Some Thoughts On Prayer

CONFRONTED

The experience of prayer has been described in religious literature over the centuries. A commentary on prayer, in addition to the wealth of actual prayers, can be found in Baha’i literature. The actual experience that people have in prayer is rarely described in a way I can personally relate to. This poem is a response to that reality, that absense of relevant statement.
-Ron Price.

One may say the words
attaching mental reservations-
footnote, as it were, one’s
private hesitations-
but these, discretion might suggest,
should not be publicly expressed.
-Roger White, “Drill”, The Witness of Pebbles, George Ronald, Oxford, 1981, p.87.

It used to be so easy. I would coast
on the pleasure of the words, slide
along on sheer beauty and the comfort
of its sound. Now, after thirty years,
my voice is slow in full privacy as I
ponder what I say and question my
sincerity, my honesty, what it all means.
It seems as if I speak to an old friend
who accepts my words, who has heard them
a thousand times sitting in the chair opposite;
or talking to myself, some inner man
I have yet to meet, some beauteous centre,
still unknown. The words slow, like a car
that must come to a stop, perhaps an electrical problem
or out of gas: profound truth fills some empty point
on the horizon of inner reflection
and I gaze in wonderment at the trees
and garden outside the window,
at my own appauling insufficiency
and heedlessness and some renewing tranquillity
of consciousness which comes trickling in
from some paradise of reality
into which I have yet to gain admission
confronted as I am with the most manifest
of the manifest and the most hidden of the hidden.1

Ron Price
12 June 1996

1.Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers, USA, 1985, p.143.