Prayer time 11 March 2026

Now you must do it: I act as spiritual courage

Download a PDF of the prayer script

Orientation

Welcome, everyone. Welcome to Prayer on a Wednesday. My name is Jacinda, and I simply act as your prayer host - as the 'reminder' person - that we pray with ease, and we pray in grace, and that right where we are, God is. And that's it. Today's theme is drawn from a short, fierce little essay by Emmet Fox called ‘Now You Must Do It.’ And from the fifth principle of Unity, which simply says: I act. We're going to explore courage as the natural next breath after prayer. That moment when inner knowing becomes outer movement. Our physical participation in the answers to our own prayers. And so we begin.

Relaxation

Together, let's settle the body first. Find a position where your spine can be both grounded and upright. Let your eyelids close, or simply soften your gaze downward. We breathe naturally, aware that we are here. Our natural rhythm. Awareness of the breath gently passing our nostrils, lungs filling, brain nourished with oxygen, and then the exhale. Sit quietly and softly with this for a moment.

All the things we've brought to prayer today, we've brought along in our wonderful body. A bit of tightness, some agitation, a scratchy neck, pressure behind the eyes. Aren't we clever, arriving here with it all so perfectly packaged! Relax your jaw.

Your shoulders. Let them drop.

Let your hands rest open if that feels right. The gesture of receiving, of readiness. Not grasping. Not bracing. Just open. Breathe into your chest.

And into your belly.

We love to say here in this prayer time that there is nothing to fix, nothing to adjust, nothing to prepare before arriving. Exactly as you were earlier today, you arrive.

And yet, just being here, just these few moments of quiet, is already realigning something. With almost no effort from you at all. Incredible.

Here you are.

Here you are.

Concentration

I want to begin with Emmet Fox. This is from his essay ‘Now You Must Do It.’

The only part of our religion that is real is the part we express in our daily lives. Ideals that we do not act out in practice are mere abstract theories and have no real meaning. Actually, such pretended ideals are a serious detriment, because they drug the soul into a false sense of security. If you want to receive any benefit from your religion you must practice it, and the place to practice it is right here where you are, and the time to do it is now. Divine Love is the only real power. If you can realise this fact even dimly it will begin to heal and harmonise every condition in your life within a few hours. The way to realise this fact is to express it in every word you speak, in every business transaction, in every social activity, and in every phase of your life. Knead love into the bread you bake; wrap strength and courage in the parcel you tie for the woman with the weary face; hand trust and candor with the coin you pay to the man with the suspicious eyes. This is beautifully said, and it sums up the Practice of the Presence of God.

Now I want to offer you a single image alongside those words. In Paul's letter to the Ephesians, the word most translations render as 'handiwork' is, in Greek, poiema - the root of our word: poem. ‘For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.’ (Ephesians 2:10, NRSV)

We are God's poem. Already complete. Already carrying a meaning only it can carry. If every person is God's poem - every person, without exception - then courage in prayer is not only about our own unlaunched plans. It is about praying into the hardest places. Those calling for war this week. Those making decisions we find frightening. The teaching of the Christ within me is that I see the Christ within you. Not as comfort. As fact. Human error can obscure a poem. It cannot destroy it. Hold that.

And now, before we go into silence, I want to read you a poem. It belongs here tonight. Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Oliver wrote that in 1986. Fox wrote his essay decades earlier. They are saying the same thing: that we are already in the right place. And we are already held in the hand of the Divine. The soft animal of our body, the poem that God composed, the love expressed through every ordinary act - it is already enough. It has always been enough. You are enough. I am enough. And - Now - We must do it.

Two more tools before silence: our foundation for action, and the wisdom we engage. In John 14:1, Jesus says: ‘Let not your heart be troubled.’ The Greek word, tarasso, means thrown into disorder, shaken from your centre. He is not saying: pretend you are not afraid. He is saying: remember your foundation. And Chokmah - the Hebrew word translated as Wisdom in Proverbs - is not intellectual knowledge. It is the gut-knowing. The solar plexus knowing. The kind that says this is right before the mind has caught up. You have that wisdom. It is always speaking to us. Will we listen? You are the poem.

Now - into silence.

Meditation

So let's go deeper now, into the ground beneath the call to act. If you are holding something today - a decision, a conversation, a threshold you've been standing at for too long - bring it gently into this stillness. And release it. Lay it down.

Pause

We are simply returning to the ground. The quiet beneath all the noise, all the planning, all the knowing. Breathe.

Pause

Let the breath do its work.

Pause

Let the stillness have you.

Long pause

You are simply becoming still enough to remember what has always been true. Something in you has never been troubled. Something in you knows.

Pause

Rest in that knowing. Breathe.

Pause

We stay here a little longer. And when you are ready, very gently, begin to feel the edges of the room again. The weight of your body in your chair.

Pause

We move, now, into realisation.

Realisation

The denial and affirmation pairs tonight come directly from what Fox names. He names the thing we release first - and then we move into what is true.

I release the belief that an unexpressed ideal is the same as a lived one.

Divine Love, expressed through me now, is the only real power.

Pause

I let go of the comfort of knowing without doing.

The place to practise is right here. The time is now.

Pause

I deny that love is an abstract principle I carry quietly inside.

I now knead love into everything I touch today.

Pause

I release the false security of a religion lived only in my mind.

I act. The word I speak, the work I do, the person I meet — all of it is the Practice of the Presence.

Pause

I deny that fear has the final word.

I act from remembrance.

Pause

And now, together, receiving these as your own truth:

I am God's handiwork, God's living poem. I was made for such a time as this.

Pause

The wisdom I need is not outside me. It comes from within. It rises from the ground of my own being.

Pause

Let not my heart be troubled. The Christ in me knows the way.

Pause

I come as one, and I stand as ten thousand.

Inspired by Maya Angelou:

Pause

I am, therefore I act.

Pause

I move as Spirit moves.

Pause

I act with courage.

I act with love.

I act with the full confidence of one who knows they are held. Pause

And together:

I am both the poem, and the voice that speaks it.

The good work I was made for is already alive in me.

I see the way open before me.

I do not doubt my next step.

Pause

God is the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere — and I am at that centre. Whatever I am called to do, I do not do it alone. I do it from within the infinite.

Now. You must do it.

And you will. Because you already are.

Appreciation

We give thanks, because gratitude is the natural breath of a heart that has remembered. Thank you for the courage that is already in us.

Thank you for the poem we each are.

Thank you for this community - this small, beloved, extraordinary gathering of people who show up on a Wednesday and say: I'm here. I want to go deeper. I want to live from the truth of what I am. That is itself an act of courage. Don't underestimate it.

If something stirred in you today - a nudge, a knowing, a quiet instruction - carry it gently. You don't have to act this second. But don't let it dissolve into the busyness of tomorrow. Write it down.

Sit with it. Trust it.

In the quiet, I am guided. The Christ in me knows the way. I act - with love, with courage, with the full weight of who I am.

Go gently. Go bravely. Tihei mauri ora.

Together:

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ