Published in Spirituality
Vol. 22, January – February 2016, no. 124

What is the source of prayer? Where does it come from? From where does it originate in the human person, in the human experience? What moves us to pray? It might be helpful to imagine where prayer comes from less as a single abode with a single address and more like a neighborhood of houses that are unique yet interrelated in the geography of faith. One of those homes where prayer comes from is human longing.

We can long for most anything and our earthly longings need not always be looked at suspiciously or disapprovingly but rather as allusions to our deeper and deepest yearning. I remember the compassionate and wise way that psychiatrist and spiritual teacher Gerald May handled the issue of young persons exhibiting promiscuous behavior by refuting moralists who quickly and omnisciently labeled it dissolute activity rooted in loose morals suggesting instead that it was often unrecognized and displaced longing for the unitive love only the Divine can give.

Spiritually speaking longing is preverbal, preconceptual, and certainly pretheological. Deeper than cognition, it makes its presence known prior to and beyond the will. It is a movement of the heart, heart here referring to that placeless place at the core of the human person where the truth of our being resides. Longing and be-longing belong together. Longing is what happens when the awakened heart remembers to whom it belongs. So in a sense, prayer is always a homecoming.

To extend the domicile metaphor by imaginal musings, it is as though before we were born we were sung to in the inner sanctum of that divine womb and encircled by the arms of the loving One from whom we came. This experience was so deeply personal and intimate that the song seemed a secret song, one that was less external than internal, as if infused in us by the singer in whose being and beneath whose heart we once floated. The song was not so much heard as absorbed. It was both an experience that evoked a profound sense of belonging and being utterly and uniquely oneself. And if any experience could be called bliss, this was it. Yet, not giddy bliss but a mixture of deep peace and oneness and awe and being known and being held as one who is singularly precious and at all times treasured. It was at once enlivening and calmly contenting, electric with joy yet soothing, passionate and quietly tender, personal yet communal, even cosmic, and always experienced as sheer gift. At its core the song was the transmission of life and an exchange of love that like a felt force was something we were invited to be part of and totally involved in, first having freely received it and then having freely offered it back in return.

Sadly, after we are born and begin to grow up, the song typically grows faint (especially in Western societies) as it is drowned out by other songs and the cacophony of competing noises from the dominant culture. For a time most of us forget the song altogether or confuse it for other songs. But the song refuses to forget us. The song that refuses to forget us is a sacred and subterranean song that continues to sing in us beneath all the circumstantial and self-created dissonance of life until one day we hear a note or maybe a phrase of the original song and we are thrown back to the primordial music and the timeless time when we rocked in the womb of the Divine. That one note, that one phrase, often heard in unsuspecting places and in surprising ways is enough to speed and swell or pierce and stop our hearts with a longing that, like the one longed for, eludes all words, mocks all creeds, and trumps all names.

Be careful not to literalize the metaphor. A man as learned as Nicodemus essentially asked Jesus “but how can I return to my mother’s womb?” The longing, if it is to be as healthy as it is human and holy, is not about recovering our innocence or returning to safety nor is it to be confused with being a puella or puer aeternus (the eternal girl or boy). When the longing makes its presence known its allure is due both to the sweetness of what we once tasted “before we were born” as well as to the bitterness of what we have tasted too often since or to the disappointment of so much that we sampled that was a weak imitation or a poor substitute. The allure of what we tasted and now long for is not that it was candy-coated but that it is true. There are no words and there are many words to describe the heart’s deepest longing. The longing is for that first and final holy communion, for knowing and being known, for being loved and loving, or maybe just to be home.

In the regions of the world where winters can be brutal and whiteouts not uncommon, farmers will tie a rope from the farmhouse to the barn, learning the lesson from one too many casualties who froze to death between the barn and the house in the blizzard. Etymologists suggest that one possible origin of the word religion comes from the Latin word religare which means to bind back or re-connect. The root of the religious impulse is expressed in prayer as that line that returns us to where we are from, connects us to our native home. It is that primal song that we faintly hear and recognize that re-members us to the One from whom we come and long to return to forever.

I think we would do well to listen long and soft enough to catch wind of that inceptive song, to listen long and hard enough to our longing that we might hear what God longs for in and through and for us. I think the longing is our prayer, our life-line.

© 2016. All Rights Reserved. Daniel J. Miller, Ph.D.