Prayer of Connection

Taize Short Prayer for The Day

 

"Happy those who can make this prayer their own:

Christ, you see who I am. 
For me, not to hide anything in my heart from you is a necessity.
You were a human being, too.
And when my inner self seems to be pulled in a thousand different directions, my thirsting heart reaches the point of praying:
“Enable me to live a life rooted in you, Jesus the Christ; unify my desire and my thirst.”

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I can relate to this prayer most days; the prayer of desire to connect with God and a desire to connect to others are intertwined. 

The last line of this Taize prayer asking for rootedness and to unify my desire and my thirst for God, speaks to me at several levels.  

Our world is deeply fragmented in myriads of ways, and different types of loss permeate the ground of our being.

My recent blogging absence was in the grand scheme of life, a trivial type of loss enforced by circumstances outside my control, but I was surprised by the destabilising effect it had on me. I normally don't have a problem with being away from blogging and social media when the decision is a voluntary one -  times on holiday have been the longest period I have been away from social media and I enjoy a break. A respite from e mail and/or facebook contact for a few days is often healthy and necessary but the fact that I was suddenly prevented from communicating introduced a whole new mental dynamic.

Sow yourself, cast the inert part of yourself in the furrow. 
You will recover yourself later in your work.
– So said Miguel de Unamuno, the Basque sage.

Self sowing certainly certainly did reveal an “inert” part of myself. 

It felt as if I was ploughing the same old furrow and became disconsolate. Several days of setbacks, following on one from another left me with a complete lack of focus and in an anxious and almost insular state of mind.
As time went on it was as if every day threw a new monkey wrench into the mess, leaving me at a complete standstill.
I tried to get on with normal life but felt a strong disinclination to do much. So much was rising up inside me but even when I attempted to replace the blogposts with some journal writing I was caught by a pervasive sense of loss. 

 



 At times when I would normally sit at the computer I would try to sit in silence and "sow " but the open deep furrows swallowed me up, leaving me isolated from the landscape’s surface. I felt clumsy and sluggish. 

















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In these few weeks offline it was paradoxically, the upturned baobab roots to the spiritual connections of the blogosphere I was seeking and missing so much.

After almost four years of blogging, the life has embedded many roots to people and the roots were torn apart.









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It's tempting to interpret all of this as a demonstration of the transience of earthly matters and the supremacy of eternity. But there is no domain of nature and lived experience independent of God.

In trying to gain some perspective I was comforted by my belief that consciousness exists as something separate from the brain, analogous to dark energy and the blogosphere as a type of collective unconscious, behaving according to the cosmic rules of quantum mechanics.

 It is possible that consciousness has a similar property to the non-locality of quantum particles and that once connected with another consciousness, we will always stay connected and influence one another, no matter how far we are apart.

The lesson might be glaringly obvious : As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke says "Be ahead of all parting as though it were already behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive."

I am glad that at last I can begin to make some understanding of this unsettling time.  I feel today the joy of a prayer rising in me, an expression of thankfulness, that connectivity, however flawed or imperfect it is, has at last been restored.