two rhythms at once. I could hold a beat though—as long as it was just one beat. My band director mercifully put me on the big bass drum and I pounded away with the single count in my head. It’s the same reason I failed at the piano. Two hands doing different things at the same time? Not for me. Throw the feet in there as well on a drum set? Forget about it.
I would claim that I just wasn’t very musical. Until later in high school when I picked up a trumpet and found something I could do pretty well—after some practice naturally. With the encouragement of my friends and a kind teacher, I also discovered that I had a half-decent singing voice. My shower-voice had fooled me, for I was certainly not a soloist. Rather, I had a nice blending voice for duets and harmonies.
You may not think you’re a mystic because you don’t have visions or ecstatic trances. Maybe you think you’re just not a very mystical person because of your history of one-sided prayers. There’s a pretty good chance you’re probably not Mozart—or you would know by now. But you’ve almost certainly got a little music in you. . . .
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