By Marie-Dominique Rail

Posted on January 7, 2021

When we pray, whether kneeling or standing, eyes closed, forehead pressed against the invisible, we inevitably stand before another world—one that no one sees, that we ourselves perceive only dimly, like a presence blossoming from within our own inner depths.

To pray is to reconnect with an origin, to mend the distance we have carved between that origin and the way we live our lives.

It is to rediscover a place where being resonates with clarity.

To pray is to walk, to walk long and far, to the very end of oneself.

To pray is to cling to the prow of the ship, knees on the hard plank, hands joined like a bow cutting through the waves, and to receive, full force, the crashing wave against the hull, the fierce wind from the open sea, from beyond the horizon.

To pray is to move forward in the dark, groping, following the faint glimmer of an inner star, the whisper of a voice waiting for us just a little further on.

It is not the thickness of the night that entangles and holds me back, but the fear I have not yet left behind, along with the easy certainties of daylight.

To pray is to open inwardly, to unfold beneath the radiant sun of a present I believed narrower than the past or future, but which reveals itself to be infinite—if only I embrace it.

It was I who limited it, through my own closures. And to open up is to enter into it, without even moving, by becoming aware that the connection depends on an attentiveness to the self.

It is about renouncing our certainties, but doing so truthfully, so that new spaces may open—spaces that do not erase the old landscapes, but instead return their soul and breath to them.

Every prayer is like a first flight.

Every prayer is a thread suspended over the abyss.

All it takes is a single step for that thread to expand to the dimensions of the world, to the vastness of the heavens, as though all their transparency were being poured into our hearts.

We are suddenly connected.

The abyss that once frightened us now lifts us up.

To pray is not to hide; to pray is to become unknotted, to let the breath of the infinite pass through us, to expand us.

It is to give ourselves a soul that is wide, fluid, elastic, light, and transparent.

Gentle energy.