Prayer time 1 April 2026
We are the prayer
On any ordinary Wednesday evening, before you found the right words for it, something in you was already at prayer. It has been going all day.
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
My name is Jacinda. I am your prayer host tonight. Welcome to Prayer on a Wednesday. Thank you for being here. It is not lost on me, and it is never lost on me, the freedom we have to gather in a public, open forum and bring the full weight of our longing to pray. As we meet tonight, we stand on the shoulders of praying people through all the generations. People who discovered what we are discovering together: that prayer is not something we do at a distance from God, across some gap we have to close. Prayer is what we are, when we know who we are.
A note: we are recording audio this evening, no visuals, just voices. So your mic is on mute, and you are entirely free to pray aloud in your own space. We would love that for you. All prayers and all pray-ers welcome.
There are no right or wrong prayers here. We practise the five phases of Unity prayer together: relaxation, concentration, meditation, realisation, and appreciation.
Right where we are, God is. And so we begin
Relaxation
We'll take a moment to relax and settle where we are. Notice the breath that is already moving. Look at that. Nobody pressed start. Nobody sent a reminder. The breath has simply been breathing us all day, through every meeting, every difficult conversation, every moment of this full week. Our breath is without effort, and it doesn't complain. Who knew being alive could feel this low maintenance?
And we settle into that for a moment. The simple, astonishing fact of being breathed. Now, bring it all in with you. The week, everything in it. The things filling your mind, the things filling your heart. The things making your muscles ache. The things demanding you absorb exponential amounts of new information just to know what to put in a lunchbox tomorrow. All of it. Gather it up. You don't have to leave any of it at the door. Have you got it all? Good.
Now let's give our attention to the body, because as the saying goes, the body keeps the score. Notice the jaw. Is it holding something? Let it soften.
Pause.
Notice the shoulders, still carrying the afternoon? Let them drop, just a little.
Pause.
Notice the hands. Open them if they're closed.
Pause.
Notice the place behind the eyes, the quiet hum of the thinking mind, still processing, still composing. You don't have to stop it. Just notice it. See a volume knob. Turn it down to zero.
Ah, silence.
Notice the chest. The breath arriving there, and leaving. Arriving again.
Pause.
The body has been keeping the score all week. For the next thirty minutes, no active score keeping. We rest and relax now. We are settling into what has been here the whole time.
Concentration
Over the past several weeks, something has been building in this community. We have been learning to live from the field, Rumi's field, the ground that exists beyond winning and losing, enough and not enough.
Call 16 said: the non-dual mind acts from what it knows.
Call 17 said: it found the field that exists beyond the score, and released the outcome into it.
Call 18 said: it wakes on an ordinary morning and finds the field already present, before the first thought arrives.
And Call 18 sent us away with these words: Go, from the ground of knowing this to be so. So. Where have you been since then?
Pause.
Sometimes it looks like this:
A flash at the corner of the eye.
A shoot of colour in a greyscale moment. The thought that was moving toward judgment, about the person in front of you, the situation you've been watching, yourself in the mirror, and then, almost before you chose it, almost before the mind had time to form an opinion about whether you were being sufficiently spiritual, the thought turned. Toward blessing. Toward the truth beneath the appearance.
That turn. That tiny, almost-indiscernible shift from there to the field. That is prayer. Not the sustained state. Not the Wednesday evening Zoom. That flash. That ordinary Tuesday moment. That is the thing itself. Have you noticed that this week? The thought that almost went one way, and went another instead?
Pause.
And when it happened, did it feel like discipline? Or did it feel like something recognising itself?
Hear now the words of Paul, written to the church at Thessalonica:
Pray without ceasing.
What if Paul is not setting a standard? What if he is pointing at a fact? The life of God in you has never stopped praying. Not once. Not on your hardest day. Not in your most distracted hour. Not in the minutes you are least proud of. Continuously. Without ceasing. You did not start it. You cannot stop it.
All Paul is saying is: look. Look at what is already happening in you. To catch the flicker at the corner of the eye and say: yes. I see it. I know what that is. That is the whole practice. That is all it has ever been.
In Exodus 3:14, Moses asks who is speaking from the burning bush. The answer is not a description of God's qualities. It is a disclosure of nature:
I AM THAT I AM.
The name is presence itself. Before the labels, before the categories, before the judgments we apply to manage our experience of things. When Jesus takes that name, I am the way, I am the vine, I am the resurrection, he is not making an exclusive claim.
Eric Butterworth, whose voice has accompanied this community all season, makes the great argument: Jesus is not the exception. He is the example. The demonstration of what a human life looks like when the I AM is no longer crowded out by the smaller, frightened self that thinks it has to manage everything alone.
And this is who we are returning to tonight. Not a concept. Not a practice. We are returning to the living I AM. The life that has no edge. The sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. We are returning to the ground of our own being, which turns out, always, to be God. This is what prayer is. This is what it has always been.
The Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Romans 8:26
The Spirit is not praying for you from somewhere outside. It is praying as you, beneath the level of conscious thought. Right now, in this room, on this Wednesday evening, beneath everything your mind is processing and composing and worrying about, something is at prayer. It has been at prayer all day. It was at prayer before you opened your eyes this morning. You did not start it. You cannot stop it. You are it.
Take this home tonight:
the Spirit has been interceding in you, as you, all week.
You did not miss the prayer. You were the prayer. And so we pray now, with that knowing.
From Charles Fillmore, Keep a True Lent, Unity School of Christianity:
The resurrection is the raising up of the whole man — spirit, soul, and body — into the Christ consciousness of life and wholeness. Every time we rise to the realization of eternal, indwelling life, making union with the Father-Mind, the resurrection of Jesus takes place within us. All thoughts of limitation and inevitable obedience to material law are left in the tomb of materiality. Today the light of Truth is illumining my mind, and I rise up in the majesty of my divine sonship and proclaim myself to be the child of the Most High, free from all belief in sin, sickness, and death.
From Charles Fillmore and Cora Fillmore, Teach Us to Pray, Unity Classic Library:
I am free, and the inspiration of Spirit is poured into my soul. I am quickened by Spirit, and the flesh is obedient. I rejoice and am glad because the joy of Christ is mine. I am filled with Spirit energy, and every cell in my organism is alight with God. I am the resurrection and the life.
A prayer in the spirit of Joseph Murphy's prayers, from The Power of Your Subconscious Mind:
Infinite intelligence within me knows the answer. My subconscious mind is always working for my highest good. I am guided by divine intelligence in all I do. I now relax and let go, and trust the deeper knowing that is already at work.
The pray-er and the prayer. We have been saying this since Call 1. Tonight we say it again, and we mean something deeper by it. We are not people who maintain a prayer practice. We are the praying life of God, moving through the world.
I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.
John 14:20
That is the structure of things. We pray from inside it.
Meditation
Allow me to lead you in a brief visual meditation. It will carry us gently through to our three minutes of stillness and silence.
It is early autumn in Aotearoa. April. The light is changing. The sun arrives a little later in the morning now, and leaves a little sooner, and in the leaving it turns everything gold, rather than the bright pinks and coral of a summer sunset.
Do you have a favourite place of bush or forest near your home, or somewhere you go on holiday? Imagine you are taking the soft forest floor path into that bush. I'll use the images of the South Island places I know and love.
Kānuka and mānuka on the slopes above you, their small white flowers long gone, their fine leaves silver-grey in the clear autumn light. The air has that April quality now, cool at the edges, still warm at the centre, carrying the faint smell of earth after a light rain. Somewhere close, a pīwakawaka, a fantail, is making its rounds.
The pīwakawaka loves to flit alongside you as you walk. Our sudden appearance was like we were their destination all along. It darts and pivots through the lower branches, wing and air and this particular second, and the next one, and the next. Further up the slope, a tūī has found the kōwhai. You hear it before you see it, that particular mix of bell and rasp, liquid and percussive, sounding like it is making up its own language as it goes. Then silence.
The light is going now. The hills ahead of you are going amber, then deep gold, then the particular purple-brown of a New Zealand dusk that no paint has ever quite managed to capture. The sky above them is still pale. One star, very faint, at the edge of the visible.
The pīwakawaka moves through the darkening air.
The kōwhai holds its gold.
The light completes itself.
We settle in quiet, darkness enfolding us.
And underneath all of it, the bird, the tree, the hill, the first star, something is at prayer. Creation doing what it has always done. Praying by being entirely what it is.
Realisation
Denial and Affirmation Pairs
Denial and Affirmation Pairs In the Unity tradition of Charles Fillmore and H. Emilie Cady: the denial clears the mental field. The affirmation declares the truth of God.
I release the belief that prayer is something I maintain through effort.
The life of God in me has never ceased. I am already the prayer.
I release the claim that the I AM in me is separate from its Source.
Right where I am, God is. I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.
I release the belief that I have to find my way back to God.
God is the ground I am standing on, and I never leave.
Affirmations — together:
I am both the pray-er and the prayer. I let my light shine.
The I AM in me has never left the field. I live from that ground.
God's life in me has never stopped. I am already the prayer.
The Spirit intercedes in me, as me, much deeper even than my thoughts and my words.
I catch the flicker, I know what it is, I say yes.
In quietness and confidence is my strength.
Divine Presence is my centre. Divine Wisdom orders my steps. Divine Love is all I am.
All shall be well.
And all shall be well.
And all manner of thing shall be well.
Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. c.1395.
God is the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. There is no edge to fall off.
The I AM that you are is held in a sphere that has no circumference.
You are not maintaining a prayer life. You are a prayer life, already and always.
Appreciation
We close in gratitude.
For the field that was already there this morning.
For the flash of colour at the corner of the eye.
For the turn, small, almost-indiscernible, real, from judgment to blessing.
For the Spirit that has been at prayer in us, as us, all week long, whether we noticed or not.
For nineteen weeks of returning together, until the returning became the ground.
The person who has been sitting in this field, week after week, praying and releasing and acting and recognising, that person walks differently. Carries differently. Enters a room differently. The room you walk into tomorrow, your desk, your conversation, the difficult situation, the threshold moment, you walk into it as someone sent. As someone who knows what they are.
In quietness and confidence shall be your strength.
Isaiah 30:15
I'm in the flow of life. I am. I am. I am. I am. I'm in the flow of life.
Eric Butterworth
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
Matthew 6:9–13 (NIV)
Prayer of Protection
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 (1941). Unity.
Go now, dear ones. Into the meeting, the conversation, the quiet room, the noisy one. The flash will come again, the shoot of colour in the greyscale moment, the almost-indiscernible turn from judgment toward blessing. When it comes, you will know what it is. You have always known what it is.
Go, as the prayer you already are.
Tihei mauri ora.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ