A Love Supreme

But what is prayer?
To hold all that is human against a vast horizon that melts, dances, shimmers. To look beyond to an idea of a God, barely visible. Distorted.

The prayer-beyond (oh Lord, help me to be) becomes a prayer-to-oneself (oh my good! oh my beautiful! ... I do not falter!). Praying to a beyond, a horizon that shall never fully form but only glitter and move with every step forward. A weeping promise of perfection, deliverance, forgiveness that despite our many-tongued begging of a God initiates from the deepest humanity. God as a perfection that does not exist. The human as a struggle towards a perfection through discipline, through dedication, through a passion that could not be comprehended by any deity.

Coltrane's brilliance as an expression of this - each syllable, each phrase a prayer. But not the prayer we conceive as prostration before a blinding light - instead, the whispered promise to oneself. Staring toward all horizons, we do not see any beyond, but a merging of futures. And the figure we think we perceive striding across the plains, inhabiting the space between the earth and the sky, is not a God but ourselves. The prayer, finding no being who could answer as God, returns to us as a promise.