The Divine Danceনমুনা

Primal Prayer

Jesus seems to teach that somehow our inclusion in the dance matters in the great scheme of things. This must be a furthering of the great kenosis—the self-emptying of God—that we really count.

Where do we get two great indications of this? In the great prayer of Mary and in the great prayer of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. (See Luke 1:46–55 for Mary’s prayer and Matthew 26:36–46 for Jesus’ prayer.)

Both of them are saying, “Let it be.”

Mary, who is the personification of the human race receiving the Christ, shows us that our “let it be” matters to God—God does not come into our worlds uninvited. The Spirit needs a Mary, a body, a womb, a humanity that says, “I want you”—your yes is always God’s yes.

When you want it, it will be given to you; it’s that simple. “Let it be done unto me,” and it was done, right? This is the symbiotic nature of the Trinitarian life, of the Christian life, that we have been included in the dance. For some unbelievable reason, God allows us to matter and our prayers to matter; that’s why it seems Jesus does teach us to offer intercessory prayers.

By all means, ask God for what you want. Jesus tells us to do this, but don’t think you’re spending some currency of personal worthiness to make a transaction happen. First, you listen, then you speak; and this speaking, we’re promised, matters in the great scheme of things.

Jesus, of course, in the garden of Gethsemane, embodies the same willingness his mother had. Not trusting his own ability to make a decision about whether to enter into his own arrest and execution, he says, in effect, “But You, Father, do it through me and in me”—this is the absolute relatedness we see in Jesus till the end.

I only do what I see the Father doing. I do nothing else except what I see him doing first, echoing his motions. (See, for example, John 5:19–20.)

Christian prayer thus becomes much more a merging than a manipulating, much more dancing than dominating, much more participation than partisanship. Those of you who want rain and those of you who want the flooding to stop both dance in the unitive center of the God who holds the rain and the dry land alike.

You rest in God, not in outcomes.

What prayer becomes, in this divine rest, is experiential knowledge of the flow. Prayer is not primarily the spoken or read word. That might be a second or third level of prayer, but not the primary one. Primal prayer is where you can in truth pray always—“Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17 NKJV, KJV)—where you can live in conscious communion with the divine indwelling, with the Spirit who was poured out so universally and graciously upon all creation, upon all nations and languages. (See Acts 2:1–13.) Primal prayer does not mean waiting for some mythical, projected future “spiritual” state, but waking up inside your life, right now, in the present moment.

Know that how you do anything is how you do everything! Just watch the how of your life—even more than the what—as dangerous as that sounds.

To be utterly given, and acting from this surrendered, creative center:

This is primal prayer.

This, to me, is holiness.

And the irony is, the very motivation for your continued search for God is gratitude for already having been given God. When you pray, it is not that you pray and sometimes God answers. When you pray, God has already answered. It would not have even entered your mind and heart to pray if the Wind had not just blown through you! Wow!