Focus Your Light Within Us
Focus your light within us—make it useful . . .
In the traditional version of this prayer, this first request was translated as, "Hallowed be thy name." A name in Hebrew tradition is meant to reflect one's essence, so when we pray this prayer, we are asking the Birther to shine into us His/Her own Trinitarian essence. We are asking the Birther to awaken within us all three of our divinely inspired centers of knowing—our minds, these temples of Sacred Wisdom, embodiments of the Divine Parent; our hearts, these sanctuaries of Sacred Love, embodiments of the Innocent Child; and, our wills/guts, our instruments of Sacred Instinct, our embodiments of the very Breath of Life.
I invite you to pause now and pray this line: Focus your light within us—make it useful.
Take a moment to picture yourself as such an open three-part container of the Divine. I know you may be tempted to rush on through this, or skip it altogether. We often prefer to read about prayer, rather than engage in it. But the reality is that your truest self is already at one with the Spirit praying within you. Why not allow that to become conscious for a moment now?
When you do that, what does it feel like in your body to ask God to focus God's light within you? Do you notice an opening, or softening? Or, is it just the opposite, evoking some constriction or closing off? What centers of knowing are you most aware of? Least aware of? Take a few moments to notice.
As an idealist (hello all 7's, 4's and 1's on the Enneagram!) who can struggle with choosing pragmatism, I LOVE the second part of this request: make it useful. From the start of this prayer, Jesus makes it clear that prayer is about action; there is no room for spiritual bypassing here!
True inner work will always result in outer fruit. Or, as 13th century Meister Eckhart put it, "The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great."
And, inner work is all about opening ourselves to Love. Inner work is what softens us, empties us, and opens us to enlarge our capacity to receive, a prerequisite for the formation of any fruit deemed useful. Inner work is about communion.
It makes me think of the profoundly creative process of photosynthesis. Authors Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker explain this intimate process this way in their book Journey of the Universe:*
Our planet is a riot of . . . communion, beginning with its gravitational relationship with the Sun. Earth has been revolving around the Sun for over four and a half billion years, and this is now a profoundly stable relationship. But the universe is not satisfied with stability alone. Over four and a half billion years, Earth has moved toward ever greater complexity and interconnectedness.
After the emergence of life itself, one of the most stunning manifestations of this deepening communion is that of photosynthesis. The key construction, requiring perhaps tens of millions of years, was a molecular assembly capable of an elegant resonance with sunlight. Like tuning forks shaped to vibrate in the presence of certain sorts of music, these special molecules, called chlorophyll, glow with energy when the light from our Sun falls upon them. The photons, when captured, lift electrons to a higher energy state, which immediately sets off a cascade of chemical events leading to a creation of the powerhouse molecules within every cell. Life thus found a process of feeding upon the Sun in a direct way, drawing in sunlight and using its energy to synthesize its component parts.
Focus your light within us, indeed, O Birther! In You we inhabit a profoundly stable relationship. And, You want more than stability. You want resonance, and attunement. You desire to lift us into a higher state. You seek to empower us at a cellular level. Focus your light within us. Synthesize us. Make us useful. Together.