Month: July 2024

“Prayer should not be transactional, rather it should be transformational” 

In a lifetime our prayer may take many forms of expression. Some of which will be words and actions, others heartfelt joy or deep suffering to which we yield in the spirit (as best we can). We may experience everything from bliss to abject misery. In these times our prayer may change from songs of joy to tears of despair. 

It may seem, particularly in relation to specific requests, that our words go unheeded and unanswered. The issue does not lie with God but with our thoughts and attitudes regarding the best outcome of our prayer. 

Though we express ourselves in words and actions, prayer is a relationship in which the communion rather than the mental, physical or verbal content is transformative. God is unchanging. It is we who are refined by the ever deepening relationship which contemplative prayer enables.  

This is why silence and surrendered stillness is so powerful. When we let go of the desire to direct our own destiny, we enter a sacred space in which the Holy Spirit communes with our Spirit and we may rest; as the Divine work of transformation and ever deepening love and trust helps us transcend our physical, emotional and spiritual limitations. It is the nature of seeds, in time, to break ground and bear fruit, in the same way this unseen, unfelt miracle of growth in the ground of our being can lead to the manifestation of the fruits of the Spirit in our lives. 

Text © K. Marsh 01/11/2023 

Photo © H Lems

Picture and text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt

If you gaze into the fire of the Sacred Heart, your own core will be broken into tiny pieces every day. Even if you decided not to watch the news, not to open the scrolls, if you closed your eyes and sat, maybe especially if you closed your eyes and sat, with your small yes in the silence, wouldn’t your heart be shattered by the presence of the loveliness of a hurting world? By the soft crying of the swifts circling in the air, searching for home, and the beauty of roses, spilling out their flames onto the ground?

Couldn’t you sense, then, the heart you are breaking with and into? There is a centre, a fulcrum, a crossways, a holding, an anchor. It is here, at the heartwood, in the groans of Spirit, a pained love so magnanimous that it never ceases to be cracked open, over and over, like a flower that blooms and opens to harshness, and chooses to blossom again the next day, knowing the effort will force death? Like eggshells hatching over and again inside one another, without seeing the freedom they are birthing, as cosmic Russian dolls.

And each of these mortalities, the quiet and the vicious, creates another layer, another crinoline surround, a nebula within those crinkling into fire before it, till this heart is full and overflowing into other universes, even as its centre burns to ash and rises again. An outpouring, a constant cataract of seeing, feeling, bursting, and from all of this, a love unthinkable, too enduring to grasp. And yet we sit and sense the edges of it, in our small pauses for prayer. We offer our song and our cries and our petals to this One, this Everything, this Love. And we too, become flame.

Picture and text © Keren Dibbens-Wyatt

About Keren Dibbens-Wyatt

Keren Dibbens-Wyatt is a chronically ill writer and artist with a passion for poetry, mysticism, story and colour. She is a contemplative in the Christian tradition who writes to encourage others into knowing the Lord more intimately, as well as to share the poetic ponderings of her heart. Keren suffers from M.E. (myalgic encephalomyelitis) which keeps her largely out of the trouble she would doubtless get into otherwise.

Keren’s work features regularly on spiritual blogs and in literary journals. She has published a number of books which can be found on Amazon and all the usual booksellers. Keren lives in South East England and is mainly housebound by her illness.