Prayer time 1 July 2026
Those who stayed
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
Welcome. Good to be here with you tonight.
We are in the second week of a four-week series of prayer called Going Through. Last week we prayed with the oldest prayers of the tradition, and we found that surrender in prayer has an important role to play. Surrender is the giving of our full attention to God, and the withdrawal of it from the fight against what is. This is most definitely not surrender as in resignation.
Tonight we go one layer deeper. Our theme tonight is endurance. So praying from surrender, God alone suffices, of last week, to tonight praying in mindful endurance.
Endurance is not the same as coping. Coping manages the surface. Endurance goes all the way down. It is what happens in the seed underground in winter; the seed isn’t passive there, but doing the slow interior work that spring reveals. The mystics, as well as desert fathers and mothers, who prayed from inside periods of long darkness, weren’t enduring despite their faith. They were enduring as their faith. The prayer and the staying were the same act.
I am a distance runner, so I have zero romance around this word. Courtney Dauwalter, one of the great ultra-runners of our time, talks about endurance as entering the pain cave. That is exactly right. There is no glamour in it. You go in, and you stay.
And this is what I love about us being here on a Wednesday night: showing up is itself the act of staying. Even when we are not sure our prayers are heard. Even when we would rather not show up but instead be crying into our cup of herbal tea.
A reminder friends, that we do not offer spiritual bypassing here. We lean on Truth Principles, affirming God’s presence and goodness even inside the hard thing. We swap the trouble not for a pretence that it isn’t there, but for the deeper truth that God is there too.
So, let us pray.
Relaxation
Original Prayer: Hildegard of Bingen, Prayer to the Holy Spirit.
Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179. Abbess, mystic, composer, theologian. From her visionary writings, Scivias, c.1151, and associated texts.
We’ll take a moment to relax and settle where we are.
Let the breath slow. Let the face soften. You have been carrying things all day. Bring them in, and then let them down. One breath, slow and full. Let it out. That is the whole instruction.
Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess, a composer, a visionary. She wrote in the twelfth century from inside a life of complete discipline. Charles Fillmore describes the Holy Spirit as the executive power of God, not an idea but God actually doing things. God dissolving the seed coat. God pushing the first root down in the dark. Hildegard knew this not as theology but as daily experience. Let us pray with her words:
THE ORIGINAL
Holy Spirit,
making life alive,
moving in all things,
root of all created being,
cleansing the cosmos of every impurity,
effacing guilt,
anointing wounds.
You are lustrous and praiseworthy life.
You waken and re-waken everything that is.
Hildegard of Bingen, 1098–1179; from De Spiritu Sancto, in her visionary writings
THE UNITY REWORK — Affirmative Poetry
The Spirit that makes life alive
is moving in me now.
In this breath. In this room. In this condition.
I am part of what is being wakened.
The same force that dissolves the seed coat in winter,
that moves the sap before the branch knows spring is coming,
is moving in me now.
I am lustrous and praiseworthy life,
because I am made of it.
Holy Spirit, making life alive, in me, in us, in all living beings.
Here, in this room, and the world over.
Wherever there is a turning to God,
the seed is already breaking open.
Concentration
Original Prayer: Thomas à Kempis, c.1380–1471. The Imitation of Christ, c.1420, Book III, Chapter 54.
Concentration asks us to turn. Not to resolve. To turn.
Thomas à Kempis spent decades in a monastery where the walls never changed and the bells rang at the same hours year after year. He did not pray for rescue. He prayed for accurate vision, to see what is real, to love what is permanent, to stop being deceived by what is merely loud.
Lord God, we gather what we carried in tonight and what we laid down in relaxation. We carry it all into your light. We turn from worry to assurance. We turn from not knowing to the God who knows all things. We share now in a Kempis’s prayer from The Imitation of Christ:
THE ORIGINAL:
Grant me, O Lord, to know what I ought to know,
to love what I ought to love,
to praise what delights Thee most,
to value what is precious in Thy sight,
to hate what is offensive to Thee.
Suffer me not to judge according to the sight of my eyes,
nor to give sentence according to the hearing of the ears of ignorant men;
but to discern with a true judgment between things visible and invisible,
and above all things to be ever seeking after the will of Thy good pleasure.
THE UNITY REWORK — I Am Statements:
Grant me:
I know what I need to know, in this moment, for this moment.
I love what is true.
I value what is permanent.
I praise what is praiseworthy.
I seek the will of the good that is at work in all things, including this.
Suffer me not:
The sight of my eyes is not the full report.
The hearing of my ears is not the final word.
Divine intelligence in me discerns what is real beneath what is visible.
My judgment rises from love, not from fear.
I am still. I am clear. I am guided.
Meditation
Original Text: Meister Eckhart, on the quiet mind.
Meister Eckhart, c.1260–1328. German theologian and mystic. From Sermon XXVII (Walshe translation).
Now we receive.
Eckhart says the problem is not that we cannot find God. The problem is that we cannot stop talking long enough to notice God is already there. A mind that has gone quiet is not an empty mind. It is a mind that has finally stopped generating its own weather. In that stillness, Eckhart says, all things are possible.
Be still. Silence within. No reconstruction, no judgment.
Hear this:
THE ORIGINAL
The most powerful prayer, one wellnigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is, the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible.
What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.
THE UNITY REWORK — Crux Affirmation:
God’s fullness already is.
My stillness does not increase God.
It increases my capacity to move in God.
I bring my full attention to the One
in whom I live and move and have my being.
The quiet mind is already praying.
I have a quiet mind.
All things are possible.
GOD WANTS NOTHING OF ME BUT A PEACEFUL HEART.
Now five minutes of silence. Let the quiet mind be, even partially, yours.
[Silence]
Realisation
Original Text: Anonymous English mystic, 14th century. The Cloud of Unknowing, c.1375.
Now we declare what is true, from inside the dark, the not-knowing, the place of the tired and weary soul where we have remained and listened.
The author of the following text is anonymous. They wrote for a young person beginning the contemplative life, someone who would have to learn to pray without obvious results, without clear answers, without the feeling of progress. Endurance in prayer. All things are possible.
THE ORIGINAL
For of all other creatures and their works, yea, and of the works of God himself, may a man through grace have full knowing, and well can he think of them; but of God himself can no man think. And therefore I would leave all that thing that I can think, and choose to my love that thing that I cannot think. For why? He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never.
THE UNITY REWORK — Affirmative Declarations
We affirm together:
I love what I cannot fully understand.
I do not require complete comprehension before I give my heart.
God is not a problem to be solved. God is a love to be entered.
I enter now.
The not-knowing is not a failure of my faith.
The not-knowing is my honest condition just as I am before the Creator.
And in this honest condition, I come to see what I do know.
I do know that I choose love over explanation.
I do know that I choose presence over understanding.
I do know that I choose to stay.
By love may God be gotten and holden.
I hold on, in love.
I stay.
Appreciation
Original Prayer: Teresa of Avila, 1515–1582. Interior Castle (El Castillo Interior), 1577, Mansion VII.
We close with Teresa of Avila.
THE ORIGINAL
In the centre of the soul there is a room where God dwells, and where the soul that has entered there finds such peace that it is not disturbed by the wars and tempests that rage without. The soul has found its centre, its home.
THE UNITY REWORK — Affirmative Close:
Fillmore says the soul’s upper room, the place of high spiritual aspiration, is where the Holy Spirit descends. Teresa calls it the innermost mansion. The seat of the I AM in you. Where God does not visit but dwells.
You have been in that room tonight. We give thanks.
Thank you that a breath is enough. That an open hand is enough. That the seed does not have to understand the spring to be ready for it.
[Pause. Speak aloud, if you will, one thing you are grateful for tonight.]
Thank you that the Spirit prayed in us when we had no words. That the quiet mind was enough. That endurance is not glamorous, and God meets us in the unglamorous.
[Pause. Speak aloud one person or one situation you are holding in gratitude.]
Thank you that we stayed. That showing up was the prayer. That the room at the centre of the soul was never locked against us.
[Pause. Speak aloud one thing you are taking from this prayer tonight.]
Go from here as someone who knows where home is.
The centre of the sphere is here.
The light of God surrounds us.
The love of God enfolds us.
The power of God protects us.
The presence of God watches over us.
Wherever we are, God is.
James Dillet Freeman, Prayer of Protection, 1947.
Te hei mauri ora.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ