As you read the words of this week’s Pulse of Spirit, I invite you into a prayerful space of openness. Feel the natural inclination of your soul to reach out spiritually. Allow yourself to feel the deepest desire of your heart of hearts. Perhaps it is a desire for friendship, or home and family. Perhaps it is a desire to share love with another. Or an urge to know fulfillment in some area of your life.

Sometimes the longing is just to touch Mother God or Father God—to feel their presence, to know they are there and that they see us and care about us.

If you let yourself feel those desires and express them to yourself and to the Divine Presence in your life, in that simple act you are acknowledging the reality of Divine Presence. You are letting it be real for you.

Sometimes, in a time of prayer like this, feelings of lack arise. You might perceive a lack of what you are praying for, or the lack of Divine Presence, immediately there for you.

Where are you? Why aren’t you here for me? How could this happen in my life? Why hasn’t this been fulfilled by now?

If you never spoke those words, admitting your own feeling of lack, you might live the rest of your life with those emotions buried deep inside you, never seeing the light of day. My experience is that when such things are spoken in a time of prayer, with openness and candor with the Divine, an answer is given, if I am open to it. What has seemed like a lack to my human soul is held within an experience of love and fulfillment. I become aware of how much I am loved from above. I realize how I am given power, inspiration, and wisdom from within. And I become aware how much Divine Being has been coming to me through people in my life. This is the message I receive:

Of course I am there for you. I always have been. I always am. Don’t you see all the ways I have come to you?

Receiving this message, and seeing the truth of it, I fill to overflowing with gratitude. I realize that my prayers are already being answered.

This is what it means to me to lead a prayerful life. It is an open, conscious engagement in a process of spiritual intimacy in which I realize what is already transpiring. And becoming more vividly aware of it, I participate more deeply in it, with love and gratitude.

I realize I am part of a prayerful exchange with Divine Being, and with other people. I offer the prayers of my soul into this intimate exchange. And I hear the prayers that come to me that are for me to fulfill. I hear the prayers of the angels of heaven that their love be known on earth. I know I am here to fulfill those prayers. I hear the prayers of my friends to know themselves as whole, as precious, as beautiful, and sacred. I feel their desire to have the gifts within them seen, and for those gifts to be given.

I picture an outer world that is guided and shaped by this prayerful inner world, full of spiritual intimacy, and the subtle energy field that is created by it. I have experiences that tell me that such an experience is entirely possible. At the same time, I realize that this is not the nature of the world at large. World culture is mostly on a different course. And even the more immediate world around me can sometimes be filled with chaos and ignorance instead of the spiritual intimacy that can shape the interior spaces of what people share and create together. Instead of being guided by an inner prayerfulness, the expression of people in words and deeds often agonizes over the lack they see all around themselves.

There are public figures whose words are full of this kind of acrimony and falsehood. Perhaps you have thought something similar to my thoughts when hearing such things. If no one listened to them or placed any significance on what they said, it wouldn’t matter very much. I can image a perfect world in which that was the case. But that is not human culture as we know it. The result is that the listener becomes as much a part of the acrimony and falsehood as the speaker. The field of soft but powerful subtle energy that could shape human culture, if we let it, is constantly undone.

The personal antidote to this public phenomenon is simple and effective. Stop placing significance in statements filled with resentment and lies. It’s not that we are ignorant people who can’t see what is going on. It’s just that we know better than to engage emotionally and energetically in someone else’s circus.

But it isn’t only in human culture at large that people’s words and deeds cut across the spiritual intimacy that brings the answer to human prayer. The same thing can happen closer to home. Spiritually unconscious people tend to agonize over the lack they see in people and circumstances. There might, in fact, be some kind of lack present. But recycling human agony through human expression doesn’t answer anyone’s prayer. It perpetuates lack. A spiritually conscious person never does that. And they never place significance in another person’s expression born out of ignorance.

We are here to be an answer to the deepest prayers of the human heart. We can only do that as agents of the Divine. Some of those deepest prayers are for an experience of home. Mother God answers those prayers from above. The heavenly home is always there for any person in any moment when they turn to it. As conscious spiritual beings, incarnate in human flesh, we have the capacity to bring Mother God’s answer to human prayers on earth. We bring it through the subtle energy field we generate together. That is the foundation for the home that people long for. And the foundation for that foundation is the prayerful spiritual intimacy we hold the space for, which must never be violated by blaming the world around us for the lack we feel. That is not prayer. It is not allowing whatever feelings of lack we might have to be filled in and uplifted. It is blame and accusation, however subtle or blatant.

Avoiding the magnification of lack and blaming others for it and building a field of soft but powerful subtle energy—this is how we become agents of Mother God and bring Her answer to the prayers of the world.