Most of what passes for prayer is negotiation. We come to God the way we come to a difficult supplier: with a list. A better job. A bigger house. More money. Children who behave. A spouse who cooperates. A diagnosis reversed, a deal closed, a problem made to disappear. We are, without quite admitting it, trying to strike a bargain with the Infinite – you give me these things, and I will believe in you, praise you, and show up on the appropriate days. It is commerce dressed in devotional clothes.
Now let me tell you about a man who prayed very differently.
Ramakrishna, the great Bengali mystic, worshipped the Divine Mother in the form of Kali, whose image stood in the temple where he served as priest. But he was not content, as most of us are, to perform the rituals and go home. He wanted to see her. Not to believe in her, not to be vaguely uplifted by her, but to experience her presence directly, with nothing whatever in between. And this longing grew in him until it became unbearable. One day, in an agony of desire, he seized the ceremonial sword that hung in the temple and resolved to end his life on the spot, that very instant, if the Mother would not reveal herself to him. He was not bargaining. He was staking everything, holding nothing back, demanding the real thing with the whole of his being. And, the accounts tell us, she came.
I am not recommending the sword. I am pointing at the intensity. Ramakrishna wanted the Divine more than he wanted his next breath, and it is that quality of wanting – total, undivided, unremitting – that moves mountains. Most of us never come close to it, and the reason is simple and a little uncomfortable: we are pouring that intensity elsewhere. We want money like that. We want status like that. We want to win like that. We worship, with our whole undivided hearts, the small gods of the marketplace – and then we offer the true one a tepid, distracted, list-in-hand devotion, and wonder why nothing happens.
So if the transactional prayer is the wrong prayer, what is the right one? I will give it to you, and you may find it startling in its simplicity. The only thing you are permitted to ask is this: let me, at all times and in all places, feel your presence in my heart. That is all. Not give me, not fix, not arrange – simply, let me feel your nearness to me. And then whatever happens, happens, and it is all right, because you already have what you actually wanted, which was never the bigger house at all.
When you pray in that way – asking for nothing but the presence, and asking for it with something approaching Ramakrishna’s intensity – you will find that the whole transaction has quietly dissolved. There is no longer a supplicant and a supplier haggling over goods. There is only the presence, which is what you were homesick for the entire time, behind every item on every list you ever carried in.
The Lesson. Most prayer is bargaining – asking God to deliver the things we want. Take all of that out. The only prayer worth making is to feel the presence, at all times and in all places, and to let everything else be as it will. What moves the Infinite is not the cleverness of the request but the intensity of the longing – and we lack that intensity only because we have spent it worshipping money, status, and power instead.
Peace!
