Prayer time 13 May 2026
The weaned child
‘I have claimed and quieted my soul.’
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
(Wendell Berry, ‘The Peace of Wild Things,’ Collected Poems 1957–1982, North Point Press, 1985)
The prayer recognises you before you recognise it.
Let us begin.
Relaxation
We’ll take a moment to relax and settle where we are.
We breathe, just keeping the natural rhythm of our breath.
Place your hands open in your lap. Palms up.
These praying hands have prayed before. Let them rest.
Unfarrowed brow.
Firm core, but not stiff.
Let the day settle at the edges.
And a final top to toe sweep, soften and become still in just a breath or two.
Let the shoulders drop. Let the jaw soften. Let the eyelids close if they want to.
[Silence]
The quiet holds you.
And we breathe together.
Concentration
Most of the Psalms are written from inside the asking. Hear me. Help me. Come quickly. Psalm 131 is different. David isn’t asking for anything. He has moved through the asking and found what is underneath it. He writes from that place. Where David went in this psalm is where we are going tonight.
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time on and for evermore.
(Psalm 131, NRSV)
The weaned child.
A child not yet weaned comes to the mother with a need. A reaching.
The weaned child is past that. This child comes for the mother herself. Resting. Present. Just here.
We are dreaming in the language now. Twenty-four weeks of learning how prayer moves, and tonight it moves through us without translation.
For those of you who carry prayers for people you love: your intercession deepens in this ground. Your love for those people deepens in this stillness. The weaned child is still in the mother’s arms. Still close. Still beloved.
A seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother spent forty years at this. His name was Brother Lawrence. He worked in a kitchen. He had bad knees and no formal theological training. He wrote:
I make it my business only to persevere in his holy presence wherein I keep myself by a simple attention and a general fond regard to God — an habitual, silent, and secret conversation of the soul with God.
(Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God, compiled posthumously c.1693)
And again:
The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clutter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess GOD in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the Blessed Sacrament.
A kitchen. Noise and clutter. God, possessed in full tranquillity.
The same thing. Right here.
Meditation
Let us go further in.
Bring the people you are praying for tonight. Hold them in the quiet.
Be still, and know that I am God.
(Psalm 46:10)
[Music — Johann Sebastian Bach, Prelude in C Major, BWV 846, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I. Recording: Glenn Gould, piano. Sony Classical. Prelude only — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIpTAgpabmo]
Come back slowly. Take a few easy breaths. Whatever arrived in the stillness belongs to you. The quiet keeps what it knows.
Realisation
Together now. A denial to clear the mental field, and an affirmation to land the truth. Say these aloud in your space, or speak them quietly in your mind.
I release the thought that my prayers must earn their hearing.
I bring my loved ones into the ground of love. The ground holds them.
I release the sense that I must come to God with the right words or the right level of faith.
The weaned child is in the arms. Already held. Already heard.
And now, what we know:
The quiet knows.
I rest in God’s grace. From this rest, I love.
I am the weaned child and I am at rest.
The Christ in me is already awake, already still, and already the prayer.
Right where I am, God is.
I am both the pray-er, and the prayer.
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)
I rest in God and my love is my prayer.
Appreciation
We give thanks for the weaned child in us.
We give thanks for Wendell Berry, awake in the night, who went to still water and found what was already there.
We give thanks for Brother Lawrence and his kitchen, forty years of simple attention, a life of holy presence.
We give thanks for the silence that held us tonight.
We go out, and we pray for the people we love.
We go out, and we know how to rest.
We pray from that rest.
The rest itself is prayer.
E tō mātou Matua i te rangi,
Kia tapu tōu Ingoa.
Kia tae mai tōu rangatiratanga.
Kia meatia tāu e pai ai
ki runga ki te whenua,
kia rite anō ki tō te rangi.
Hōmai ki a mātou āianei
he taro mā mātou mō tēnei rā.
Murua ō mātou hara,
Me mātou hoki e muru nei
i ō rātou hara ki a mātou.
Āua hoki mātou e kawea kia whakawaia;
Engari whakaorangia mātou i te kino:
Nōu hoki te rangatiratanga, te kaha,
me te korōria,
Āke āke āke. Āmene.
Matiu 6:9-13
For you, dear ones:
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 you are, God is.
(James Dillet Freeman, ‘Prayer for Protection,’ Unity, 1941)
Tihei mauri ora.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ