Prayer as Energy

Seeing diversity as divinity being distributed all around us, can be extremely helpful in understanding the nature of intercessory prayer.

When we ask someone to pray for us or we offer to pray for someone else, what does that mean? How does that work? Traditionally, it is understood as praying to a “God up in the heavens” for a special blessing. This understanding generates a series of questions such as why some prayers are answered, and some are not? Whose prayers are heard, and whose are unheard? What happens to those for whom nobody prays? Why did someone for whom many prayers were offered died and another one for whom no prayers were offered, was healed?

What if all the blessings we ever need are already granted and they are all around us for us to experience? A horizontal understanding of prayer as opposed to the traditionally vertical understanding can be very helpful. It is predicated on the notion that God is within us and as us, rather than above us and separate from us.

Everything around us is energy. There is an energy flow between you and everything around you such as plants, animals, humans, and all that exists in the entire universe. When you stand in front of a person, there is an invisible, yet real, energy movement between the two of you. Your moving lungs, beating heart and flowing blood create a physical, palpable energy field along with the emotional energy field of your feelings and emotions.

If you are relaxed and your feelings are loving, compassionate and non-judgmental, you will receive positive energy from your environment. If you are all tensed up and your thoughts are tinged with anxiety, fear, and prejudice, you are likely to receive a negative energy flow from your environment.

Do you want blessings from God? Seek them from everyone and everything around you. For this to work, you must first believe that the source of your blessings is scattered all around you. Without such a belief, you are unlikely to look for it or expect it from your surroundings. Poet Chelan Harkin advises us to pray regardless of your belief in God:

Everything in the Universe

is energetically linked,

and like an invisible root system,

information and resources

are shared,

and words are the ambassadors

of what we think and feel

to the Universe’s Great Ears

that exist everywhere.

Christian prayers usually end with a phrase, “we make these prayers, through Christ our Lord” — the understanding being that prayers are made through Christ and received through Christ. The concept of divinity as distributed around us is the same as the concept of the Universal Christ, manifested in the universe.

So, blessings come to us not from an imaginary connection to an invisible God, who is separate from us, but through the real bonding with the universe around us.

God’s blessings are not favors from the sky, dropped on you when you say some magical prayers. They come to you from everyone and everything around you that are soaked in divinity. In her poem I no Longer Pray, Chelan Harkin gives poetic expression to this truth:

I no longer pray as I was taught

but as the stars crawl

onto my lap like soft animals at nighttime

and God tucks my hair behind my ears

with the gentle fingers of her wind

and a new intimacy is uncovered in everything,

perhaps it’s that I’m finally learning

how to pray.

Embracing diversity is the most direct, concrete, and immediate path to experiencing the divine — which is the ultimate path to self-realization and fulfillment.