In preparation for the monthly chant group I lead on the second Saturdays I was reading what one of my favorite authors, Mindy Ribner wrote about the Hebrew month of Nissan and one of her statements struck me in a new way.
"Affirm the presence, not the absence, of God."
How much of my life am I unconsciously 'affirming the absence'?
I'm aware of the time I am consciously 'affirming the presence'. I spend defined chunks of time each day in deep connection with God. It is a sweet devakut (cleaving or attachment to the Divine) that I can taste with all my senses. My meditation time is like diving into a deep and refreshing sea after a long parched and dry journey.
I mark the transition time of my spiritual practice from profane to sacred in many ways; by lighting a candle, by wrapping myself in my tallis, by sitting on my meditation bench, by settling into my breath. It is a conscious crossing over, a clear entering into the gateway of prayer. I thought that was enough since my prayer life feels very rich and deep and real but the statement "Affirm the presence, not the absence, of God" got me thinking about the flip-side of my practice.
Maybe the important part is not how, or how often we ENTER into prayer but how we come OUT of it. Do we step out of it like a finite thing that we can shed before we go into the world of our day? Do we complete a targeted time, a set reading, a specific ritual so that we feel we are adequately inoculated before we step into the real world? Do we treat our daily prayers and meditations as a sort of spiritual vitamin regimen to boost our spiritual immune system?
"Affirm the presence, not the absence, of God."
By the very way I approach entering my spiritual practice am I affirming the absence of God in the mundane daily goings on of work, traffic, to do lists...?
Of course that is not my intent, but subtly, if I feel I have to step 'into' prayer, doesn't that mean that at some point I have stepped 'out' of it?
So, for this month I'm going to pay attention to how I shift from the sacred time of prayer back into my everyday time instead of how I shift into my prayer time. I'm going to stop short at the close of my meditations and prayers. I am not going to shed the cloak of prayer but instead I'm going to blur the lines between ending prayer and I'm going to consciously invite that sacred space and time to come along with me into the rest of my day.
I want my prayerfulness to leak into my everyday doings. I want the membrane between sacred and profane time to be more and more permeable.
I don't want to carve out more time to spend in prayer. I want there to be more prayer and meditation in ALL of my time.
Prayer is not a subset of my life actions. My life actions are a subset of prayer. My daily actions come out of it, they are not separate from it.
"Affirm the presence, not the absence, of God."
How might that look in your life this month?
