Prayer time 5 August 2026
The sky remains the sky (despite the weather)
The intelligence for your next step is already given, and it is given as one step.
Download a PDF of the prayer script
Orientation
Tīhei mauri ora. Haere mai. Good evening, and welcome.
Tonight is the third of our five turnings in what God is like. Tonight, Soul.
Soul is the way the one God becomes a person. God, alive at the place where you are standing, as you.
Moses stood in front of a bush that, as it burned, didn't burn up. And he asked God for a name.
And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM. (Exodus 3:14, King James Version)
I AM THAT I AM. The name we hold in prayer tonight.
God lies at the source of our longing and can never be an object of it.
Rupert Spira, The Heart of Prayer (2023).
I'll just say it again for us:
God lies at the source of our longing and can never be an object of it.
From our own Unity tradition, we have this idea of soul written by Charles Fillmore (in Prosperity):
Desire is the onward impulse of the ever-evolving soul.
So the longing that brought you here tonight is God at the source of you, already moving.
We repeatedly refer to this as The Turning.
We're having a bit more of a lead time into our prayers, more than usual tonight.
It's lovely to refresh the five principles of Unity ideas in the area of metaphysical Christianity.
God is.
I am.
I think.
I pray.
I act.
We're spending just a bit of time on the 'thinking' part before we pray tonight.
Think about what that means. Our longing is made of the very thing it wants. It comes home to us by resting, and what it rests in is God, who was its source the whole time. Tonight we let the longing rest.
So we get still, and we turn toward God. That is the whole of it. Everything else this evening is only a help toward those two things. We get still, we turn.
This is how Jesus prayed.
Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. (Mark 1:35, New International Version)
But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. (Luke 5:16, New International Version)
He went off by himself, early, before the day had a chance to start on him. He got quiet. He did that all his life, and he did it most when the crowds were largest and the need was greatest. When his friends finally asked him how it was done, he told them this:
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:6, King James Version)
The closet is the quiet inside you, the place you can shut a door on. You are sitting in it now. And Jesus told us what is waiting there. A Father in secret. God, already present, where nobody else can see.
He gave one warning about prayer, and, funny, it was talking too much.
When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. (Matthew 6:7, New Revised Standard Version)
We lean tonight on prayers from many centuries and many traditions. Most of them speak in the old way, of a soul down here reaching up toward a God somewhere above. Just let that language be a door. Walk through it, and let it go. The essence of dualistic prayer language is still that of turning towards God. Enjoy all the many forms of prayer language and expression.
Relaxation
Let your body come to rest. Let the day set itself down beside you.
Everything that happened today happened on the surface of you. All of it moved across you the way weather moves across a sky. The sky lets the storm come and stays sky. It lets the long grey afternoon come and stays sky. The weather leaves the sky exactly as it found it.
Go inward now, slowly, past the layers.
Past your thinking, which has been busy since you woke.
Past your feelings, which have risen and fallen all day.
Past what you can hear and see and touch.
Past the work of your hands and the names of the people you love.
All of it is real, and all of it is weather.
Grab this idea of weather across the sky.
And now look further under the layers of the day. It's all weather.
You have a sky in you. And the sky is still the sky despite the weather.
Take away everything that could be taken from you, and what is left is God.
Your name could go. Your work could go. Your memories could fade. The essence of life still sitting here, quietly awake, is God's own being, alive as you.
I make it my business only to persevere in His holy presence.
Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God.
Let your breathing slow. There is nowhere to be tonight except here. Nothing in you needs fixing before you can pray. You are already in the presence and, it's a wild thought, you have never been anywhere else.
An idea: Nothing that has happened to me has touched what I am.
Concentration
There is an old word from the Sufi mystics. Die before you die.
It is a kind saying. Set down the self that has to manage everything. You will lose nothing that is truly yours. What remains when the striving goes quiet is God, who was and is underneath it the whole time.
Let's Golden Key or 'course correct' our ideas of separateness from our God/Creator/Source:
(Do say these slowly with attention on the phrasing and the words chosen here.)
I let go of the belief that I am separate from God.
God is the very being of my being.
I let go of the belief that God is anywhere I am not.
I am the presence of God at the place where I stand.
I let go of the belief that my prayer must travel somewhere to be heard.
The prayer is already inside the One it is addressed to.
Now bring to mind one person or situation you are holding in your prayers. Is it someone unwell? Someone you know who is fearful or frightened? Perhaps a loved one you are missing, far away. Keep them in front of you and say their name.
We turn toward the God who is already their life. The turning is the prayer.
Jesus prayed this way for the people he loved. We pray these Scriptures for our loved ones.
That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. (John 17:21, King James Version)
He asked that they know what they already were.
Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee. (Isaiah 26:3, King James Version)
Beloved, now are we the sons of God. (1 John 3:2, King James Version)
If you feel yourself starting to push, starting to send the prayer somewhere out there, let that go. It is an old habit, left over from years of thinking that God lives somewhere else.
This is what Emmet Fox called the Golden Key. Stop thinking about the trouble and think about God instead. It is the simplest instruction in all of our teaching and the hardest to remember when we are frightened.
So we 'wash' this prayer in the truth of what God is (the Golden Key turning).
Five turnings, one for each of the aspects we have prayed recently.
Keep the name of your loved one ready, or simply pray for humanity in general as we move through these.
God is Life.
I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. (John 10:10, King James Version)
The life of God is whole in [name], this moment.
God is Truth.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (John 8:32, King James Version)
The truth of God is clear in [name], this moment.
God is Love.
God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16, King James Version)
The love of God holds [name], this moment.
God is Intelligence.
If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally. (James 1:5, King James Version)
The wisdom of God is awake in [name], this moment.
God is Soul.
As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. (Psalm 42:1, New Revised Standard Version)
The longing in [name] is God, already moving.
I am only agreeing with what is already so.
The God I pray to is the God I am praying from.
And now we go in to our meditation, alone and unafraid. This line comes to us from Plotinus, who founded Neoplatonism in third-century Rome, and whose Enneads trace the soul's return to the One.
A flight of the Alone to the Alone.
Plotinus, Enneads VI.9, translated by Stephen MacKenna.
Meditation
Now we come to the still centre of the evening.
Be still, and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)
This is the quietest place in you. Quiet... empty... still... silent.
Can you:
Let your being be as wide and impersonal as God?
Let God be as near and intimate as your own self?
So we rest here.
God is the nearness itself, closer than your own breath.
If your mind wanders, and it will, come back to the simple fact of being here. No striving, no struggle. Just come back to silence and a still mind.
We keep five minutes of silence together now, with a little music underneath to hold us in the one stillness.
I rest in the presence that was always here.
[Silence, five minutes. Music: ‘Fleeting,’ Ocean Fal-Cav, used with permission.]
Realisation
Come back gently.
Remember the name in the fire. I AM THAT I AM. When you say it quietly to yourself, I am, that is God, awake as you.
Your knowing of yourself is God's knowing of God.
From our mystic teacher Meister Eckhart, Sermon IV, True Hearing, translated by Claud Field, 1909:
If my eye is to discern colour, it must itself be free from all colour. The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.
Catherine of Genoa, 1447 to 1510, an Italian mystic who spent her life among the sick and the poor of Genoa:
My me is God, nor do I recognise any other me except my God Himself.
So when you say I am, you are speaking God's own name with your own mouth. That is what the name at the bush was for.
Jesus said this plainly, to people who found it very hard to hear.
Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? (John 10:34, King James Version)
At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you. (John 14:20, King James Version)
This is our faith. We realise this to be true.
You will go back out into the week and the eclectic weather patterns will start again. But still, the sky remains the sky.
I am, and that I am is God.
Appreciation
And now, before we go, we give thanks.
There is only one ego, only one selfhood, the I am that I am.
Joel Goldsmith.
Praise be to God, the life inside everything alive.
Praise be to God, who fills the whole world and spills past its edges.
Praise be to God, hidden in every face and shining out as plain being.
Praise be to God, singing in every sound and resting in every silence.
Praise be to God, who is the longing and the rest, the asking and the answer.
Praise be to God, whose name is I AM, and who speaks it in us.
Praise be to God, who was here before this prayer began and is here now that it is done.
And one last time, a borrowed line, the one we have prayed all evening.
God lies at the source of our longing and can never be an object of it.
(Rupert Spira, The Heart of Prayer)
Go gently now, dear ones.
You are the presence of God at the place where you stand, and you always were. Slip away into the night, sleep well, and we will pray together again next week.
Prepared by Jacinda Faloon-Cavander for Unity of NZ