Praying to What You Cannot Know
Orar a lo que no puedes conocer
A reflection on how the impulse to pray transforms when we release our fixed concepts of God and enter into genuine dialogue with the mystery of reality itself.
Praying to What You Cannot Know
A reflection on how the impulse to pray transforms when we release our fixed concepts of God and enter into genuine dialogue with the mystery of reality itself.
When the impulse toward God moves into an institution, the mind naturally defines God. I'm sure you could look into scripture and find places where it is emphasized that God is not definable, that God is a mystery. But conventionally, the mind will define God, and then we relate to and pray to that which is known: God is this, this, this, and that.
The baby and the bathwater
The baby I want to metaphorically keep alive is that true desire to dialogue with and pray to something beyond ourselves. That impulse is precious.
What you can then clarify, the bathwater you can discard, is the moment you start to see that there is a concept, a fixed knowing, of that which you are praying to. To move more toward what you are actually praying to (which you can still call God) is to move toward mystery, toward what is unknowable.
How prayer changes when God becomes mystery
This shift also changes what you pray for. If you understand God as an entity that will give you or withhold something based on how you behave, that is one form of knowing, one form of conceiving what God is. You will then pray and ask for something in accordance with that conception. But if that which you are praying to is more of a mystery, then what you pray for starts to become a stranger thing, a more mysterious thing as well.
The relationship starts to become, in a sense, more real, because it is a relationship with something you do not know, something that is a complete other.
Dialogue with reality, now
Ultimately, you are entering a form of dialogue with reality. And that is now. You do not pray to a God that might exist in the future but does not exist now, or a God that existed in the past but does not exist now. We pray to now: that which is present, that which is beyond you, and beyond your understanding of what God is.