Without a drink, my consciousness was painful. For five days I had been drinking around the clock, unable or unwilling to fight the craving for another drink. I squinted my eyes shut, willing sleep to come, and with sleep, oblivion. I had no alcohol to put me back to sleep and without a drink I would lie there, sleepless. I woke with a start and reached for the bedside bottle to drink myself back to sleep. My newly intimate God took a hand in my affairs. As I mustered my courage to speak of difficult things, I felt my difficulties diminish. Praying with candor, I felt God to be welcoming. As I trusted, God felt to me to be trustworthy. As I spoke of all of me, I experienced faith. No longer tailoring my prayers to please a distant God, I prayed now with greater ease. As I trusted to God the secrets of my heart, I sensed that God was accepting all of me. Where before I had prayed begrudgingly, “Thy will be done,” dreading the worst, I now began to sense God as truly benevolent. I cannot convey to you the relief I felt, knowing that I was being authentic. After all, I was now candidly “talking” to God. No longer content with formal prayers, I began to pray with greater confidence. This was, for me, a flier into a prayer that worked. I was speaking in my own words, speaking with honesty. I found myself feeling assured God had heard my prayer. I was speaking as an intimate-even as a lover might speak. Please help me.” I experienced relief at being so plainspoken. The advice to be more colloquial found me praying more intimately, and not on my knees. I was raised Catholic, and had spoken of using a formal prayer and saying it on my knees. “Speak to God in your own words,” a sage advised me four decades ago, as I was struggling in early sobriety. We will explore the possibility that we can convene with a god of our understanding-and then we will experiment with talking to this Higher Power, however we choose to define it. In the six weeks that follow, we will begin by examining the “God concept” we were raised with. In writing this book, which spanned a cold and snowy New Mexico winter, I wrote, and I prayed-and I talked to my friends and colleagues about prayer.Īt the core of our relationship to God is our understanding of God. There are as many definitions of God-and prayer-as there are people to define it. “God” and “prayer” can be loaded words, often associated with an organized religion that we may or may not have broken from. That’s simple enough, and yet for many people, prayer is a difficult subject. “Prayer is talking to God,” so the adage goes.

Seeking wisdom julia cameron