Although Sonny and Cher so many years ago had a completely different connotation for this simple three-word phrase, “I’ve got you,” I have begun to find it preeminently useful in expressing prayerful reality and intention. Before I put this into a form that can be used as a practice, let me try to explicate and share with you the new and deeper meaning this phrase has come to take on for me.

In both my early childhood training as well as in my professional training for ordained ministry, I was raised with an established pattern for intercessory and petitionary prayer. In a church worship service, at the time for intercessory prayers, names of those who were having special needs would be read aloud and/or listed in the bulletin. In the best possible sense, they were being remembered within the context of the worshipping community. But if one were to take the form quite literally, these names were being lifted up to God, who might then intervene in some sort of extraordinary way in order to bring healing to them. This kind of petitionary prayer, then, had three points that included a hoped-for outcome: It began with (1.) my expressed concern, either on my own or within a worship service; (2.) a hearing by God who apparently needed to be reminded or nudged in some sort of way by my articulated prayer, and (3.) an executed action on the part of God in response to my prayer.

I suppose this made certain sense based on the theological system within which it operated. But this worldview is based on separation—me being separate from others and me being separate from God. It also had no small amount of presumption hidden with it. Was I actually pointing out to an omniscient and omnipotent God something that God should pay attention to and was not…? Was this something that God was overlooking…?

Without necessarily criticizing or belittling this worldview (although maybe I already have!), many of us are finding that we simply desire something deeper. When we may have experienced through spiritual practice or otherwise the felt sense that we are an integral part of a greater Whole… When we may have sensed that all of creation is tingling with a vibrational aliveness to which we too are resonating… When we may have sensed ourselves as part of a vast exchange in which everything is flowing into everything else… When we may have detected and experienced a deeper river of life running as an animated current beneath our narrative selfhood… When we may have seen and tasted any of these deeper realities — a whole new approach to petitionary prayer may be necessary. And that’s what this practice seeks to provide.

Song List

• Somewhere In Between – August Wilhelmsson – 2:31

• Serenity (O Magnum Mysterium) – Ola Gjeilo, Matthew Sharp, Kristen Kvalvaag – 5:08

• The Book of Jen – Tedosio –2:47

• Ancient Pines – Loreena McKennitt – 3:34

• The Gift – Gaven Luke – 2:38

• Northern Lights – Ola Gjeilo, Voces8 – 4:08

• Deep Field: Earth Choir – Eric Whitacre, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Eric Whitacre Singers, Virtual Choir #5 – 4:54

• Sleep - Richter – 2:00