All that is needed is right under your nose

“[What we seek] is not distant from us nor is it external to us,” taught St. Anthony of Egypt nearly sixteen hundred years ago. “Its realization lies within us and the work is easy if only we want it. The Greeks leave home and cross the seas in order to gain an education, but there is no need for us to go away on account of the Kingdom of God nor need we cross the sea in search of virtue. For the Lord has told us, ‘The kingdom of God is within you.’ All that is needed for goodness is that which is within the human heart”.

The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers, ed. Benedicta Ward

The transformation of your life requires a journey

The transformation of your life, the recovery of prayer and the discovery of all you seek will require a journey. This journey is not from one place to another. Rather, it's a pilgrimage into the deepest places within you where God dwells in fullness.  As scandalous as that sounds, it's a universal truth—all who've sought God and found what they were looking for will tell you that.

I once traveled farther than the Magi traveled in search of all this only to find that what I was looking for was right beneath my nose: close as my next breath, near as the beating of my heart.

Such long distance trips to find God are unnecessary and can even distract you from looking to the only place you’re going to find what you’re looking for: your heart.

Prayer: not some genii's lamp

Prayer is coming home—to God and to ourselves, to heaven and earth and all that fills them. Prayer is waking up to Life itself. It is opening to grace.

But prayer's been so terribly reduced in our day. For most, it's more like rubbing a Genii's lamp than an encounter with the Beloved, whose aim is the glorious transformation of our lives into the fullness of our humanity, which is also the cradle of Divinity: the God who permeates and pervades all creation, even, or more accurately, especially . . . us.

Curved in upon ourselves

Much of our lives are spent curved in upon ourselves—closed up within, and closed down to the Divine. But there comes a time when each human heart receives an invitation to awaken to the Light that radiates from the Center, Source, and Substance of all things—to open what was once closed, to curve outward in a gesture of receptivity, like a chalice awaiting the wine.

Many of us ignore that this summons to come home; we minimize it, deny it, struggle against it.

When we do, we remain restless— vagabonds wandering this earth, searching and searching but never finding . . . until we awaken to the invitation to come home to the Light manifest in Jesus, who is, astonishingly, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, Love who gives life to all, our eternal Home.

Awakening to prayer

Prayer—conscious, intentional, and in the words of St Paul, “unceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5.12)—is the highest expression of our intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. Prayer, when we are awake to it, is life.

When you consciously and intentionally enter into the prayer that is always going on around and within you, you become spiritually active, free, and more fully aware that you are alive to more than your “self-made me” and its many compulsions, anxieties, and obsessions that keep you curved in upon yourself, fallen into the sin that separates you and contracts you and closes you off from the presence of the Beloved who is always near, and whose prayer is always calling you to the friendship that is prayer.