Living with mystery – 14 September 2012

Kathleen Norris writes:  I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  It’s one of those insights these people seem to have, which can be told in simple words, briefly and clearly.  Perhaps people like me then start to obscure it.

Prayer is… a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.  Unfortunately, as it seems to me, she then goes on to write about the common experience most of us know, when someone or some situation springs to mind, and it becomes a quiet personal prayer.  That’s a kind of running intercession, appropriate and perfectly fine. 

But Kathleen Norris’s insight is better than that, and I felt sorry she didn’t follow it up.  There are two things in what she wrote and in the way she wrote it.  First, she called prayer a certain quality of attention.  We have visited this idea before in our group.  Prayer is paying special attention.  It is deeper and more disciplined than the scatter-gun attention we normally give to things, or the so-called attention possible in multi-tasking, which is much admired.  The attention prayer requires is the result of being fully present and fully awake.  It is the attention possible when we have set our own agendas to one side and have stepped in front of all our internal and external chatter.  It is the attention we come to know in our consent to God, in silence, in stillness and in mystery.

Secondly, she says it comes upon her when I’m busy doing something else.  She is not now referring to the time of prayer.  What meditators eventually start to report is that their mantra, with all its connotations of stillness, silence, focusing, paying attention, spills over into the rest of life.  We become aware of its resonance in stressful situations, at busy and occupied times, in tiredness or anxiety.  It is as though part of us is now living in a kind of constant presence, what the Greek of the New Testament calls an αναμνησις (anamnesis), a remembrance.  We are more and more learning to be present to God, and to other people, in ways not possible when we are living behind our defences and facades.  In company we may see what others don’t because of all the chatter.  When we are alone, we come to realize that there is no space between our thoughts of people and our prayers for them.  Boundary between life and prayer has become thin or attenuated, even invisible.