The invocation of the spiritual

,” Prayer,Auden wrote, “is to pay attention or, shall we say, to ‘listen’ to someone or something other than oneself. Whenever a human so concentrates his/her attention—be it on a landscape, or a poem or a geometrical problem or an idol or the True God—that s/he completely forgets his/her own ego and desires in listening to what the other has to say to him, she/he is praying.” This may seem a denatured idea of prayer, but Auden took it seriously, and seems to have prayed in exactly this sense”

I sent this article to a few friends.One sent  back an elegant and beautiful  description of his view of the world and what it has within it though  being an atheist he may not pray in the [old fashioned] Christian sense.He may pray in the above sense but to him  it’s not prayer it is being alive and experiencing that

Another lapsed Catholic sent a short note saying  she wasn’t interested in God
She didn’t ask me what it meant to me or why it had seemed interesting enough to send to her.She may like me have suffered the utter boredom of a convent school

Are some of us living in a complete and enclosed world so we don’t care what interests  others? And we feel safe.After all, the boredom of the Rosary nearly drove some of us insane.That was no prayer that was rubbish to me.Yet some people have found it a help in times of trouble/Maybe just feeling the beads is nice?

I suppose in Auden’s piece he wants to be involved in humankind and the world of nature, the Universe of some aspect of that.And he also liked the invocation of the  spiritual by means of rites and rituals which has been part of our history from the start……

A bit like music or an art show….?