Prayer time 25 March 2026
On any ordinary morning
It was always happening in you, on an ordinary morning, before you knew it had a name.
Orientation
Welcome to Prayer on a Wednesday.
Thank you so much for joining us - it's never lost on me our freedom to meet and to express our longing for prayer and connection with the God of our understanding, and to do so in a public, open forum. As we meet, we stand on the shoulders of praying people that have come before us throughout the generations. In particular we learn and lean on the prayer taught us by Jesus in what's called the Sermon on the Mount - we will lovingly pray this prayer at our close.
My name is Jacinda. I am simply your prayer host.
All prayers and all pray-ers welcome. There are no right or wrong prayers.
We are here to pray. We sprinkle tiny teaching points where we think it necessary, but overall we are simply here to pray.
Our intention in prayer is to renew our mind, think on the things above, and to remember who we are and to whom we are connected.
We practise the five phases of Unity prayer together: relaxation, concentration, meditation, realisation, and appreciation.
Right where we are, God is.
And so we begin.
Relaxation
We'll take a moment to relax and settle where we are.
Feel the weight of you, where you are sitting. The particular quality of this Wednesday evening [or any time] - the room, the light, the temperature of the air.
Let the breath move at its own pace. No engineering required.
Let the shoulders drop. The hands open.
You have carried a full day to this moment. A full week. Whatever is still moving in you - the decisions forming, the threshold moments approaching, the something more that will not quite leave you alone - it is welcome here. Lay it down beside you. It will still be there when we finish. Tonight it simply is not the point.
The ground beneath all of that is what we are here for.
Settle toward it now.
Let the breath do one more thing: release the posture of someone who is about to be tested.
You are not here to perform. You are here to remember.
Concentration
Tonight we return to the field: Rumi's field, the one we have been learning to live from. On any ordinary morning, the field was already there. Before the first thought formed itself into a question. Before the working day began. Before the first decision presented itself for your consideration. The ground that holds your life was present in that morning. It has been present through every hour since. It is present here, now, in this room, on this Wednesday evening.
We have been in this field before.
Rumi calls it the field out beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing. Last week we prayed from the field beyond winning and losing, enough and not enough. We have prayed from it, released outcomes into it, acted from what we know inside it.
What have you been noticing from the compounding effect of your prayers? What calls for your attention in prayer tonight? What has the renewing of your mind shown you could have some more attention on this very ordinary day?
I've been concentrating on the idea of never leaving the field. It's quite got into me - waking on each ordinary day of the week, and my first thought is: the field. The field! And what I find, each time, is that the field is already there before the thought arrives. That is the discovery. That is what we are here to name tonight.
Because it is precisely in the ordinary days - the desk, the study, the conversation, the bold next move - that we stand at the threshold of expansion. The expansion of our own lives, and the expansion of all those around us.
The prayers we pray tonight - prayers that renew our mind, that lift our thinking from the troubles of this world toward the nature of God, prayers that remind us of who we are - these are the prayers that sustain us in the ordinary day. And they are the prayers that prepare us for the extraordinary bold next move.
There are decisions forming.
There is something more stirring that will not be quiet.
In the stillness and the quiet, we turn our attention toward that.
Consider your daytime work, your studies, the things you spend your evenings doing, and bring to mind your closest relationships. We are investing in all these things as we pray and remember.
And more and more, as we meet and our practice of weekly collective prayer compounds, we find ourselves out in that field with less and less effort. Where judgement and resistance fall away. Where the deeper order of things becomes audible.
And so we pray.
This is the ground of tonight's prayer - that on any ordinary morning, the field where we operate from the best of ourselves is already present, especially for the decisions that are waiting to be experienced.
Eric Butterworth, whose voice has accompanied this community all season, said that decisions are not made. They are discovered. We return to that line tonight not as a new idea, but as a deepened one. We have been practising the conditions for discovery since our first prayer time. Tonight we name what those conditions produce.
The expansion your life is asking for was not waiting for you to wrestle it into existence. It was waiting to be recognised. The knowing was already present. Silence is how it surfaces.
Christopher Heuertz names this prayer posture Silence: the inner condition of a person who has remembered something true. The body settles. The breath lengthens. The field opens beneath the noise.
Caroline Myss teaches that the soul arrives already in agreement, a Sacred Contract, and the expansion moment is the soul recognising that agreement activating. You are not approaching this moment unprepared. You are already standing in the field.
Hear now these words from Proverbs, received as living truth:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5–6)
Metaphysically, every word in this text is doing precise work.
The heart, in Unity teaching, is not the seat of emotion. It is the seat of spiritual intuition - the faculty of wisdom, the Christ-knowing that operates beneath the intellect. To trust in the Lord with all your heart is to trust the deepest knowing you carry, the ground-level intelligence that precedes analysis.
To lean not on your own understanding is the denial - the release of the fear-labelled mind that arrives before the silence does, the voice that says this is complicated, I might fail, I am not ready. That voice is not wisdom. It is the intellect running ahead of the field.
In all your ways acknowledge - the word acknowledge in the Hebrew is yada: to know intimately, to recognise, to perceive from the inside. This is not intellectual assent. It is the act of returning. The acknowledgement Proverbs speaks of is the turning back toward the ground of spiritual knowing. The return to the field.
And then: he will make your paths straight. The straight path is not engineered. It is discovered - already laid, already clear, already present beneath the noise you were carrying. The discovery was always there.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn't make any sense.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī, translated by Coleman Barks. The Essential Rumi. HarperCollins, 1995.
The field is the operating ground from which your whole life is conducted. The meeting, the study desk, the bold move, the tender conversation - all of it, from the field. All of it, from the ordinary morning that was already holding you before you knew it had a name.
Meditation
Let the breath do its work.
Silence.
Realisation
Denial and Affirmation Pairs
In the Unity tradition of Charles Fillmore and H. Emilie Cady: the denial clears the mental field. The affirmation declares the truth of God.
I release the belief that this moment requires fear to be navigated wisely.
I am held in infinite Love and led by divine intelligence.
I release the claim that I arrive at this threshold unprepared.
The wisdom I need rises from the ground of my own being.
I release the idea that the expansion I am standing in is a problem to be solved.
It is a discovery waiting to be experienced.
Affirmations - together:
I am not waiting to be ready. I am already in the field.
The discovery is already made. I move forward from a position of faith.
Divine Presence is my centre. Divine Wisdom orders my steps. Divine Mind steadies my mind. Divine Love is all I am.
I act from remembrance.
I release the outcome. I trust the ground.
I am held in infinite Love and led by divine intelligence.
I am both the pray-er, and the prayer. I let my light shine.
Julian of Norwich
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.
The discovery is already made. The soul already said yes. The ground is already holding you.
All shall be well.
God is the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
There is no edge to fall off. There is no threshold too wide to cross from the field.
Appreciation
We close in gratitude. For the ordinary morning that held the field. For the body that knew it before the mind arrived.
For the arc of prayer that has been building in this community, week by week, into something living.
We are grateful for the knowing that rises beneath the noise.
We are grateful for the expansion that is opening.
We are grateful for the discovery already made, in us, through us, as us.
Martin Rinkart wrote this hymn of thanksgiving in 1636 in Eilenburg, in the German states - in the midst of the Thirty Years War, a devastating conflict between Catholic and Protestant powers that tore through Europe from 1618 to 1648. Rinkart buried thousands of his own parishioners through plague, famine, and siege, and still he wrote this. Gratitude rising from the ground of ordinary life, through everything. We receive it tonight as our own.
Now thank we all our God,
with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things has done,
in whom this world rejoices;
who from our mothers' arms
has blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today.
Martin Rinkart (1636), translated by Catherine Winkworth (1858). Nun danket alle Gott.
I'm in the flow of life. I am. I am. I am. I am. I'm in the flow of life.
Eric Butterworth
The Lord's Prayer
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
Matthew 6:9–13 (NIV)
Prayer of Protection
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 (1941). Unity.
Go now, dear ones. Your bed, your desk, your kitchen, your exercise space - all of it contained in that field out there. Go, and never leave, dear ones. Imagine the tender conversations from any ordinary day, out there. The work progress, out there. The study, assignments, research and development you do - all out there. Oh my. This is the field of limitless potential.
Go, from the ground of knowing this to be so.
Tihei mauri ora.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ