Prayer, and the limits of words

When I enter silent prayer, there have been a few times when I have been able to fall slowly back. 

I feel the fall, but not because my stomach is dropping or there is fear in where I will land; rather, it is my true self which is falling, falling away from attachment, from sound, from worry. I gently slide backwards through the whirling chaos until I reach a place of warm darkness, where the only feeling is a holy emptiness. There isn’t attachment, and there isn’t suffering; a smile forms on my face and I can feel a growing fullness in my chest. 

While praying in the Holy Spirit Chapel at the Cathedral a few months ago, I came to understand this fullness, warmth, and peace as being like a loaf of bread, fresh out of the oven and full of good smells and sustenance. This warmth in my chest, this living bread, grows with each breath in and gently dissipates with each breath out; never going away but changing as I change, growing as my chest expands and lessening as I contract. But there is no sadness in the lessening, no sense of loss; it is merely the changing of the moment, the presence which stays with me even as my mind wanders to other subjects. 

I hear footsteps upstairs, and smile to myself that even as my mind goes to matters of this world the warm darkness stays within me, stays centered right in the middle of me. The smell of wet dog, the sound of light snores, enter my senses but the centeredness remains as the outside world and its sentiments gently kiss my face as they keep moving along. 

I have a sense that we are all so small; and yet we are all extensions of this warm darkness, this peace that is like falling, and we are so much bigger than I ever imagined. We are all a cosmos unto ourselves. 

Hooking into it is a matter of paying attention to it, rather than finding it. It is always here, always available; it is I who is too often unavailable. 

It is in this nothingness of the world that love flows unfiltered, in the darkness of freedom from all attachments that presence is pronounced. In this field beyond all others where words lose their meaning, where there is only love and You and I and… then I think, how silly; there is only we. There is only One, after all. How do we find the words for this, this Holy Space?

“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.” 

Rumi