Praying with the body

On many occasions I have heard ministers or friends or strangers talk about praying and I've wondered about this.

And then I realize I do pray, in a particular way.

I call it praying with our bodies.

We usually think of prayer as a conversation with God, with us here, and God, well, God is somewhere else. This is prayer as talking to God, a kind of long-distance telephone call.

But there is also prayer as a form of “waiting for God.” Waiting for God is waiting for things unseen, waiting in hope. “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” (Isaiah 40)

But as I have said many times, we moderns don’t like to wait. And many times I have told this story.

When I was a young boy, around four or five, we lived in Tyler, Texas. It was Christmas, and my mother showed me the gift for my Dad a week before. She said, “This is a secret. Don’t tell your Dad.”

Four nights later, two days before Christmas, sitting in the living room I suddenly shouted out, “house shoes.” At first my mother scowled, and then she started laughing, and then so did my father.

I made it for about four days. The waiting finally got to me. 


When I talk about prayer I am usually talking about a kind of listening, recalling that we also think of God as everywhere and in everything, and everywhere and everything as in God. 

This is God as the world's body and the body of the world includes our bodies. And our bodies are so much more than our consciousness. Indeed consciousness plays a very small role in our intelligence. It is our unconscious, our undermind that is largely in control, as I have written before.

Thinking about our bodies this way can change how we pray. This would be praying as attending, praying as waiting in stillness and silence, prayer as a kind of listening and noticing that is always going on, outside of our consciousness. Our task is to attend to this,wait for this, in stillness and meditation, letting out larger self, our bodies, speak.

“For God alone my soul waits in silence.” (Psalm 62)

When we pray in silence and stillness, what do we wait for, listen for? 

I suggest that we listen to our embodied selves, to our bodies as they register our innermost and divided hearts.

If we are fundamentally divided and estranged against ourselves and against others, if this division is what we Christians mean by sin, our bodies will know this first.

Our bodies know our estrangement more deeply than we do.

The idea behind this form of meditation is that we use our bodily awareness to connect to the world and others and also to lead us in a process of unfolding, reuniting, and healing, reconciling with ourselves and with others.

I suggest that our bodies are one of the ways in which God still speaks to us, touching us with a silent but plainly felt language that registers how we’re doing, what we’re suffering, what needs doing with others.

This is letting our body pray us, letting it use its larger wisdom to guide us to wholeness and a health deeper than death.

We can learn how to listen to our bodies this way much as we learn meditation. This would be prayer as sitting quietly and attending to and waiting for our body’s felt sense of where we are and where we need to be, a sense that can begin as mundanely as with an unease in the pit of our stomach or with a clutch in our throat—then claiming that felt sense, and using it to lead us to a growing and unfolding awareness and grace, life meeting life again.

I find this way of thinking about prayer, about our being prayed by our bodily self a very compelling and very practical way to think of God and of prayer, a listening quietly to our bodies as a portal to the spirit that is constantly moving in the body of the world, a listening to what God is seeking amidst our cordoned hearts.

Let us pray: 

God with us, body of our life together,
Teach us to listen in perfect silence to our body’s speaking.
Teach us to hear Your Word speaking in the world’s body.
Let your silence unfold our truest voice, your New Being.
Let us wait in your silence for the New Creation.

Comments

[David Daniel]

In the past, my mind ran at 1000mph. All thoughts were awash with other, non-connected thoughts blending and overlapping... for a while I thought I was actually crazy - and nothing I am about to say will confirm or debunk that - but... I often prayed...in the "traditional" form... for "The Right Answer"... and seemingly none ever came. It was not until I prayed for "patience and peace" that my prayers were answered.

I distinctly remember the morning I woke up - it was in Bisbee - and realized that my brain was silent... the endless screaming of terror... the constant nagging of doubt... the incessant thoughts of whether I was "good enough"...and all the rest... were gone...

At first, I thought I might have finally gone mad... as what I had come to know as "normal" was not there... I pondered the idea that I may have had a stroke... that some physical defect had done away with the "voices"... I actually started into a panic about not having all of that noise... and then it dawned on me...

This was peace.

I had no idea how good it felt....in mind, body and soul...

These days, I do not look back at those days with any fondness. As they say, without "hot", there could be no "cold"...without pain, how can we know when relief comes...

Peace of mind and heart actually gives a physical response... I just **feel** better... overall...