Pray in Secret

When the Master Jesus speaks about how to pray, he says that the one who prays must “pray in secret.” In the experience of this writer, it is often easier to say what he does not mean than to positively define what he intends by this instruction. He does not mean simply that one must withdraw physically to a hidden location where no one can observe the act of prayer, though such withdrawal is not excluded. When the Master gives instruction, he is rarely concerned with outer arrangement alone. His words consistently point toward an inner dimension, toward a depth of awareness rather than a change of scenery. The secrecy to which he refers is not primarily architectural but interior.

When the Master speaks these words, he does so within the Sermon on the Mount, contrasting outward religious display with interior communion. “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet…” is not ultimately instruction about architecture but about awareness. The contrast is not between public and private performance alone, but between prayer as display and prayer as inward communion.

The Secret Is Not a Place but a State of Awareness

In order to explore this instruction with any clarity, it becomes necessary to consider what prayer itself is understood to be and from what state it arises. For many sincere Christians, prayer is grounded in the assumption of separation. One stands here; God is conceived as being there; and prayer becomes the attempt to bridge that distance. It is reaching upward, appealing, asking, persuading, hoping to secure what is lacking or to repair what appears broken. Whether articulated or not, beneath much devotional life lies the quiet premise of duality. God and the individual stand apart, and prayer becomes the movement between them.

Yet this was not the ground from which the Master lived or spoke. His lived awareness was not separation but union. His declaration, “I and the Father are One,” was not poetic exaggeration but the expression of his deepest KNOWING. Though he appeared as a human being moving within time and circumstance, his identity was not confined to form. He could say he was in the world, yet not of it. From such KNOWING, prayer cannot be an attempt to cross a divide, because no divide is experienced as real. Prayer, for him, would not have been striving toward the Father but abiding in the Father, not negotiation but communion already present.

This changes everything, because if prayer does not begin from separation, then its purpose is no longer to overcome distance. The focus becomes availability rather than acquisition. Instead of approaching the Divine with an agenda shaped by perceived lack, prayer becomes an inward emptying, a consenting to stand open without insistence. One does not come filled with demands but cleared of them. The word secret begins to reveal another meaning here, for it points toward a depth that cannot be grasped by the calculating mind. The secret place is entered when one releases the need to define outcomes and relinquishes the subtle effort to direct Divine activity according to personal preference.

For those who still experience separation, prayer in secret becomes the pathway through which that assumption begins to soften. As the self that believes itself alone loosens its grip, prayer shifts from asking to abiding, from seeking to consenting, from striving to resting in Presence. In that resting, nothing new is manufactured; rather, what has always been true is no longer obscured by identification with form and thought.

From Words to Wordless Communion

It is here that the deeper challenge of the Master’s invitation becomes apparent, for to pray in secret ultimately requires a movement beyond reliance on words. Words arise from thought, and thought belongs to the surface activity of the mind. Thought measures, compares, anticipates, remembers, and in doing so generates the experience of division—of “me here” and “God there.” When prayer is confined to this level, it inevitably carries the subtle tension of separation. This divided awareness has often been called the carnal mind, not as condemnation but as description of awareness identified exclusively with the realm of form.

When the Master says, “Give no thought,” the instruction seems impractical within the ordinary world of time and space, and so it is often dismissed. Yet he is not advocating carelessness but pointing beyond identification with the stream of thought as the ground of identity. To pray in secret is therefore to allow prayer to descend beneath words into that depth where awareness rests prior to mental commentary. It is not suppression of the mind but the quieting of its dominance. Beneath thought there is simple awareness, and within that awareness communion is already alive.

Wordless prayer is not barren silence but living participation. It is Being before the Divine without narrative, without performance, without the subtle effort to construct spiritual identity. The secret place is entered not by adding more words, but by allowing interior noise to fall away until what remains is Presence itself.

If this is understood, then what has been described as praying in secret may also be recognised as Christian meditation. Not as a technique imported from elsewhere, not as a discipline added to faith, but as the quiet consenting to feel the Presence within. When words fall away and the mind loosens its insistence, what remains is not absence but aliveness. The prayer that descends beneath thought becomes a simple abiding in the Divine life already given. Christian meditation, in this sense, is not the pursuit of an experience but the surrender of interference. It is the willingness to remain present without agenda, to rest without constructing spiritual identity, to feel rather than formulate.

In this way, praying in secret is not something added to prayer; it is prayer returned to its source. It is the movement from speaking to listening, from asking to allowing, from separation to felt Presence.