Meditation 762
Communicating with God (3)
To open a discussion on this article, please use the contact page to provide your comments.
Suppose you are taking the subway. You get on the last car in the train, and as you get on, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse a person sitting near the front, otherwise the car seems empty. You move to the rear, sit down, put on your headphones to listen to some music, and open a book and lose yourself in reading.
Sometime later, the lights go out, the train stops. Power failure. As you look up from your book, the emergency lights go out. You are completely in the dark.
After a minute or two in the darkness, you feel alone. You have to reach out. So you turn off your music and start telling the other person an amusing (to you anyway) anecdote about the last time you were caught in a blackout.
Before you finish, the lights come back on. The car is empty. No-one is listening to your words.
You thought you were talking to someone, and you weren’t.
Maybe there was no-one else in the car in the first place, the other person was just a trick of the light. Or maybe she got off at an earlier stop while you were lost in your book. Or perhaps, when the lights went out, she moved into the next car so as not to be alone with just one person. Or alternatively, she moved forward because she found your story incredibly boring.
Only in the latter case were you in any sense communicating, and not very well. Otherwise, it’s just empty words into the emptiness.
Just like prayer isn’t communication. It's just talking into the darkness thinking someone is there.