All Can Be Prayer

After years of doubt, meditation has become a place where there is something to be trusted and called on, often in the form of Kwan Yin, a Chinese goddess of compassion in the Buddhist tradition. She sits on a lotus flower, one hand holding a vessel of healing liquid, one foot on the earth, symbolizing her willingness to engage with the world. In some images she has a thousand arms, with tools to help in any circumstance. She is known as "she who listens to the sounds of the world", to its suffering and pain. She seems not so far from Jesus surrounded by children, tenderly holding a lamb. Both seem to be inviting us into compassion and connection, to embody those qualities.

I can now appreciate devotional practices – bowing, singing, or chanting – where once I was so resistant to them, and from this I can connect with the Christian practices of ritual and music, both of which I value enormously. Last year an Irish Catholic friend told me of his image of God, a loving mother dressed in a beautiful gown, who comforts him deeply. Buddhism offers no such comforting images, and he offered me his God should I have need of her. I was very moved, and grateful for that moment of generosity and connection. That was prayer too.

In fact, what is not prayer? My only current answer to this is a lack of present awareness, being lost in the past or in the future, losing experience and a sense of witness consciousness. Not that there's any blame in that, it’s just how things are for us much of the time. But each time I’m seeing, really being with, what is around me – whether it’s washing the dishes, playing with a child, sitting with a dying man – it’s prayer, as much as formal contemplative practices or rituals. It’s refreshing, renewing, healing, grounding, disturbing, painful, and transformational.

This part of the journey is only just beginning, and the terrain seems to be about inclusion, bringing together, integration. It is important to me that nothing has to be left behind, or left out, that it be possible to express authenticity.

Maxine Linnell is a writer, educator and Buddhist psychotherapist who practices in Leicester, UK. She is also the Commissioning Editor for Self and Society, the UK humanistic psychology journal.

This article is a part of a longer article which first appeared in the journal Parabola (Vol. 29, Number 3, August 2004), under the title “Nothing Left Behind”, and which is reproduced here with permission.