Fourth Week of Advent, Monday: A Time for Prayer

In the Heart of Winter: A Meditator’s Guide to Advent

…without prayer there is no inward peace.
    – Mahatma Gandhi

The metaphysical approach to prayer is never about fixing a problem we want help with.  Instead, prayer provides a way enter divine communion, where there the problem no longer exists.  It is not that the problem is fixed through prayer.  Through prayer, we relinquish the sense of being a separate self and consciously participate in harmony and divine order.  In this state of consciousness, we are not asking for a solution to our problems or even asking God to provide inspiration or direction.  Rather, there simply is no problem.  We are not asking for doors of opportunity to be shown to us so that we may escape our difficulties.  In mystical prayer, there is no problem to be fixed or difficulty to escape.

Now we see why it is said that the spiritual path becomes narrow and difficult, because from our human perspective, we rail at this teaching.  “Wait a minute!  Of course there is a problem, and I am suffering.  How can you say there is no problem?  I can see the problem, and the world has a lot of problems and a lot of suffering too!”  From this perspective, there is a very real problem, and that is why we have come to God in prayer. We want help with our problems and we do not want our problems dismissed as unreal or unimportant.  It sounds dangerously like denial to affirm that problems are not real, fly into some spiritual solution, and imagine it will all go away.

Yes, the problem is real, and the suffering is very real.  The teachings do not deny that nor do they suggest we try to imagine them away.  But here is the key to spiritual understanding:  whatever the problem is, it is a changeable condition.  It is a human condition that was brought about by certain causes and it is always subject to the laws of change.  In and of itself no human problem has any power to sustain itself.  A condition has no independent power.  There is only one power—and that power is God.  Only God is all-powerful, eternal, and unchanging.  In prayer, we cease to believe that the problem itself is powerful, that it has any power of its own, that it is fixed or unchanging, or that it can be solved from the level of human consciousness that brought it about.  We cease believing in two powers, trying to pit one against the other.  We believe only God has power, and in our prayer we intend to rest in that power.  In this way we do not deny the problem but we see through its insubstantial nature, and come to rest in divine truth and harmony.  Divine consciousness is unity consciousness:  God is one.  In unity consciousness, there is no separate self with a problem.  There is no duality; not two powers.  There’s only God, one power of love and divine harmony.

Practice:

The best time for prayer is after meditation, when thought activity has subsided and the mental field is clear. Spend some time in prayer after your meditation today by inwardly cultivating the awareness that all is in divine order. Feel this to be true. “Pray your way through” any inner conversation about conditions until you consciously abide in wholeness, aware that all will ever be well in God.

Contemplate:
An affirmative prayer:

Beloved God:

Your one divine light—the Light that is the life of all the world—

ever shines in the sanctuary of my soul.

Though it has been obscured—clouded over by wrong ideas, by thoughts of separation from Thee, by pride and self-will—it is shining still.

It is shining now.

Though Winter is here and the days grow darker,

my soul light is becoming brighter.

I release the past. I free myself from the tyranny of conditions.

They hold no power over me.

I kindle the light of divine remembrance.

Today I claim my true identity.

I am truly blessed. I am highly favored.

I see everyone in the light of Truth.

Amen

Reflect:
I am willing to release my belief in the power of conditions and welcome God as the only power in my life?