Prayer is not a stratagem for occasional use, a refuge to resort to now and then. It is rather like an established residence for the innermost self. All things have a home: the bird has a nest, the fox has a hole, the bee has a hive. A soul without prayer is a soul without a home.

But how is one to find one's true place in life? Is there any means where you may discover what it really is that God wishes you to do? 

You may feel inclined to say: "Even if it be true that God has some splendid thing [for me] to do, and to be, how can I possibly find out what it is?" Perhaps you may even be tempted to add: "I am a very plain, everyday sort of person; my circumstances are extremely restricted; the conditions of my life are just drab commonplace. How then can there be something wonderful, beautiful, splendid awaiting me? Or, even if there were, how could I possibly get to know about it?"

And the answer is Divinely simple. Already in your past life from time to time, God has whispered into your heart just that very wonderful thing, whatever it is, that God is wishing you to be, and to do, and to have. And that wonderful thing is nothing less than what is called Your Heart's Desire. Nothing less than that.

The most secret, sacred wish that lies deep down at the bottom of your heart, the wonderful thing that you hardly dare to look at, or to think about--the thing that you would rather die than have anyone else know of, because it seems so far beyond anything that you are, or have at the present time, that you fear that you would be cruelly ridiculed if the mere thought of it were known--that is just the very thing that God is wishing you to do or to be for God.

And the birth of that marvelous wish in our soul--the dawning of that secret dream--was the Voice of God itself telling you to arise and come up higher because God had need of you.

I don't want to be anything special, I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfill its promise. I sometimes imagine that I long for the seclusion of a nunnery. But I know that I must seek You amongst people, out in the world. And that is what I shall do, despite the weariness and dislike that sometimes overcome me. I vow to live my life out there to the full. Sometimes I think that my life is only just beginning, that the real difficulties are still to come, although at times I feel that I have struggled through so many already. 

When a man is singing and cannot lift his voice, and another comes and sings with him, another who can lift his voice, the first will be able to lift his voice too. That is the secret of the bond between spirits.

God is not real to most of us because of the condition of our consciousness. God is closer to our minds every moment than our own thoughts. God is nearer to our hearts than our own feelings. God is more intimate with our wills than our most vigorous decisions. If we are not aware of God, it is not because God is not with us. It is, in part, because our consciousness is so under the sway of other interests that it cannot turn to God with the loving attention which might soon discern God.

Did you ever encounter, on the street, a friend whose physical eyes looked at you without seeing you? You walked right into him before the alien look on his face changed into one of recognition. Then he confessed that he had been so absorbed in thought about some other matters that he had not been aware of you, until your intentional collision with him. You were there, yet he did not see you. Though actually in your presence, he was nevertheless as unconscious of you as if you did not exist.

That is a persistent failure of the unemancipated consciousness. It can be so preoccupied by lesser realities that it does not sense the presence of the divine Reality surrounding and sustaining it. Something has to happen to end that absorption in other affairs, so that it can turn its attention to God.

Sometimes events will do it. One encounters God in a crisis that, as we say, "brings one to one's senses." Death, disaster, sickness, the collapse of friendship, are like the collision on the street. They shatter the tyranny of an idea or a dream, and release consciousness for the awareness of something greater than the idea or the dream--God himself.

It would be a very poor sort of life that was aware of people only when life collided with them, or was brought up standing by some decisive act of theirs. And it is a tragic life that becomes conscious of God only in those events that shatter its habitual thoughts and dreams and compel it to recognize God's presence and activity.

What makes life splendid is the constant awareness of God. What transforms the spirit into God's likeness is intimate fellowship with God. We are saved--from our pettiness and earthiness and selfishness and sin--by conscious communion with God's greatness and love and holiness.

This excerpt is taken from a collection of daily meditations on the lectionary scriptures called A Guide to Prayer, edited by Rueben P. Job and Norman Shawchuck.

The essential act of prayer is to stand unprotected before God. What will God do? [God] will take possession of us. That [God] should do so is the whole purpose of life. We know we belong to God. We know too, if we are honest, that almost despite ourselves, we keep a deathly hold on our own autonomy. We are willing, in fact very ready, to pay God lip service (just as we are ready to talk prayer rather than to pray), because waving God as a banner keeps our conscience quiet. But really to belong to God is another matter.

How can one pity anyone who is doing the will of our Lord? Is there anything sweeter on earth than to do the will of one one loves? And if it gives one some trouble to carry it out, the sweetness is all the greater.

Creativeness sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished. Until then, they cannot stand even positive reactions.

The passionate reactions of people to a painting, the exclamation, "Oh, this is wonderful!" may, even if meant in a positive way, entirely destroy the chiaroscuro, the mystical hidden weaving of fantasy which the artist needs. Only when he has finished his product can he expose it to the light of consciousness, and to the emotional reactions of others.

Thus if you notice an unconscious fantasy coming up within you, you would be wise not to interpret it at once. Do not say that you know what it is and force it into consciousness. Just let it live with you, leaving it in the half-dark, carry it with you and watch where it is going or what it is driving at. Much later you will look back and wonder what you were doing all that time, that you were nursing a strange fantasy which then led to some unexpected goal.

For instance, if you do some painting and have the idea that you could add this and that, then don't think, "I know what that means!" If you do, then push the thought away and just give yourself to it more and more so that the whole web of symbols expands in all its ramifications before you jump at its essential meaning.

But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.

We must learn to look through every gift and every event to God and never be content with the thing itself. There is no stopping place in this life--no, nor was there ever one for any man, no matter how far along his way he'd gone. This above all, then, be ready at all times for the gifts of God and always for new ones.

A revolution is going on in the world today that is cutting across lines of class, color and nationality. It is the revolution of those all over the world who are in on the secret of gifts. At the heart of it is the gospel, but the Church cannot assert this in the traditional words of faith because of a noisy piety that failed to become embodied in authentic lifestyles.

In this revolution one gift is neither superior nor inferior to another. The recognition dawns that the exercising of gifts is wrapped up with our needs, which mesh with corresponding needs in the world. The Peace Mission Group, [for example], in the course of its efforts to help the congregation attain a fuller understanding of the meaning of Christian nonviolence, learns to deal with its own violent responses to life. Those who move among the poor discover and confront their own conflicts with money and possessions. I write a book and find in its pages answers to my own questions. We exercise our gifts and learn that there is a mysterious law of reciprocity at work in the universe.

As the artist discovers that there is a direct relationship between the inner and outer forms of material, so we discover that creativity in our inner lives has a direct relationship to creativity in the world. We can never be in the world only as its benefactors. This does not make for authentic relationship. All that we genuinely do is very personal and calls into being our own personality.

The covenant of the Church to call forth gifts is extended to the whole of humankind. I say to the world, "I will be an instrument of God in the continuing act of creation," and the world fulfills in me its side of the covenant. It brings forth in me the new creation.

Elizabeth O'Connor was a staff member of The Church of the Saviour and an author who wrote many books about the church's development, available here. This piece is an excerpt from the preface to her book, Eighth Day of Creation, Gifts and Creativity.