“…we are put on this earth a little space that we might learn to bear the beams of love.”

William Blake

There is so much that could be said about William Blake's poem, ‘The little Black Boy’, especially about the ignorance of racism and prejudice of any kind.

But here I would like to focus on how this line in particular relates to the life of prayer and specifically, the prayer of the heart as described in the literature of Orthodox Christianity.

I first ran across this line, as probably many others have, in the introduction of Thomas Merton’s last book, ‘Contemplative Prayer', shortly before his untimely death, wherein he was beginning to discover the Jesus Prayer as practiced by the Orthodox Christian Hesycasts.

The line has stuck with me ever since and serves as the best description of the life of prayer that I have ever heard.

Prayer is a doorway into a direct experience of the love of God; the love that God has for each of us, a love so overwhelming that it is difficult, if not impossible to bear.

There is a line in the ‘Song of Songs’ by King Solomon in the Old Testament, which speaks about being ‘Wounded by love' and a prayer by St Basil the Great that we say every day at the sixth hour, wherein we ask along with him, that God would “pierce our souls with longing for Thee…”. Both of these refer to this experience of ‘bearing the beams of love’.

It can be said that the entire Spiritual Life is nothing more than an attempt to decrease our resistance and increase our capacity to bear these beams of love.

One can not really have a clear picture of just how fallen we have become until we experience directly our incapacity and resistance, bordering on a rebellious refusal, to bear the beams of love.

In fact, it is this realization which fosters in us the true humility which makes a genuine Spiritual Life possible.

And then finally, we can begin to speak about the other sense of the words, ‘to bear' as in ‘to Carry'.

To be able to begin to bear the degree of the love that God has for us inevitably causes us to love God with all of our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and finally, to truly love our neighbor as ourselves - and to carry the love of God to each other.