100516 Evelyn Underhill pp. 94-100

[In the Reflection by Richard Foster [p.100] he says that Underhill stresses our active participation in God's work.  This bothered me, leading me to really ponder whether prayer is an actual participation in God's work. I had found the reading dry, and at first didn't garner much from it. I had to read the work over  several times. Sorry if I have made the following too long. ]
At first I didn’t understand this reading at all. It didn’t resonate or seem to offer much, so I let it sit for a bit hoping I could see past the drabness of so technical a description of prayer. Eventually while re-reading the Reflections section the light turned on, and I understood the passage to be about our own contribution of our personal gifts to the prayer. I began to recognize the creative power of prayer not just from the perspective of the prayer’s divine recipient but from the harmonizing perspective of the human offering of creativity, and from here I envisioned myself sketching. When I sketch I tend to use my whole body. I lean into the sketch and insert myself within it so that the charcoal feels like an extension of my whole being. I leave normal time and space and enter the experience so entirely that I fear my house could burn down around me and I would be helplessly unable to respond to the room outside my own body. I learned to sketch later in life, almost by accident. After my mother died, I came across an old sketch pad among her belongings. The pad had been mine when I was a teenager, but I had never really aspired to art and so most pages remained desolately blank and lonely. I couldn’t understand why my mother had kept this for over 20 years. The few sketches I had done as a teen were hardly great art, and the empty pages seemed to dwell on this regret. In my grief, I ended up at my dining room table with the sketch pad and charcoal and I began to draw my mother. I became intensely aware of the way light and shade worked together to reveal her face on the paper. The way her face emerged out of the blankness startled me. My mother’s face seemed to draw its own form out of the bright whiteness of the page, guiding my charcoal with the soft sorrowful strokes of my own grief. Every line that appeared on her face unfurled from the charcoal tip with the same leisurely motion that tears and laughter had engraved them with while she still lived among us. Every shade seemed to stretch out the imponderable distance death rammed between us while simultaneously bringing me closer to her than I had ever been. I truly loved drawing her face towards me on such intimate terms. The light of her face was already there, and just as marble knows its own form and waits for the sculptor to free it, my mother waited for the charcoal to cast her shadow onto the startling white light of the blank page. We tend to see creation as light being shed on darkness, as opposed to darkness exposing light, so it was the opposite of expectation. Through the slow revelation of my mother’s face, I began to see that creation has more to do with what is revealed, than with what is ‘there’. What is ‘there’ became more and more of a mystery, because what is ‘there’ suddenly seemed more and more capricious. The page is never blank. When I compare prayer to sketching in this way I can better understand prayer as participation in God’s work, an idea that seemed irreverent to me earlier. I can visualize prayer as a truly creative force. I can see what prayer could be. Prayer was meant to transport us more literally to God’s threshold through the same process we enter into creativity through.
Just as it makes more sense to approach art as an interaction and not as an object, it may be more appropriate to see prayer not as mere conversation, but rather as a pilgrimage right into the creative presence of God where our full participation is a privilege. There is something about looking at art that had reminded me of prayer earlier. There is something that permeates the air between painting and viewer. It can’t be put into words, but I think others would recognize this substance that I am describing even though it seems to be outside of language, and it is this same substance we enter when we pray. We, ourselves, emerged from this substance when God drew His own image onto the canvas. Experiencing a painting’s complexity requires the same faculties described as essential to prayer. It hadn’t really occurred to me on the intellectual level that the act of prayer could be considered active participation in God’s work because I hadn’t seen prayer as a human creative process. On some level, I saw prayer as an almost perfunctory routine, as more or less a burnt offering of our thoughts wafting upward and God inhaling them like smoke. From this new perspective though, I am seeing prayer as an engagement of the same powerful elements of creation that produce art. When we pray we cast our shadows into the light, and acclaim with God the very mystery of our  own creation.
 
 
Does anyone else have something they naturally find themselves comparing to prayer? Singing, dancing, baking, cartwheeling . . . . . ? Nude sunbathing?