One reason I pray is that it gives me a time of stillness in an otherwise ever turning world.
A time to stop and be myself.
To be as honest with myself and with God as I can be.
Stasis. To be still.
It allows me to reconnect to my values and purpose and to reassess.
Bible reading and liturgy help to create that still space.
At times that stillness becomes ecstasy. From the Greek, ‘ek’ – outside and ‘stasis’ – standing still. Ecstasy is not the opposite of stasis, it is a development of it. It is not a return to the business of the world, it is a place revealed through the stillness.
I suspect most people, religious or not, can understand the value of prayer in terms of being still, it is like ‘Mindfullness’.
Ecstasy is something else.
Something unreasonable. Something that words are ultimately inadequate to explain; music gets closer than words.
In prayer there are times when I feel embraced by love and delight. The physical reality of time and place is still there but fades in the light of eternity.
I have not gone anywhere and neither has anywhere come to me, my time and place have been transfigured. I want to sing and dance and sometimes I do.
This ecstasy is nothing I do, it happens to me, I just have to turn up. It feels like a gift.
God is always present. The contrast of light and dark, chiaroscuro, can help us to understand this.
So I pray to be still and to be moved.
As have countless thousands of people through all human existence.
*The picture is me on the way to Evening prayer with the sunlight streaming low through the West Window. I thought it rather fitted the text above in a naive symbolism sort of way.
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