Prayer time 29 April 2026
Non-travelling prayers
The prayer doesn’t travel anywhere. It arrives where it already is.
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 week, we stayed inside one of the oldest questions in the tradition: what is prayer? We found George Herbert in 1633, circling the act with twenty-six images and arriving at something understood. We found Paul saying we don't know how to pray as we ought, and finding that oddly relaxing. We found Simone Weil: absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Our closing affirmation last week was this: Prayer is what I am, when I remember who I am.
Tonight we take one more step.
If prayer is something understood — between the one who prays and the one who receives — then who is listening?
And if God is, as Eric Butterworth taught, the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere — then where does a prayer go?
I love that we can bring questions like these to God, inside our prayers. You don't need to resolve the technicality of it. Just know that open questions and prayers are the same thing. What is a question? What is an answer? Are they different things, or the same thing seen from different angles? As your host, I hold this: the answers have already arrived before we've finished forming the question.
Let us begin.
Relaxation
Attention to our physical self.
Now attention to the whizz and whir of our mental self. Oh my word, and the grasping at our hearts.
And of course, all the ways we've disappointed others by gently, kindly, and compassionately living our lives — lives that look like a zag when our friends and family are zigging.
Let the weight of the day begin to soften at its edges.
The things still to do. The mental downloads still to make.
The bursting ideas that require more of you than you think possible.
And see the small gifts of your life also. The things no one else has noticed. The things you've done that make life a little sweeter for your people.
All these edges — let them soften.
What does that mean? It means we bring it all here, into prayer. We're not grasping it any more. The rightness and wrongness of our lives begins to blur. All these things we hold, we now love out into the field beyond good and bad, right and wrong.
Breathing naturally. Letting each exhale carry a little more of the day's effort out of the body.
One of my favourite reminders for us: we bring our whole selves here, and all the scenarios we mentioned and more. Yet when we bring it all to God in prayer, we aren't seeking to fix or solve anything. We are here simply to pray, to be the prayer, to express a prayer, to receive a prayer. And in praying without ceasing, we remember our connection as children of the Most High God.
We pray with ease, with blessed assurance, and without struggle.
And may I say: we pray without struggle, but that doesn't mean we can't arrive in a state of struggle. When we find ourselves struggling with the day, or with the world, or with our finances, it is precisely because we have temporarily forgotten that God is lavish abundance, the source of all our good. We pray to remember.
We are open. We are here. We are pray-ers, and we are the prayer.
Be still, and know that I am God.
(Psalm 46:10)
And the question comes with us: who is listening?
Let us go further in now.
Concentration
We begin with a line from Isaiah.
Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.
(Isaiah 65:24, NRSV)
Before they call.
I'll read it again: ‘Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.’
Who is listening to us here? The I in ‘I will.’
This is a promise to the world, dear ones. A statement of assurance if ever there was one. This is how God — Spirit, Source, Creator, Elohim, Adonai — is actually at work for us.
The answers promised to us are not a response to our taking everything to God in prayer, though that is the place to take our concerns.
The answer is already present in the field into which the prayer is spoken.
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
(Meister Eckhart, Sermons, c.1310)
Meister Eckhart was a fourteenth-century German mystic.
One eye. One knowing.
The question — who is listening? — finds an unexpected answer. The listener is not at the other end of a long line, processing requests. The listener is the same awareness that is asking. Prayer is a recognition. The knowing in us, reaching toward the knowing that holds us, discovering they were never separate.
Our working definition from the Unity tradition: God is the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.
If the centre is everywhere, the centre is here. In this room. In this breath.
Right here.
Non-travelling prayers.
The prayer doesn't travel anywhere. It arrives where it already is.
Charles Fillmore wrote in Talks on Truth that the universe operates on spiritual law as surely as it operates on physical law.
So what shall we call answered prayer? It is the most accurate expression of how things actually work. We align our consciousness with wholeness, and wholeness manifests. We align with divine supply, and supply flows.
Cause and effect, at the level of Spirit. The universe is coherent. It responds.
We pray. We act. We remain open. And we find the answer already on its way — sometimes already waiting, in a form we didn't expect, from a direction we hadn't thought to look.
Take a moment now. Bring your life, your prayers, your situation to mind. What is being answered in ways you didn't expect? What answers are already on their way?
Meditation
We go still now.
All the thinking we've just engaged, and the ideas still forming — trust that what you need to hold on to will still be there later in the evening. For now, our intention is to slip as gently and quickly as we can into the place of silence.
The questions remain. The scripture remains. And what changes now is this: the answers to our prayers are already here. We come into the silence accepting that as so. We are open to receiving.
Be still, and know that I am God.
(Psalm 46:10)
And as you begin to return: feel the room around you.
Can you feel the air? The vastness around you?
Is there any warmth you wish to linger in a little longer?
Come back gently, and bring with you whatever arrived in the stillness. But no grasping at it. Your answers were already here before you arrived, so you needn't panic about losing them again. They are here. Trust. This is faith.
Realisation
We speak what we know to be true.
First, a release. Then, the knowing.
I release the idea that prayer is a message sent to a distant God, or place, or person.
Prayer is the recognition of what has always been here.
I release the anxiety of not being able to see how things will work out.
The answer is already moving toward me.
I release the effort of trying to pray with sufficient faith, in the right words, in the right way.
The Spirit that intercedes in me is already praying, with or without my eloquence.
And now, what we know:
The God who answers was present before I called. I am open to what is already here.
God is the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The centre is here. I am held at the very centre of all that is.
I am held by the same awareness that hears my prayer. One God. One love. One knowing.
I align with divine supply, and my supply flows. I align with wholeness, and wholeness is my life. This is spiritual law. In this, God never fails me.
I take the next step that is in front of me. The answer meets me in the movement.
All things are working together. I trust the slow work of God, which is not slow. It is already underway.
The eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees me. One knowing. One love. And I am held in it completely.
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)
Appreciation
We give thanks tonight for the question itself. Who is listening?
We give thanks for Isaiah, who wrote that before we call, the answer is already given. We give thanks that this is a statement of the way things actually are.
We give thanks for Meister Eckhart, discovering one eye, one knowing, one love.
We give thanks for the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. We give thanks that the centre is here — in this room, in this breath, in the question you held tonight. It was here before this call began, and it will remain after we close.
We give thanks for the answers already in motion. For provision that arrived in a form we didn't expect, from a direction we hadn't thought to look. We give thanks that cause and effect operates in Spirit as surely as it does in the natural world. That the universe is coherent. That it responds to what we align ourselves with.
We give thanks for this Wednesday room — for every person who arrived with their real life, their real need, and their full attention, and offered that as 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.
Aua 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, Unity, 1941)
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ