The Language without Words

The word spoken aloud is a powerful thing: it rends the silence to affirm our faith, lets our natural breath mix with breath given to us by the Holy Spirit, and catches up our hearts like iron filings to a magnet so that we can be led by the speaker. From what I've seen and heard of prayer, though -- and granted, that is yet VERY little -- people seem to be limited to praying by speaking aloud, as I've not yet seen the topic introduced of which I'm going to tell you here.

When I'm laying-on-of-hands-praying for someone else (outside my family, which I've not done often), I speak aloud just to show the person I'm praying for where my mind is, but when praying very deeply for someone I tend to fall into the Language without Words. However, the last time I did that, with a close friend, after about five seconds I was whomped across the consciousness by the awkwardness factor emanating from him just skyrocketing, so I stopped after a few more desperate seconds. I did warn him first that I was going to go into silent prayer, asked him if it was okay and he agreed, but all the same, it fizzled miserably.

When I'm praying for my spouse (the only current recipient of my laying-on-of-hands-prayers), free from awkwardness, I just tend to slide into this silent language right away. I'll try here to describe what it's like.

It's not a meditative state, as is the state of silent prayer into which I sometimes drift when praying alone (against the deepest versions of which I have to guard lest I take an unscheduled snooze), but rather this begins as a seeking state. I seek the other person and, if there's no place else to start, I begin by rolling my inner eye across my own experiences with the person and who I see the person to be. Then I can kinda launch that inner eye into the other person, as if I'm stepping into a new room in which I've never been before. (And it is a new room every time, as no one is exactly the same person from one moment to the next -- and even if it's much the same, there's the need to reacquaint myself freshly each visit.) I'll hear the electric crackling sound of a worried mind, feel the undertow of an aching heart, and can almost taste the hydrochloric acid mix responsible for that gastritis. I look around the room in all the different directions I can find, and if I'm looking for something specific, I can zoom over there right away; if I'm praying for the person as a whole, I just try to soak up that whole room at once into my consciousness.

Then I stretch out my hand so it's HUGE (a little like the much-distorted homunculus who "lives" in the sensory part of the brain, but with a smaller thumb), and for each place in the person there's a fingertip to rest upon it (even parts that aren't distressed), and then I take the other hand and reach for God. I'll say a little prayer that my mind might be filled with Light and sanctified to serve as a right and true gateway through which the Holy Spirit might manifest.

Then I begin to pray, still without words, but now in a state of rest rather than of seeking. And, when need be, I "refresh" -- I F5 my location, as it were -- among the phases of seeking, whichever of them needs strengthening. Sometimes an actual word will say itself in there (and I'm sure sometimes it comes out of me as a whisper): just the biggies, like Father and Love and stuff like that.

Sometimes I don't even get this far because it takes a little time for all this to happen, although it hardly seems to take any time from my own perspective; I'm always mildly annoyed when the person is ready to move on from being prayed for because dangit I'm not done yet! Wait! Arrgh! In fact, I don't know whether I can remember a time when I ever actually finished praying for someone; I always have to wind myself down when I feel them begin to come up for air (but, man, we can breathe down here, don't you see? Don't you get it? Arrgh!).

Yeah, it's like we're underwater. Yeah, I know it feels weird. Yeah, I know things are packed closer here and there's a heaviness about it. Yeah, I know it can be scary if you worry about running out of air. But the breath we receive is faith happening down here. We can breathe down here. We can breathe.


I'll end with a the first verse of a hymn I always especially liked in church, from when I was a child:

Breathe on me, breath of God
Fill me with life anew
That I might love as Thou dost love
And do what Thou would'st do

Many thanks to Jeff for verse additions and some very sound advice (comment)!


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