Without, within
A few months ago, I was walking down 7th Street near the arena when a young woman approached me and asked if she could pray with me. Skeptical and curious, I agreed. As I listened to her prayer, I followed the meaning of her words: a plea that I might obtain salvation through her conception of the divine, the supreme, the ordered heaven she envisioned above. I thanked her, declined her invitation to join her religion, and walked on to breakfast another block away.
I did not think much of it at the time. But that evening, in my journal, I kept returning to the odd nature of the encounter — the strangeness of receiving an unrequested prayer on a random Tuesday, on a warm summer sidewalk, from a stranger who wished for my soul in the only way she knew. Nothing I write here is aimed at her. Her sincerity was not in question. What I noticed was the form of the gesture, and what it revealed about my own deliberate distance from it.
She sought, through religious authority, outward rite, and works ordered toward her own divine truth, a blessing and assurance of life beyond death. My interest of late, however, has lain elsewhere: in the deeper, inward act of direct apprehension of the eternal — an act which, as far as I can tell, involves no hierarchical heavenly order, no supreme being, and certainly no omniscient judge with, arguably, dubious designs on humanity.
What I’m pointing to is not a private certainty that entirely dispenses with tradition, practice, or responsibility. I mean a knowledge that completely alters the knower.
And in that knowing, the doing is transformed.
In such an encounter, the ego — with its fear, its self-protection, its claim to be the whole of the self — is metamorphosed. One is, in a meaningful sense, reborn: awakened to a reality that exceeds one’s prior ordinary perception, and wholly reoriented in one's relation to self, life, death, and other people.
Yet there’s a subtle risk.
An inward glimpse of the eternal, however small, cannot remain disembodied or self-confirming. The witness must carry its truth back into the world and give it form there: in humility, compassion, truthful speech, ethical action, and the patient work of sustaining life with others. At least, that is one ideal. Rites, teachings, and communal practices may therefore serve as conduits — through which insight is remembered, tested, and made answerable to consequence — rather than as guarantees purchased from authority and conformity. The inward revelation, however rare, becomes credible only because it teaches one to inhabit the world more truthfully, rather than ignoring or abolishing it.
That morning on 7th Street, I pondered the woman who prayed for my salvation as I drank my coffee. Perhaps we were reaching for the same thing — she from without, toward a heaven I do not see above; I from within, toward what was already closer than closeness, more real than real, more human than human. The difference is that her prayer asked me to leave where I stood. The knowing I trust and practice asks only that I live more truly within it.
By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.