Prayer As Having Wings.........

      A LENTEN PILGRIMAGE   Rev. Fr. K M George 

 The  Wings 

Human beings are winged creatures! 

Or so they dream to be. From the time of the Wright brothers in the late 19th century to that of space shuttles and the solar powered experimental airplane now flying around the globe, humanity has been perfecting the art of flying. 

Religious mythology is replete with flying beings and even airplanes like our puranic "Pushpaka Vimana".

The Christian tradition, however, has always held that the soul has wings and is capable of rising to the heavenly heights. We are taught that the soul is weightless, invisible and unaffected by the power of gravity. It is probably this spiritual soul-force within us that make us resolute flight-aspirants.

"Those who wait on the Lord will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles.." (Isaiah 40:31)

The Lenten prayers describe prayer as having wings.

"Prayer is love-ful: unless love lifts it up its wings are weak". 

The ascetics and people who genuinely observe fasting witness to the body's light-weight experience. In other words, the soul's character is transferred to the body which is naturally heavy and pulled down by the earth's gravity. There is a phenomenon of 'levitation', the gift of rising gently from the ground while in prayer or meditation attested to by certain spiritual figures.

We are not focusing here on the physical rising but simply mention that even that is reportedly possible. We are concerned about the lifting up of our inner person to the heights of a new awareness of our spiritual gifts through fasting and prayer.

Interpreting the experience of Adam and Eve in paradise before the fall and on earth after the fall, the Fathers like St Gregory of Nyssa would say that the physical body of our first parents, which was weightless and transparent in paradise, became heavy, opaque and thus subject to the forces of nature on earth. So the spiritual struggle of humanity has always been to overcome this slavery of the body to the material forces, and to rise to its original transparency and lightness. In the observation of fasting and prayer and other spiritual exercises, we make an attempt to subordinate the instinctual natural drives like hunger, thirst and sex to our higher goals of spiritual soaring and transcendence. We also need to be liberated from our inclination to debasing passions like power, pleasure, possessiveness, and aggressiveness.

So spiritual exercises like fasting and prayer need to develop wings in order to climb high levels of experience. According to the best of the Gospel tradition, love alone generates those wings.