Presence

Awareness; - I have used the word more than a few times already, but being “aware” of its continued drifting in my mind as I begin to write, I feel I am, once more, being drawn to dwell on it further.
I am experiencing rather than simply hearing it as a word; I feel it as successfully conveying its own meaning to my whole person rather than merely suggesting it to my mind. It is making me fully aware of my awareness. In a self-fulfilling way, it invites and raises a full realization of meaning through an overlay of sound which cloaks its complete recognition.

All prayers are more than words; if they are not, we must question what they are doing in our lives.
Are they a form of security blanket which really provides no security at all? Words alone remain just that: - words alone.
Prayer does not need words to be prayer.
Prayer may be comprised of prayers, with few or many words, but the words themselves do not make prayer.
Prayer is communication: it is conveying one’s heart and its emotions to the security and love of an Eternity we may only suspect to be reality: the reality behind the presence of that “Other” we are unable to shake off.
It is our honesty in the presence of Truth; our need in the presence of Gift.
It is our brokenness in the presence of Wholeness; our shame and our hope in the presence of Knowledge.
It is our trust in the presence of Eternal Power.
Prayer is the laying open of our true selves at the feet of that Awesome Presence which is itself the ultimate Awareness.

The very feel of that word within me this evening, is as the gentlest movement of air upon my hand as I write: the faintest stirring from the hem of His cloak as my unseen Guardian glances (as it were) over my shoulder and passes me by.

It is only by approaching the edges of our belief, the edge of our awareness, that we can place ourselves in a position to receive that which is held out to us: the inexpressible love of God.

“Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love.”

This short prayer is more than words. Like any other, it can be read or said by anyone, believing or unbelieving, aware or unaware, but it expresses something that could never arise from simply believing that there is a God, or believing in God.
Those few words arise from an awareness of God: from an awareness of the presence of a power, a force, an authority: an awareness of the presence of a Presence.
We need only the tiniest touch of that Presence to make us aware.
We need only the smallest hint of awareness to transform what we have been calling belief, into what we may now experience as faith.
We cannot be ‘nearly’ or ‘almost’ aware of that presence.

We speak of being close to death, and of dying as though it is a process. We all know what we mean in that context. As our bodies fail, as we age, we know there will come a time when everything has ceased working: the life of the body is over: the body is dead.
We can recognize the passage of time towards this point, and we use these expressions in universally accepted ways; but, at any single moment we are either alive or we are dead.
We cannot be dead until we are no longer alive.
We remain the one, and cannot be the other, right up to our dying breath.

Similarly, at the beginning of our lives, we are either alive or we are not.
Nobody today would say that a child has to be born to be alive; that a pregnant mother does not carry life within her womb; - but the arguments continue about the stages of our development in the womb.
When does a foetus become a viable human being? Should that be accepted as a valid question at all, in any situation other than a miscarriage or a premature birth?
It only makes any sense when thinking of the foetus outside the womb: - where it is not meant to be.
An ability to survive outside the womb is not the measure of the beginning of human life. Life is there long before.
All the way back - adult, youth, child, infant, newborn, foetus, embryo, blastocyst, zygote, - there is human life.
The fertilized egg is the beginning of a human life. It is where I began; it is where you began.
The ovum and the spermatozoon both have lives of their own, but it is only when they are combined that we as individual persons are created. As with death, we are either one or the other: at conception we either do not exist, or we exist: at one moment we are nothing, at the next we are everything, and we have life.

Now, well into our journey through this life, with a well developed awareness of ourselves and of the world in which we live, with our moment’s start behind us, and our physical end ahead of us, we either do or we do not become aware of God’s existence.
The merest suggestion of a breath, a touch, a fleeting half-thought, a something indefinable and ungraspable - however faint, in some vague way undeniable - this is all it takes.
That very beginning of an awareness, is awareness itself.
Awareness is itself a sense of the presence of God.

Come Holy Spirit, fill me; kindle your fire within me.
Fill the hearts of all who sense your presence, and kindle in them the fire of your love.