Tag: Presence & Practice

There are thresholds we desperately want to cross.

We can see what is on the other side.

Sometimes we can even feel ourselves becoming the person who could step across.

And yet we stop.

For a long time, I thought this hesitation meant I did not trust myself enough.

I experience it in prayer.

There are moments when someone asks,

”Who would like to pray?”

Something in me wants to answer.

I can feel the prayer I have the words for it. I sense something stirring, something wanting to be spoken.

And then I hesitate.

What is I don’t have the right words?

What if I stumble?

What if what comes is not what someone needs to hear?

A lot of ‘what ifs’.

I thought I was afraid of the prayer.

Then I remembered the red pencil.

When I was young, letters I had written would sometimes come back to me marked in red, my words corrected on the page.

I had almost forgotten.

But perhaps the body remembers thresholds the mind believes it has left behind.

There I was again, standing before words that had not yet been spoken, already wondering how they would be corrected.

The red pencil was no longer in someone else’s hand.

I had learned to hold it myself.

That is the strange thing about echoes.

They can sound like the present.

An old voice can become so familiar that we mistake it for our own.

Be careful.

Get it right.

Don’t say it until you know.

And so we remain on one side of the threshold, believing we are waiting for courage, when perhaps we are waiting for permission that no one else can give us.

The Gap asks something different.

It asks us to notice the echo without obeying it.

I hear you.

I know where you come from.

But you do not get to speak to me.

Perhaps this is why prayer asks so much of me.

Prayer does not give me time to polish every sentence before I speak.

It asks me to listen.

To breathe.

To become still enough to notice what is already there.

And then to trust the next word.

Not because I know it is the perfect word.

Not because I can know what another person needs to hear.

But because I am willing to offer what has come to me with an open hand.

There is vulnerability in that.

Maybe that vulnerability is not what keeps me from the threshold.

Maybe vulnerability is the threshold.

For so long, I thought I needed to arrive there with the right words.

But perhaps what I need to bring is my humanness.

I may stumble.

I may pause.

I may reach for a word and find another.

My voice may reveal that I am standing in the same uncertainty as everybody else.

And perhaps that is not the failure of prayer.

Perhaps that is where the prayer begins.

Because when I stop trying to stand before another person perfectly,

I can stand with them honestly.

Something opens.

The distance between us becomes smaller.

We recognize ourselves in one another.

Not one person who knows,
praying for another who does not,

but human beings
standing together
before something larger than any one of us.

And perhaps this is what I have misunderstood about prayer.

Prayer is not a performance of certainty.

It is communion.

It is the moment we stop standing apart.

The one speaking does not carry the Divine into the room.

The Divine is already there.

In the person speaking.

In the person listening.

In the silence between the words.

In the breath we take together.

Perhaps the prayer simply helps us notice.

And suddenly I understand the threshold differently.

I thought I was trying to cross it so I could become brave enough to pray.

Perhaps I am being asked to cross it so I can become vulnerable enough to connect.

To stand before others without leaving my humanness behind.

To bring my unfinished words,
my trembling,
my uncertainty,
my open heart.

And discover that none of these separates me from another person.

They are where we meet.

Perhaps that is the sacred place.

The Gap is not empty.

It is where we find one another.

It is communion.

The red pencil may still appear.

But it no longer has to write the prayer.

I can set it down,

open my hands,

and begin.

And so it is.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

I came into the garden looking for the words.

I thought perhaps Francis would know them.

But Francis was listening.

So I waited.

Across the garden sat others who had come by different paths.

One spoke of the heart.

One of surrender.

One of devotion.

One of service.

One of stillness.

One reminded me that prayer without action leaves suffering untouched.

Another seemed to say nothing at all.

Different centuries.

Different names for the Divine.

Different understandings of what happens when a human being prays.

And still, beneath their differences, I began to hear something.

Prayer was here before the words.

Before theology named it.

Before traditions organized it.

Before anyone decided there was a correct way to speak to God.

There was the mother holding her child.

The frightened person asking for courage.

The grieving person whispering a name.

The stranger reaching toward another stranger.

The human being standing beneath the night sky, suddenly aware of something larger than themselves.

Perhaps prayer began there.

Not in language,
but in longing.

In attention.

In gratitude.

In helplessness.

In love.

I had come into the garden afraid that if someone asked me to pray, I would not know what to say.

And then I understood why Francis had been so quiet.

I had been listening for words.

He had been listening for
presence.

Maybe learning to pray
is not learning what to pray.

Maybe it is learning to become still enough to notice what is already there.

And when words come,
we give them.

When silence comes,
we give that too.

When action is required,
we rise.

Perhaps all three are prayer.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya

”Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.”
_{— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930)}

Boredom is the quiet terror of meaninglessness.

It whispers that our lives have no pulse unless we stir the waters — that silence is proof of absence rather than the presence of being.

But boredom is not emptiness; it is invitation.

It is the soul’s way of asking …
Can you bear to be without distraction?
Can you sit with your own depths without turning away?

Most wrongdoing doesn’t spring from malice but from the refusal to face this ache.

Infidelity, greed, violence, addiction — and quieter forms of avoidance — the endless scrolling, overworking, over-speaking, self-numbing, all are attempts to feel alive without being alive to the void.

The moral failure is not only in the acts that wounds others, but in the subtler betrayals that keep us from presence.

The flight from stillness takes many shapes, and each one draws us further from the center of our being.

And yet, when awakening comes, it arrives as ache — a hollow stretch where the light has expanded but life hasn’t yet caught up.

It hurts because the soul is being rewoven.

You’ve outgrown the old skin of certainty, and the air feels raw against the new one.

We try to fill that space by teaching, fixing, rescuing — trying to make meaning of what only time can settle. But the more we reach outward, the deeper the ache grows.

Stillness asks for something else: to trust that each soul must meet its own silence.

Then something so tender happens.

We stop dragging and start shining.

We become the quiet lamp Russell imagined — proof that stillness, held without fear, becomes light.

— a Torchbearer Wisdom by Corvalya