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September 2008
Rejoicing in Our Oneness
By Alison Flowers

Unity World Day of Prayer brings together people around the world for a vigil celebrating the power of affirmative prayer.

Within Unity, the focus on our interconnectedness is more than theoretical. Opportunities to pursue peace and healing abound as real connections are made through constant prayer, a sacred commitment of the Silent Unity prayer ministry for more than 100 years. Abundantly blessed by its belief in the one presence and power of God, Silent Unity is reaching out once again to share its rich, spiritual harvest—and rejoice in the reaping—through the fifteenth annual Unity World Day of Prayer on September 11. At the Silent Unity Chapel in Unity Village, Missouri, hundreds of Unity employees, students, guests, and volunteers will hold vigil throughout the day for all those whose names were submitted by prayer partners around the world. More than a million names are expected to be prayerfully acknowledged during the vigil.

Unity World Day of Prayer actually began as a class project for Unity ministerial students. “It’s one of those grassroots kinds of things,” said Cindy Bronson, executive assistant to Lynne Brown, vice president of Silent Unity. “It has grown from one little event with students and employees gathered around the fountains to a 24-hour activity … it’s wonderful.”

And it keeps growing. This year’s World Day of Prayer is honored to open “11 days of Global Unity, A Season of Interfaith Celebration.” Continuing through the International Day of Peace on September 21, the 11 days are to celebrate solidarity with organizations that also want to explore the possibilities of transforming our global consciousness to that of healing, peace, and sustainability.

This year’s World Day of Prayer event is the capstone of a six-day “Alter Your Life: Pray Anew” retreat, led by Unity’s SpiritPath retreat team September 7–12. On the evening of September 10 at 7 p.m., retreat participants will gather in the chapel for an opening ceremony featuring the live, meditative instrumentals of the musical group Devotion. The evening program and 24-hour interfaith vigil are open to the public. All are encouraged to participate by taking a stack of prayer lists bearing the names of those to be held in prayer and affirming each one, quietly and confidentially.

“It’s a palpable energy that you can feel,” said Bronson. “You can just sense the sacredness.”

That sacredness—the connection to God’s spirit and indeed to each other—is intensified in affirmative prayer, a hallmark of the Unity World Day of Prayer experience. Every year, Silent Unity prepares a new affirmation to concentrate our collective spiritual energy; it is a single statement that provides a spiritual focus for participants. This year’s affirmation reads: Rejoicing in our oneness with God and one another, we celebrate healing in every aspect of our lives and in the world.

One particularly powerful way healing is celebrated is through the gift of this year’s keynote speaker, Gregg Braden. Kansas City native and New York Times best-selling author of The Divine Matrix and The God Code, Braden is known worldwide for his bold redefinitions of the life-giving connection between ancient spiritual wisdom and modern science. His most recent book, released in April, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits, empowers the reader to discover his or her own power to heal and contribute to peace. Braden’s talk closes the Unity World Day of Prayer event on the evening of September 11, after which he will lead a weekend of multimedia workshops: The Divine Matrix: Bridging Time, Space, Miracles, and Belief on September 12, 7-10 p.m., and The Science of Miracles: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits, an all-day event on Saturday, September 13.

The thematic mustard seed nestling in the heart of Braden’s work is that we are part of, rather than separate from, our world. We are interconnected. Braden’s work demonstrates that through certain modalities of prayer (including a “lost mode” that Braden plans to address), we create peace in our bodies, which can then be reflected in the world. As Mahatma Gandhi famously put it, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” By being at peace, Gandhi seems to argue, so simply, that peace can be actualized.

Charles Fillmore, cofounder of Unity, similarly expressed this idea in Teach Us to Pray: “Do not supplicate and beg God to give you what you need, but realize, affirm, and absolutely know … that your thought substance and the spiritual substance of the Most High are amalgamated and blended into one perfect whole that is now being made manifest in the very thing you are asking for.”

In harmony with Fillmore’s insight, Gandhi further challenges our mode of prayer: “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.” In an age when our souls long all the more for peace and justice, our hope is in our unity. In the oneness of prayer and the singularity of a shared vision of healing, we do well to think upon that mustard seed of possibility that Jesus said could move mountains, and that the Buddha, millennia before, spoke of in a parable about inner peace. Delightful possibilities emerge spontaneously from a prayerful way of life; they are the fruits of faith. Awareness and engagement of this divine potential are the doves that the Unity World Day of Prayer endeavors to capture, only to be set free over the planet.