Prayer time 10 June 2026
Prayer and the senses
What do you see?
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
Kia ora koutou, welcome everybody. We are here simply, as always, to pray. All prayers and all pray-ers are welcome. Come to this place to pray, to remember who you are and to whom you are always connected, and to sit and rest in the knowledge that your prayers are heard. You are in the presence of God right where you are. God is with you, you are not alone, and your prayers matter.
The working title for our prayer tonight is Prayer and the Senses. Bring all your prayers: the people you carry, the conditions and situations on your heart, and your prayers of thanksgiving, your joy, your ease. All of it. Bring it in.
Tonight we bring our attention to this: our whole body is at prayer. We are not disembodied intellects presenting petitions to a distant God. We are sensing creatures, meeting a God who is already here. Every faculty we have: sight, sound, touch, taste, the body's quiet knowing. All of it is at work in this room. We pray as we are.
Prayer is the fullest use of every sense we have.
The power of the month in Unity this June is imagination. The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa has written on how we experience space, and how imaginative thought is stirred by dim light, by shadow, by the edge of what we cannot see clearly. It is not by full illumination that we pray. We pray even in the dimness. We pray in the almost-visible. We pray in the invisible. That is what we are doing tonight.
Haere mai, welcome. My name is Jacinda. I am simply your host. Let us now relax.
Relaxation
Take your attention to the room you are in. The space. The prayer cave or the closet. What part of the room are you in? What chair or cushion? What is the light like right where you are? Too bright? Adjust until it is a little softer. Are you near a window? Are you cold? What can you hear?
Just notice the room. You have chosen this space and you are here. Let your body, in a full sweep top to toe, give itself to this room. Say something in your mind like: I am here. I am here to pray. I settle and I relax.
Wriggle whatever needs to wriggle. Find your comfortable prayer position. A sweep from the crown of the head, the shoulders, the jaw. This is where prayer begins. In the body, in this room, in this moment.
We breathe naturally, gently, easily. Here we are, alone yet among others. Permission to close your eyelids, and let the room and your body's response to it hold you now in prayer.
[Silence]
Concentration
Bring your attention now to all that is on your heart. Name your prayers. See the people you love. See the situations that need your prayer. See your circumstances. Whatever of your life is asking to be held tonight, bring it into the room with you. Call your people by name in your mind now.
This is the first movement of prayer: we look at what is. We do not look away. We do not rush past it. We name it.
The Japanese art of the tea ceremony begins with a question. The host asks: what is near? What is distant? What is present? What is absent? This is very much a Unity tradition as well. What do you know to be true? And what do you hold in faith, not yet seen but sensed?
Faith, as the writer of Hebrews tells us:
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Hebrews 11:1, King James Version.
See your concerns. See your people. See what is missing and what you already have. Now hold it in the light of faith, not the light of certainty but of substance: this is real, even though it is not yet in my hands.
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
Psalm 23:1–2, King James Version.
The shepherd is the divine intelligence within me that knows the way, that finds the sustenance, that leads me to the still place inside. I shall not want. Green pastures and still waters are states of consciousness, and I am being led there now.
Now comes the second movement: we release the demand for full clarity. Open your hands in prayer. Flutter your eyes gently behind your eyelids. The answers to your prayers are not yet fully in view. And that is all right. Faith is evidence of things not yet seen.
Pallasmaa writes:
In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocused gaze.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses.
Soften your gaze, gently. What you are releasing is not the prayer. You have already named that clearly. What you are releasing is the demand that the answer must appear right now, fully formed, in the terms you have specified. The unfocused eye is the eye that has stopped insisting. It has stopped gripping. And what is absent from your vision is not absent from God.
[Silence]
Before it is fully formed in you, it is fully known in God.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
Psalm 139:4, NRSV.
[Silence]
The divine Mind that already holds your prayers in full. That Mind is not waiting for the right formulation from you. It is not withheld until you achieve the correct level of faith. As Harriet Emilie Cady wrote: God is present where we are. The question is never whether God knows. The question is only whether we are willing to be still enough to receive.
Any anxiety in these prayers, any striving or struggle: we lay it aside now, and we come to our time of meditation.
Meditation
Pallasmaa has observed that the human eye is most perfectly tuned for twilight rather than bright daylight. The eye that grasps and measures belongs to the day. The eye that receives belongs to the threshold.
Behind your eyelids, allow yourself to rest in this in-between space. Not quite dark. Not quite light. The threshold.
Mist and twilight awaken the imagination by making visual images unclear and ambiguous; a Chinese painting of a foggy mountain landscape, or the raked sand garden of Ryoan-ji, give rise to an unfocused way of looking, evoking a trance-like, meditative state. The absent-minded gaze penetrates the surface of the physical image and focuses in infinity.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses.
What Pallasmaa is describing, the Christian contemplatives have always known: the grasping eye, the eye that demands proof, that counts and measures, closes down in prayer. The receiving eye opens. Meister Eckhart called it Abgeschiedenheit: detachment, release, the interior stillness that makes space for God to act. Not passivity but attentiveness. Not emptiness but availability.
In this time of meditation, let your absent-minded gaze penetrate the surface of things, and focus in infinity. The intimate quality of this dim, interior prayer holds what the bright efficiency of daily life cannot. This is where the vessel of the soul is refilled.
Be still and know that I am God, in the interior life of your soul.
Embrace the quiet. The low light behind your eyelids. Withdraw to the silence. We are at the threshold.
[Ambience: Ocean Fal-Cav, original composition, permission granted]
Realisation
Dear ones, come gently back. Feel the space around you on your skin. Reconnect with your fingers and toes. Bring to mind what your unfocused gaze allowed you to see. What knowing was there for you in the dim?
The senses are not a doorway to the holy. They are where the holy is already met.
I release the demand that my prayers must appear clear, complete, and confirmed.
My faith is the substance of what I cannot yet see. That substance is real, and it is enough.
I release the grip of the eye that must measure and count.
My unfocused gaze reaches into the infinite. What is absent from my vision is present to the God in whom I live and move and have my being.
Let us affirm together:
I name what I carry, and I bring it before God. It is fully known.
I release the demand for certainty. My prayers breathe in the dim light.
I am seen. I am known. I am loved, in the twilight and in the full light both.
My senses are the instruments of encounter. Right here, in this body, in this room, I meet God.
Before a word is on my lips, it is fully known. I let prayer form without forcing it.
[Silence: minimum 45 seconds]
Appreciation
Bring all your senses back into this room.
We give thanks for this moment. For this room and every person in it. For what has shifted inside, and for this body that prays. The senses that are the very instruments of the holy.
We give thanks for dim light. For twilight. For shadow. For the threshold between what is seen and what is not yet seen. We give thanks for all the spaces in our lives we can withdraw to, and we remember those the world over who seek a refuge in prayer.
We bless all in this community, and we bless all who seek the stillness tonight.
We give thanks for the unfocused gaze we carry with us now into the week. It is not a diminished state. It is the state of availability: the eye that has stopped insisting, and begun receiving.
We give thanks for divine law, divine presence, divine mind, the One who penetrates the surface of things seen and finds the infinite beyond.
James Dillet Freeman:
The Light of God surrounds you.
The Love of God enfolds you.
The Power of God protects you.
The Presence of God watches over you.
Wherever I am, God is.
In God we live, and move, and have our being.
James Dillet Freeman, ‘Prayer of Protection,’ Unity School of Christianity, 1947.
Tihei mauri ora, dear ones. Slip away into the night, and carry that unfocused gaze with you into tomorrow.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ