PRAYERS/PRAYING

Our real journey in life is interior; it is a matter of growth, deepening, and of an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts. Never was it more necessary for us to respond to that action. I pray that we may all do so.

(AJ 296)

[Untitled]

Five breaths pray in me: sun moon

Rain wind and fire

Five seated Buddhas reign in the breaths

Five illusions

One universe:

The white breath, yellow breath,

Green breath, blue breath,

Red fire breath, Amitabha

Knowledge and Desire

And the quiescence

Of Knowledge and Desire.

(CP 785)

Prayer flags flutter among the trees. Rock mandalas are along all the pathways. OM MANI PADME HUM (“Hail to the jewel in the lotus”) is carved on every boulder. It is moving to see so many Tibetans going about silently praying — almost all of them are constantly carrying rosaries.

(AJ 93)

Yesterday as I came down the path from the mountain I heard a strange humming behind me. A Tibetan came by quietly droning a monotonous sound, a prolonged “om.” It was something that harmonized with the mountain — an ancient syllable he had found long ago in the rocks — or perhaps it had been born with him.

(AJ 79)

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

(II-77, GNV 87)

My greatest weapon is mute prayer.

(I-251, GNV 59)

From “Freedom as Experience”

And so, some days in prayer Your Love,

Prisoning us in darkness from the values of Your universe,

Delivers us from measure and from time,

Melts all the barriers that stop our passage to eternity

And solves the hours our chains.

And then, as fires like jewels germinate

Deep in the stone heart of a Kaffir mountain,

So now our gravity, our new-created deep desire

Burns in our life’s mind like an undiscovered diamond.

Locked in that strength we stay and stay

And cannot go away

For You have given us our liberty.

Imprisoned in the fortunes of Your adamant

We can no longer move, for we are free.

(CP 187)

Oh God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness. . . . Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. Oh God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is in Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love . . . united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen.

(AJ 318–19)