The brink of prayer

Once awakened, awareness will not sleep.
Having made us conscious of both our littleness and our potential in the presence of God, it places us at the very edge of eternity.

Strangely perhaps, we may not realize we are at an edge at all.
We have approached at least one during our advance, but, without any real crisis, all that seems behind us.
We walk now in a tension between desire for something sensed but undefined, and apprehension at the absolute quality of its invisibility: the emptiness of its unknown face. We wander, unstressed, in a mist of mystery.
We follow the line of what we take to be a low bank, beside an unseen stream; the solid, safe and friendly ground stretching away unseen in all directions.
The mist about us is the product of unanswerable questions, but is found to be quietly comforting.

The truth of our situation is far beyond the limits of our comprehension. We have nothing in our experience to hint of where we are, or where we are going.
Our awareness of having been given much, and our low-key fears of something being asked of us, are enveloped in the tensions already drifting in the mist; they do not trouble us unduly.
We are touched by an all-pervading consolation as we unwittingly follow the hem of the Ultimate Mystery: the Mystery that beckons from within, calls us to enter, and longs to cradle us in the love that is the source of that consoling touch.

We could not walk this path without the mist.
Nor could others who have already passed this way, and who may have found answers to questions of which we have not yet even thought.
They are still journeying onwards through their newfound fears, joys, insights and understandings: they shall not walk this path again.
If they did, they could still not begin to cope with the vastness of the reality obscured by the mist.
Regardless of where we are in our approach to God; regardless of how advanced we believe ourselves to be in our understanding, knowledge, experience, or giftedness, we are all utterly unable to grasp the Truths of the Mystery of the Presence of the Eternity of God.
Those who have gone further along the way have the ability to help those who follow behind: no more and no less; just as we all have the potential for lifting and supporting those who travel beside us.
For most of us this is what makes the difference.
The presence of the Mystery in our fellow disciples makes all mountains climbable, and every desert crossable.

The stream has led us here – as was intended – and has now gone into the mist where, ultimately, all such streams go.
Our path does not follow a low bank; beyond the mist there is no ground.
The hem of this Mystery lightly brushes the lip of an unfathomable precipice; we are at the very edge.
We stand on the brink of eternity.

The height, the depth and the breadth of this profound and significant emptiness is infinitely beyond us, yet the entirety of the Presence within it shadows our lives from beginning to end.
It awaits us; it is available to us, and we avail ourselves of it through faith and through communication:

- the communication that is prayer.