Last year I had the privilege of visiting one of America’s lesser-known national parks, Great Sand Dunes (on the same trip that I experienced sunrise in the San Juan Mountains). Nestled in a bay-like formation between Colorado’s soaring Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the vast Rio Grande river valley to the west lies a complex of North America’s largest sand dunes, rising seven to eight hundred feet above the valley. These dunes prove a hostile environment for people: hiking in the shifting sand is arduous, and one almost expects to see the Sarlacc Pit waiting for them upon cresting a high dune.
This landscape, captivating in its barrenness, would not exist but for wind, which sculpts the sand into intricate patterns. Under the naturalistic worldview, “wind” is merely the movement of air molecules, fueled by solar energy–just one more blind force in a universe lacking any material telos. But the Bible envisages “wind” as a fundamental creative actor; indeed, as the Creator Himself, the Spirit of God. God’s breath brings life and creation wherever it blows: it orders primordial chaos (Gen. 1) and animates all life on the planet, in particular humans, the divine image-bearers (Gen. 2). The Spirit also brings new creation and unity to a world of death and disarray, renewing His people from the inside out and re-uniting them under the banner of Christ (Acts 2). The same Spirit that hovers over all creation, the architect of the world’s natural wonders, also makes His home within every Christian. In my time at the dunes, I encountered God in a new way. At once the immanent God and the personal God were both made manifest to me, as was the realization that their phenomenological separation points to their ontological unity as the one God. The God who leads me into a deeper relationship with Him is the same God who tirelessly crafts countless grains of sand into dynamic, majestic monuments. The wind blows where it wills.
Since that experience, I have sought further contemplation of this unity of immanence and personality found in the Holy Spirit. Unsurprisingly, this process takes place through prayer. I’ve devised a way of praying which I call the “ruach prayer” (in the Hebrew Bible, the word used for God’s breath/wind/Spirit is ruach, e.g. Gen. 1:2). By no means is it a groundbreaking way to pray–it is really a fusion of other contemplative and meditative practices that have personally impacted me. I start with some of the principles of “centering prayer”, a method popular with many Christians in recent decades. I then supplement focused deep breathing, which I used for mental training back in my days of competitive swimming. My intent is to eliminate the sharp mind/body distinction that has gripped both the intellect and the spirituality of the Western world, so that both the mind and the body are attuned as one nephesh. Having spent a lot of time in Evangelical circles, where prayer too often functions merely as a mental exercise in its effect on the precant, this is a crucial shift for me. The catalyst for this practice was my time at the sand dunes, where I first experienced a unity of both mental contemplation and physical presence.
To start, I look for a place outside where I can perceive the movement of the wind, whether it be the blowing breeze on my face, the rustling and swaying of trees, or the crashing of the ocean waves. Indeed, for the prayer to be properly physical, and oriented towards the immanence of the Spirit, it must take place outside where the Spirit is moving. I sit in a meditative posture, back straight and legs crossed, with hands open or closed. I close my eyes and start with deep breathing, breathing in for roughly five seconds and exhaling for the same. At the same time, I gently pay attention to the breeze on my face, the rustling of the trees, and whatever other rhythms of movement the wind causes. In this way, I attune my senses to the Spirit that is already working all around me, and recognize that He also sustains my inmost being with every breath. He fills my lungs as I breathe in, and I contemplate His life flowing to every cell of my body as I exhale. For the duration of each exhalation I may vocalize a soft “amen”, recognizing that it is the Spirit who moves across my vocal cords and allows me to praise Him. I continue this deep breathing for five to ten minutes, until I feel aligned with the movement of the Spirit. Unlike many Eastern practices, this is not intended as an “emptying” of one’s thoughts or emotions, but instead as a filling-up of one’s entire being with the Spirit, letting Him guide us where He wills, like the waves and the trees.
At this point I relax the deep breathing and start consciously addressing God in prayer, first thanking Him for the breath with which He has never ceased to sustain us since creation. I confess my sins and ask for forgiveness, recalling that it is He who sanctifies us, and who breathes in us to craft the new creation. With my mind cleared of worldly anxieties, I then offer my problems and petitions to Him, knowing that in His manifest presence no scheme of the enemy can compare to His love, grace, and glory. I close with a brief benediction, and return to focused breathing for several deep breaths, affirming both physically and mentally the work God has done in this time. Then I slowly bring myself back into the world, lingering in the physical sensation of the wind as my mind returns to the day at hand.
My “ruach prayer” isn’t fundamentally different from many contemplative/meditative methods. I’ve wanted to make up for the lack of physical engagement in modern Evangelical prayer, and the lack of spiritual meaning associated with my deep breathing exercises on their own. Though I often fall short, in praying this way I seek to engage my entire being in communion with God. After all, if prayer is the time where we commune most deeply with our Maker and Savior, we ought to do it with all of our being–loving the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength. Perhaps this is the reason Christ often withdrew to a mountain or solitary place to pray–not that He prayed the exact way I do, but that He was modeling how we might approach God in prayer, where His immanence and personality are simultaneously discernible to us. In these times where our lives are shaped by the ubiquity of technology, the COVID crisis, and fear and uncertainty, it’s more important than ever to retreat to where the Lord is always present and moving, both outside of us and within us.
scribo discere 