Meditation and prayer are very different. I find myself wanting to pray during meditation but cannot. Not because I cannot pray, in fact the impulse to do so is often urgent with eloquence, but because the way I see God has changed radically in the last few years. When I prayed it was, not just to a person, but to Person. It was to the Almighty who could, if he wished, grant any desire. Very often prayer was like a bleeding wound pouring out the blood of anguish and desolation, asking to be healed and comforted, what Jean-Louis Chrétien calls ‘wounded speech’. Often it was a cry for intervention, a plea for the rearrangement of events so that I might feel better – though I never allowed myself to think in such a blatantly selfish fashion and always put an altruistic spin on things. Even though I realised there were so many problems with a worldview that saw God as a Transcendent manipulator, as Someone who intervened in history in order to arrange events so they fitted his plan, this realisation did not percolate through to my emotional life. God the Intervenor fitted my emotional needs. The God that made intellectual sense did not. I lived quite happily with this dichotomy for a long time, never questioning the prayer of petition.
However, since I have retired and since I have been meditating regularly and seriously it has been less and less easy to pray like that – for a number of reasons. The sight of the starving children in southern Sudan on the TV screens nearly every day, homeless people sleeping in doorways, young people rejected by their families, the victims of war – there are so many who deserve divine intervention more than I that it is no longer possible to pray just for my needs, I can only pray for others.
In any case it is no longer possible to believe in a God who intervenes for some in response to prayer while he allows millions to continue suffering and dying. More and more prayer, and meditation, has become an exercise in searching for God in the depths of being. ‘Searching’ is the wrong word, as though God was some discrete being concealed from view. It is more an exercise in coming to see in a new way. The story of the little fish searching for the ocean sums up what I am trying to say. It is so difficult to say anything at all about God and yet he is the oxygen of life.