These guiding metaphors by Richard Rohr provide a way to help us be present and to enter into prayer in a deeper way. Many times in our lives we are keeping vigil until something or someone is restored to life.

Watching At the Tomb: Attitudes for Prayer

Now Mary Magdalene and another Mary kept vigil there, seated opposite the tomb.  Matthew 27:61

Picture yourself, like Mary Magdalene, sitting outside the tomb of the buried Christ. It is the ultimate luminal space, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the time of ultimate rest and waiting: the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Many fruitful possibilities and entranceways are offered here. Read the list below, and try the practices that most invite or challenge you today. These might help you find your attention and your inner silence. Let it be your guiding metaphor for a good twenty-minute “sit” as you also keep vigil:

Sitting in Love.

Filling the tragic gap with pure presence, often in the presence of “nothing” or even “death.”

Note that Mary does not keep vigil alone. Prayer often needs other “Mary’s” for support.

Waiting without answers.

Hoping without evidence.

Love sustaining itself by longing.

Inner space is only created by patient watching.

The “grief work” of holding patiently, without resolution or consolation.

Prayer as watching and waiting more than doing.

Prayer as unknowing and not knowing.

Prayer of quiet.

Christ in the tomb is still the Christ (absence is its own kind of presence).

The dead Christ is still Christ. What does that connote for you? How often do you intentionally pray in the presence of a “dead” situation?

An exercise in not forcing resurrection but letting it come when it will.

Note that a “large stone is across the entranceway” but they do not try to move it.

The dead Christ is your passing display of negativity, anger, fear, and hopelessness, and your attachment to these deaths.

You must stay in your vigil until the dead Christ resurrects, that is, until you can release or detach from the reactions of your False Self. This may take two minutes or two hours.

Taken from Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self by Richard Rohr, OFM