A Kind of Prayer

“I think wonder is a kind of prayer,” said Carey. “An undirected prayer…don’t you think so?”

It was Sunday morning, and we were walking in our church. We had passed the eucalyptus grove, where we breathed the mentholated air that segued into fragrances of sage and creekside oak, ascended to a meadow, and walked further along a dirt road to a panoramic view. There we stood looking out at the contours and colors of a neighboring ranch, and the sparkle of the sea, and the hills gleaming green. This has become my landscape, my home place, and I am never not astonished by that fact.

We don’t usually get philosophical, but we were talking about different ways of seeing, and the infinitely various and often implausible constructs of belief, acknowledging windows in our own secularism and skepticism through which bright lights of possibility shine, both blinding and revealing. I do believe there’s more than what we see, and, as my friend Dan Gerber once said, it’s divine that we keep looking.

But maybe there’s a risk to overthinking it. In the words of Angelus Silesius:

God, whose love and joy are present everywhere, can't come to visit you unless you aren't there.

And anyway, as Meister Eckhart might have said, there is already nothing closer to us than God. It’s that way from the start.

I’ve been reading John O’Donohue, who reinforces such ideas:

That we may awaken,

To live to the full

The dream of the earth

Who chose us to emerge and incarnate its hidden night

In mind, spirit, and light.

The church of the outdoors is particularly conducive to awakening and faith, to profound pondering and trivial gabbing and reverential silence. With each footfall on the sweet dusty earth, I was thinking that walking, too, is a kind of prayer, and that gratitude is a hymn.

My heart filled with love and my eyes beheld the wonder.

Yes, it’s kind of prayer. I’m certain of this.