Prayer time 15 July 2026

I return home, I arise today

I shall not be overcome.

Download a PDF of the prayer script

Orientation

Welcome. It's good to be here.

This is the fourth and final week of Going Through. We have prayed about surrender, giving our full attention to God, and withdrawing it from the fight against what is. We have prayed about endurance, the seed underground, doing its interior work. We have prayed about trust, the thing that holds whether or not we can feel it.

Tonight is return.

So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. (Luke 15:20, NRSV)

I want to be careful about this word ‘return’ too. Return is quiet. It is the prodigal son in the far country, who came to himself and remembered where he was from, and turned toward home.

And yet. And yet. As the son turns to return home, the father also turns and runs toward the son. This is the shape of love returning, those wonderful moments when we're really not sure who loved whom first!

We have prayed through the idea of the seed in wintertime allowing the natural process of germination to happen in the dark, underground. And spring is what winter was moving toward, which is what we mean when we pray Returning Home tonight.

Alongside our Scriptures, we have five other prayer voices tonight, I just want to mention them now so they don't feel so clunky when I read them. We have Thomas Merton, St John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila and the old prayer of Irish Patrick 8th Century, breastplate prayer.

Prayers about Returning Home are particularly charming when shown through good company of prayer warriors who have gone before us.

Let us pray.

Relaxation

We'll take a moment to relax and settle where we are. A full body sweep, attentively and consciously allow your body to relax and come to place of stillness. Settle in, get comfortable, like a child nestling in for a good story, comfortable, but alert.

Original Prayer: Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, 1958.

Merton wrote this prayer from genuine uncertainty, unsure of what he was doing or where he was going. He prayed from inside the absence of faith and found it there anyway.

Let it be yours tonight.

THE ORIGINAL

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

THE UNITY REWORK — Affirmative I Am Statements

I trust that I am guided, before I know even which road to take.

The desire to align with the good is itself the alignment.

I have that desire. I desire to return home. That is enough.

I am led by the right road, even when I cannot see it.

I am in transit, carried toward what is next.

I am moving through what feels like the shadow of death.

You are ever with me.

You hold me through whatever is coming.

I trust the God who sees the road I cannot.

I walk forward and I walk home.

Concentration

Original Text: John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul.

We have prayed this prayer of St John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz) before. Charles Fillmore named the power at work in a night like this: Life, the faculty that animates even what looks perfectly still.

What in you is a seed right now, still in the dark, still being prepared?

This is his poem of return, often called a love poem, which it is, and also a prayer about what happens when the dark night ends.

THE ORIGINAL

On a dark night,

Kindled in love with yearnings, oh, happy chance!

I went forth without being observed,

My house being now at rest.

St John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, c.1578; trans. E. Allison Peers.

THE UNITY REWORK — Affirmative Poetry

The night I went through

was the night I was being prepared.

I went forth because the love in me

was stronger than the fear.

My house at rest.

The striving quieted.

The demanding silenced.

And in that quieting,

I found what had been waiting.

Oh, happy chance.

Oh, necessary dark.

Oh, what only the dark could show me.

Meditation

Original Text: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, c.1393, Chapter 86, the final chapter.

This is the third Julian passage across the four-week arc.

Now we go into the silence with this.

This is Julian's final word: her final understanding of what the visions meant.

THE ORIGINAL

Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well. Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore it was shewed? For Love. Thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end.

And I was not taught that love is our Lord's meaning, not twenty years after that time, nor ten, but as it were twenty years and more I was learning it. Knowest thou well what it meaneth? It is Love. Who taught thee it? Love.

THE UNITY REWORK — Crux Affirmation

I have been learning this for a long time.

And I will be learning it for a long time yet.

And the answer is the same.

Love was the meaning.

Love is the meaning.

Love will be the meaning.

I went through the dark and found Love waiting there.

Love was in the dark all along.

I could not see it until I stopped fighting.

Love is our Lord's meaning and that is everything.

Realisation

Original Prayer: Teresa de Ávila, 1515–1582, Nada te turbe.

In week one, this prayer was where we began: words borrowed on faith, before we knew if they would hold. Tonight, after surrender, after staying (endurance), after trust, we know and return. The prayer holds.

THE ORIGINAL

Let nothing disturb you,

let nothing frighten you.

All things pass.

God does not change.

Patience obtains all things.

Whoever has God lacks nothing.

God alone suffices.

THE UNITY REWORK — Full Affirmation Set

I deny that I am disturbed at the level of my true being.

I am the peace that surpasses understanding. This peace is my nature.

I deny that I am frightened by what I cannot control.

The Christ in me is fearless. I rest in that truth now.

I deny that God has changed or moved or withdrawn.

The sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere stays constant. I am held at the centre just as I always have been.

We affirm together:

All things pass.

And yet. And yet. God does not change.

I am in God, and I am of God.

I have come through the winter.

I came to myself.

I turn toward home.

And yet, and yet, the Love that made me was already running.

God alone suffices.

God alone suffices.

God alone suffices.

Appreciation

We close the arc of this prayer series, Going Through, with an invitation to arise.

My beloved speaks and says to me: Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away; for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. (Song of Solomon 2:10–12, NRSV)

Winter and spring are states of consciousness before they are seasons.

Patrick did not coin this word. Arise was already scripture before it was Irish.

Original Prayer: St Patrick's Breastplate, Old Irish, 8th century; trans. Cecil Frances Alexander, 1889.

THE ORIGINAL

I arise today

through the strength of heaven,

the light of the sun,

the radiance of the moon,

the splendour of fire,

the speed of lightning,

the swiftness of wind,

the depth of the sea,

the stability of the earth,

the firmness of rock.

I arise today.

[Silence]

THE UNITY REWORK — Affirmative Close

I arise through the strength of what is real:

the light undimmed,

the depth that stays full,

the stability of the earth that has held my feet through every step of this winter,

the firmness of the rock that has always been underneath my feet.

I arise today.

I arise in love.

I arise in trust.

I arise in the knowledge that I have never been alone and that I am never alone.

And I go back into my life

as someone who went through the winter

and found that the process of life, the nature of what is, sustained me.

I go.

And you, my friends, go.

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.

Tihei mauri ora.

Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ