Prayer time 6 May 2026
What the quiet knows
The sound of sheer silence.
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.
There is a moment, sometimes, before a word of prayer forms, when something in you already knows you are about to pray. A settling. An orientation inward. As if the prayer recognised you before you recognised it.
The answer to your prayer already in motion before your request or question is fully formed. The response already present in the field into which the prayer is spoken.
So what, then, is the act of prayer actually doing?
Tonight we pray and enquire into this. Not to resolve any questions about prayer with the mind, but to become still enough to know what is already known in the quiet.
What does the quiet already know?
What does the quiet already know concerning our prayers?
The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.
(Habakkuk 2:20, NRSV)
Let us begin.
Relaxation
There is a rhythm that has been at play in your life today.
As we stop here, you may still hear and feel its texture and vibe.
Let it wind down. Turn the volume knob down, subtly. No needle scratch — just easy, with your own natural breathing, wind it down. Down… down.…
As we wind down together, turn up the hearing. Hear what is around you. The hum and the hiss of your home. The outside noise of nature and traffic. Your home settling into the evening. Let it be what it is — we don't need to get the house or the household to shush. However, we are taking our business and noise-making out of the mix for 30 minutes.
Does the evening sky have a sound? Listen for it.
Find what is good for you as your prayer posture. Wriggle into your prayers. Volume down, movement settling, a final scratch on your nose.
We breathe.
We settle.
Let each exhale carry a little more of today's effort out of the body.
We are open to our prayers and to each other as pray-ers.
[Silence]
Let us go further in.
Concentration
Before I bring our scripture for concentration, I want to introduce you to someone writing outside the Unity tradition or metaphysical Christianity. You may already have read one of his books.
Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer and philosopher, and I have been spending time in his beautiful little book about his encounters with silence. Kagge writes that silence is first and foremost an inner condition. He is the first explorer to reach all three poles — the North Pole, the South Pole and the summit of Everest — and in his book he is essentially saying that in all the locations where he finds or craves silence, he finds it not in those unique settings but in the posture he takes toward his life.
Isn't that interesting? This prayer posture can be arrived at through any number of pathways. And this thing that we do here together — praying on a Wednesday — is firstly a longing for the silence, and the silence that we bring with us already, as we take this posture of prayer toward our very life. So we both find it here, and bring it here.
Now, our scripture, setting our minds on truth.
In 1 Kings, there is a story about the prophet Elijah.
Elijah has run himself into the ground — burned out, frightened and alone, convinced that everything he has done has been for nothing at all. He has done what the Lord asked of him. He is certain it was not enough.
God speaks to him: ‘Go out, and stand on the mountain.’
So Elijah goes out, stands on the mountain, and he waits.
‘He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”’
(1 Kings 19:11-13, NRSV)
The sound of sheer silence.
Elijah was waiting for something dramatic — some confirmation large enough to match the size of his fear and exhaustion. Yet what arrived was the quietest thing in the world.
Meister Eckhart, a fourteenth-century German mystic, wrote: ‘Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence.’
Nothing.
I will say it again: ‘Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence.’
(Meister Eckhart — attribution widely cited; original source difficult to confirm.)
We are never the ones who begin the prayer. The Christ in us has already begun. The Christ is a universal Presence, the divine Intelligence that indwells every human soul, in every tradition, in every sincere prayer lifted in any language toward any name for God. In metaphysical Christianity, we call it the Christ within — the same knowing that moved through Jesus, and that moves through you. When we pray, it is the Christ consciousness in us that is already awake, already listening, already turned toward the silence.
Simone Weil wrote that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. Praying asks us to attend, fully and without agenda, to the ground of our own being. And in that attentiveness, something is already known. The attentiveness is our prayer posture.
We are already praying now.
So, what does the quiet know?
What does the quiet know about the prayers you are praying before a word is formed?
What does the quiet know about your hesitations about how to pray and present your requests to God?
The quiet knows who you are beneath every label attached to you.
The quiet knows the answer to the question you have not yet been able to form in words.
The quiet knows your next step. The answers you are seeking, the quiet already knows.
The quiet is love already moving in the direction of your highest good, and the highest good for all concerned.
This very act of prayer is us becoming still enough to know what the quiet knows.
Meditation
And so we go further into the silence.
We have thought about why we would bother to stop talking, why we would give everything over to the formless — and now we just go quiet.
See your housemates, family, friends, co-workers in your mind's eye. Even though they may not be with you, give them the grace of your presence. See them quiet and still, in the silence, knowing also what the quiet knows about your shared experiences and circumstances. Gather them in. You don't need people to know you pray for them. Just bring them in.
And reclaim the silence. For yourself, and for them.
Be still, and know that I am God.
(Psalm 46:10)
And so we pray by being in silence together.
[Silence]
And as you return: come back slowly. Breathe a couple of rounds without rush. What arrived in the stillness belongs to you. Whatever you sensed or knew in that quiet place was already yours before you prayed. The quiet keeps what it knows. You do not need to grasp at it or hold it tightly. Let it rest in open hands and upon your open heart.
Realisation
Together now. A denial to clear the mental field, and an affirmation to land the truth. Say these aloud in your space, or repeat them quietly in your mind.
I release the idea that prayer requires the right words, the right posture, the right level of faith.
The act of praying is the act of becoming still. My stillness is sufficient. I am enough.
I release the noise I have been adding to my own life.
The quiet beneath it is God's presence. God's presence never leaves me. And I never leave God's presence.
And now, what we know:
The quiet knows. And I am listening.
In this stillness, I am fully known and fully loved.
The Christ in me is already awake, already still, and already the prayer.
The sound of sheer silence is how God has always spoken. Like those who prayed before me, I am listening now.
I reclaim silence as my practice, my inheritance, and my home.
I become the prayer.
I am held in the quiet that knows all things. I trust what is given to me there.
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 silence.
For the fact that it was here before we arrived and will remain after we close.
For Elijah at the cave. For his exhaustion and his fear and his willingness to stand on the mountain anyway.
For the sound of sheer silence, and the God who did not need the earthquake or the fire to be fully present.
We give thanks for every person tonight who came to sit, in the middle of a busy and noisy week, and gave their unmixed attention to God.
We give thanks for the Christ in us, that indwelling knowing that was already still and already praying before we opened our mouths.
We give thanks for the quiet that knows us, completely, and without needing us to explain ourselves first. Ah blessed Quiet!
We stopped. In the middle of a week that did not ask us to stop, we stopped.
We gave our full attention to God. That is the whole of it. That is enough.
We are the prayer that was already praying.
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