The Distances in Which We Live

This essay deploys the insights of philosophical hermeneutics to approach a better understanding of the practice of prayer and its effects. Its arguments have a dual purpose: to achieve a wider appreciation of the disclosive powers both of prayerful practice and of philosophical hermeneutics as a phenomenological investigation into the revelatory powers of human experience. Our arguments assume the importance of prayer as a phenomenological occurrence. The essay offers a focus on the structural elements of such experience and does not presume to provide a hermeneutical analysis of the role of prayer in religious liturgies whether they be Christian or Buddhist. Our attention is on something more fundamental––i.e., an experience of opening, which, though it may be initiated and nuanced by given liturgical practices, nevertheless precedes them ontologically. This central concern with opening involves, we argue, experiencing a poignant shift of orientation, a shift that is not to do with religious practice alone since it is also a feature of literary, musical, and visual aesthetics. With regard to such a transformational shift, it is frequently overlooked that coming to understand a subject-matter is less to do with achieving an endpoint but more with a direct experience of transition.