Satori on prayer

The most "awakening" chapter for me in Kidd's When the Heart Waits is "Concentrated Stillness." Epigraph: "There should always be more waiting than striving in a Christian's prayer." -- Evelyn Underhill

Kidd's is a Christian take on prayer as what the waiting heart does, but Buddhist meditation is the same thing, and relationships with the almighty being in other faiths is, too.

Matthew 26:36 Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His disciples, "Sit here while I go over there and pray."

Yet, "so little attention is paid in our culture to the value of waiting." (p. 123) And so says William Bridges in Transitions: "...transition is a kind of street-crossing procedure. ...move on to the other side as fast as you can. And whatever you do, don't sit down on the center line to think things over!"(Bridges, 1980 ed., p. 112) For Bridges, as for Kidd, waiting through the stages is the Way.

Wondering why she couldn't pray as she was in her dark night led Kidd to a satori: Seeing her reflection in the glass door through which was a foggy night, it came. "I was praying. My still heart, my silence, the very posture of waiting against a backdrop of darkness was my prayer." (p. 126)

Another echo, in Eliot's "Burnt Norton" (my undergraduate thesis was on "Four Quartets"): "Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is" --> Kidd's "prayer of waiting." And, to belabor allusive points, isn't this what Waiting for Godot is about?