PRAYER

Veiled in dazzling obscurity:

soundless dark;

Mystery

thought cannot grasp

nor words intone,

nubilous,

present in my soul’s

deepest silence,

Distant near.

The more You fill me

with Yourself

the more I hunger:

a paradox of Presence.

Like priests of old, come,

ravish my soul.

Inoculate me

with Your blood;

let Your Spirit

flow through my veins.

At ocean’s edge,

on the border between this world and the next,

Risso dolphins, dancing

soaring in ecstasy, dreaming

as though lifted in rhapsodic prayer,

rising to unknowing.

There

in the rasping call of the corncrake,

in the tortoiseshell butterfly emerging from hibernation,

in the scent of cinnamon,

there

in evolution’s incalculable creativity,

syllables of silence,

the symphony of the Sacred.

Like Mary,

may the baby of Bethlehem

be born in me;

like Simeon,

may I hold in my arms

the One who embraces the universe,

every universe, soul’s limitlessness.

Like Mary of Bethany,

may I sit at the feet of Jesus

gazing into His face, His eyes,

into Eternity,

enraptured.

At supper,

like John, the Beloved,

may I lean against Jesus

my heart at one

with the heartbeat of Holiness.

Drawn by God’s hiddenness,

by an intuition more profound than philosophy,

by communion rather than formulae,

by mystical lore and love.

The scholastics have had their day

and so too the reformers;

I want to be born again.

Photo: iStock

This article appears in the February 2018 Issue of Life and Work

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