Prayer time 22 April 2026
What is prayer?
Prayer is in the ordinary. So is heaven.
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
My name is Jacinda. I am your host. Welcome to Prayer on a Wednesday.
All prayers and pray-ers welcome here.
Last Wednesday, we did something we had not done before. We went down into the dark, and we stayed, and we prayed from that place — not for ourselves, necessarily, but for everyone who lives there. The ones who cannot feel God’s presence. Who cry in the shower. Who drive home and cannot remember why. We offered ourselves as pray-ers for the people in the hinterland of the soul.
And then something happened. We came out the other side — not triumphant, not resolved, but alive. We laughed. We talked. We felt like something essential had taken place, right at the edges of our lives and our prayers.
Tonight, we hold one question open. We never try to be tidy prayers here … we just pray with what is, and we acknowledge all our heritage in coming to this time of prayer. And within all of that, we always choose to stay, never judging whatever state we appear in, as good or bad. And last week, we remembered that we can pray right inside any situation. We will pray inside it, and see what the prayer returns.
And so, the question we will pray inside of tonight is this: ‘what is this act — this thing we do, on a Wednesday evening, together?’
What is prayer?
This is our question which we will pray inside of.
So without an answer, or with an answer you favour already, let us enjoy our Unity five steps of prayer. As usual, we will follow a trajectory that begins with relaxation, then concentration, meditation, realisation, and finally appreciation.
The edges of our lives and our prayers had touched.
Let us begin.
Relaxation
And so… our breathing… eyelids… physical body… space around us… and stretch, release, settle.
Let the chair hold your weight. Let your hands find a resting place. Let your face soften — the space between your eyes, your jaw, the set of your shoulders.
So finding stillness — and the silence will follow — bring our question in and let it curl up on your lap. Hello question — what is prayer?
So our settled, still, relaxed selves now open to this question.
We come in faith to pray, and we have acknowledged we carry this question — what is prayer? … and so we relax and instead of shutting out the world, our focus is actually to remain open. For we come to God in prayer to remember. Perhaps the answer will gently find us, as answers tend to, when we stop pursuing them.
And now, let the day go. Not forever — it will be there when you return. The jobs. The laptop and comms. The lists. The five books half started and the lecture pad full of today’s brilliant ideas. Set it all at the edge of the room.
Bring your full self here. The curious self. The self that showed up because you love this Wednesday evening of collective prayer together.
Breathing naturally, and allowing yourself to breathe slower because you can. Let the silence in this room be generous. Let the distance between you and everyone else on this call be, for a moment, no distance at all.
We are gathered and that is enough to begin.
Concentration
I have for our concentration time a scripture, a couple of definitions — one from within Unity, and one from philosophy — and a poem with some tremendous imagery that holds a whole lot of keys for us. Here we go.
We begin tonight with a scripture, where Paul writes to a community of prayers.
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. (Romans 8:26, NRSV)
We do not know how to pray as we ought.
Paul. Writing to pray-ers. Saying: we don’t actually know what we are doing.
I find this at once extraordinary (I really mean quite funny) and I find it also quite relaxing (or a relief, is better said). If Paul didn’t know how to pray as he ought — if the Spirit had to step in, had to intercede with sighs too deep for words — then perhaps our own uncertainty about this act is not a problem to be solved. Perhaps the not-knowing is, itself, a kind of beginning.
The not-knowing is, itself, a kind of beginning.
Not-knowing is often a place where our prayers begin.
Simone Weil was a French philosopher and mystic who died in 1943 at thirty-four. She wrote this, and I believe it is one of the most useful things ever said about prayer:
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
(Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1952)
Absolutely unmixed attention. The full self, turned without reservation toward what is real. Every part of the awareness, present, here.
That, Weil says, is prayer.
Which means what we did last Wednesday — the full attention given to people in the darkest place — that was prayer in its most complete form. The attention was real. The giving of it was real. Something was received, even by those who will never know our names.
In 1633, an English priest named George Herbert published a collection of sacred poems. One was titled simply ‘Prayer.’ It is fourteen lines long, yet it doesn’t define prayer, as one might think it would being titled ‘Prayer.’ I’m going to read this poem to you in a moment — as a heads up, it offers twenty-six different images, and no main verb, not a single complete sentence — just this long, restless, exhilarated list. It is as though Herbert knew that any single definition would be too small to hold it.
Listen as I read ‘Prayer’ to you. (And don’t worry about holding on to anything, it’s such rich imagery you may want to grasp, and leave the moment of listening…but you can come back to the written word later…just let these images come to you — holding our question in prayer — what is prayer?)
Prayer
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
(George Herbert, ‘Prayer (I),’ The Temple, Cambridge, 1633)
Two images I want to hold up before we move on.
God’s breath in man returning to his birth. When you pray, Herbert says, you are not sending something out into the distance. You are returning something home. The breath that God breathed into the first human being — prayer is that breath, finding its way back to its source. Every exhale, a homecoming. Think on that moment — every exhale, every cycle of breath, a returning to home. Last week we had St John of the Cross with his ‘the house is at rest,’ and the soul slipping away in disguise. This week, we add the idea that our very breath returns us to ‘home.’
And this one, it’s something we’ve been noticing through recent weeks in prayer, but here said in another way: Heaven in ordinary. Heaven found exactly in the ordinary. Just a few hours earlier, we had ‘Wednesday afternoon.’ We are hearing in this prayer, that Wednesday afternoon is Heaven. Our New Zealand tamariki and rangatahi returning to school this past Monday was a prayer. How about our second cup of coffee that we let get cold this morning? Or, heaven in the missed life insurance premium? Heaven in pest control. Heaven in raking leaves and digging compost. Heaven in ordinary.
God, fully present, in the unremarkable fabric of the day-to-day.
Prayer, it would seem, is right here. Prayer is where you already are.
And the last line, the most quietly extraordinary: Something understood. Prayer is ‘something understood.’ If we bring it to this moment, it’s not the teaching about prayer. So prayer isn’t something explained. Prayer isn’t being good at prayers, or achieving passes or credits in our traditions. Check this out — it’s not something you can relay to anyone else in the same words. It is ‘Something understood’ — between the one who prays and the one who receives the prayer, if those are even two entirely separate things — something passes. Something is known.
What is prayer?
Prayer is God’s breath in us returning to our birth.
Prayer is heaven in the ordinary.
Prayer is something understood.
Now. Let me try, as Herbert tried, to say this in the language of 2026.
What is prayer?
It is older than any word we have for God.
It is the table where everyone finds a seat — the eloquent and the inarticulate, the certain and the completely lost.
It is the soul, struggling into language, then releasing language entirely, and finding that the release is enough.
It is the restless heart, still moving toward something it cannot name.
It is a plumb line dropped into the deep, sounding what cannot be fully sounded.
It is a kind of tune, running under every frequency. Present in the place already, before we turn up. We arrive and tune in.
It is heaven, found exactly in the ordinary.
It is the sound of bells heard somewhere past the edge of what hearing reaches.
It is a country, or a place, we know we have visited, though we cannot find it on any map — yet we recognise it, the moment we arrive, because we have always been there.
Prayer is something understood.
In Discover the Power Within You, Eric Butterworth offers this: the Sanskrit root of the word prayer literally translates as ‘judging oneself to be wondrously made.’ (Eric Butterworth, Discover the Power Within You, Harper & Row, 1968)
Before prayer was petition, before it was technique, before it was theology, before it was our tradition — it appears that prayer was recognition.
The recognition that you are wondrously made. That the life within you is the life of God. That the breath moving through you has always been finding its way home.
Meditation
And now we go still. Let us simply breathe, and be in prayer.
So now, for a few minutes, we give our attention to what is here.
The room. The breath. The presence that is always already here, before we look for it.
Let the silence be generous. You do not have to manufacture anything in this silence. You do not have to feel anything in particular. You do not have to pray correctly. The Spirit, Paul says, is already interceding — with sighs too deep for words, on your behalf, in you, right now.
When you are ready, return slowly. Feel the room around you. Your chair. Feel the ends of your fingertips. The Wednesday evening. Come back gently.
Realisation
Butterworth writes:
In Jesus’ concept, prayer is not for God, but for you. You pray, not to change something in God-Mind, but in your own.
(Eric Butterworth, Discover the Power Within You, Harper & Row, 1968)
Prayer shifts the consciousness that stands between you and the awareness of what is already true. God requires no shifting. The work of prayer happens in you — restoring the awareness that has drifted from its ground.
This is what the Unity Five Steps do. They are not a method of reaching God, who requires no reaching. They are a threshold back into the recognition of what has always been present. Or I quite like to think of the steps more as a slide.
So, our realisations from these ideas on prayer. First, the denial which is the mental release. Then, the thing we know to be truth.
I release the belief that prayer is something I do correctly or incorrectly.
Prayer is the full attention I bring to my ordinary life.
I release the idea that eloquent words, or clever phrasing, are required.
The Spirit intercedes in me, as me, with sighs too deep for words. I am a prayer that is already happening.
I release the sense that God is somewhere I need to travel toward.
God is in the ordinary. God is in our Wednesday afternoon, the unremarkable coffee moments, and in the breath I am taking right now. Prayer is a name for what is already here.
[Pause]
And now we declare what is true:
I am wondrously made. My prayer begins with that recognition.
God’s breath is in me, returning to its source with every exhale.
Though I do not know how to pray as I ought, the Spirit prays in me, in the space that not-knowing opens.
My full attention, given to God, to the world, to the person in front of me, is prayer.
Heaven is in the ordinary. I am standing in it now.
Something is always understood between me and the love that holds me and I do not need to explain it for it to be so.
Prayer is what I am, when I remember who I am.
Appreciation
We give thanks tonight for the question itself. For the question: What is prayer?
For the audacity of asking: what is this thing we do?
We give thanks for George Herbert in his rectory in Bemerton, who circled prayer for fourteen lines and arrived at something understood, and found that to be enough.
We give thanks for the Apostle Paul, who wrote ‘we do not know how to pray as we ought.’ The comfort these words bring us is tremendous.
Thank you for the Spirit that steps into that not-knowing and prays on our behalf.
We give thanks for Simone Weil, who wrote of prayer as ‘unmixed attention.’ We understand this as the full turning of the self toward what is real.
We give thanks for the Sanskrit root — that before prayer was petition, before it was technique, it was the recognition that we are wondrously made.
We give thanks for this Wednesday room — where people arrive with their real lives and their real questions and their full attention, and call that prayer, because it is.
We give thanks that last Wednesday we prayed for the people in the hinterland of the soul, and that something real happened, beyond where we can trace it.
We give thanks that Heaven is found in the ordinary.
That something understood.
That our very next thing when we leave this place of prayer, is already a prayer.
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, Unity, 1941)
Tihei mauri ora.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ