New Worlds Isse: NW025
By: Galen Gillotte

We move into ecstasy, You and I. You are the seed at the center of every dream I’ve ever dreamt. You are the vision of my heart. Your Name was writ upon my soul before the foundations of the world were laid. You are my first and final breath. I fall into the bliss of Your being and just melt away.

Prayer is that avenue by which we speak with Deity. Ideally it brings us to a place where even words fail, and we stand open and naked to the ravishing love of the Object of our desire. It is the Mystical Marriage in which the Lover and the beloved become one. In Book of Hours: Prayers to the God, the ecstasy of prayer may be discovered. Though Deity may be envisioned in many forms, this book presents Deity as God the Lover. It is through love that we find our deepest home with the God, and even images of carnal love may create an intimacy and intensity that allows our spirituality to blossom into being.

Pray Little, Pray Lots
This book was written for those who have had little experience with prayer, as well as for those who pray often. For the former, it offers a foundation of what is needed in order to engage in prayer: silence, solitude, and simplicity, as well as four types of prayer: the Prayer of Expectation, Prayer of Thanksgiving, Prayer of Celebration, and Prayer of Contemplation. For those who have enjoyed the experience of prayer for some time, the book offers enticing images of the God that may have been unexplored as yet but which offer fruitful sources for contemplation. The prayers are definitely Wiccan in nature, but may be used by others who may wish to have this ecstatic experience of God.

Book of Hours: Prayers to the God is a companion to my earlier work, Book of Hours: Prayers to the Goddess. As a Solitary Wiccan who comes from a Roman Catholic background, I was frustrated about the lack of prayer material available to me. I had enjoyed the structured prayer I experienced as a Catholic, but found opportunities for this type of daily prayer in the Wiccan community to be absent. My first book took over 20 years to write, as experiences of the feminine aspect of Deity slowly unfolded. Prayers to the God took only about a year!

Why? Because I had a good foundation of experiencing God’s masculine aspects and images. However, the experience of God as Lover grew apace with my growing understanding of the Goddess. This occurred because I realized that day cannot exist without night; joy without sorrow; or life without death. The Goddess cannot "stand on Her own," as it were; She must have a companion of Her heart to dance the Wheel of the Year around. In both, may wholeness and holiness be found.

The God Through the Seasons
The God may be imaged as the Son of the Goddess; He Who brings Light and hope back into the world at Yule. He is the Young Lord, who partners with the Maiden Goddess at Imbolc. He is the Hunter of the Moon Who achieves the object of His desire at Beltane. And He is the Sacrifice, Who dies that we may live, both physically and spiritually. Woven throughout is His great love for us as we celebrate the seasons—He is our Lover as we are His beloved. His passion surrounds us always.

Passion is always a part of prayer: Your bright Flame/invokes the heat;/heat of body/of desire./Fire smoldering,/building, blazing,/all consuming;/inner pyre. Or: Your eyes are full of flame./Your wings drip fire./ Within Your embrace/I am drowning,/drowning/in ecstasy. One cannot approach the God with lukewarm intention. One must be willing to plunge into the blaze of desire and to be consumed by the God’s bright passion. His loving embrace may be perilous, but only to apathetic souls. For all others, it is the consummation of all yearning.

Develop Your Prayer Life
This book is very "user friendly" for developing an active and productive prayer life. It offers Afternoon Prayers for every day and special prayers for various aspects of one’s life, such as a Meal Blessing, a Child’s Blessing, a Healing Prayer, a Prayer to Invoke Passion, and a Prayer for Peace. In addition, prayers for each of the seasonal holidays are offered and those that specifically address the Sun/Moon God. A special chapter written by a man, NiteWolf, for men offers prayers that encompass men’s roles.

Book of Hours: Prayers to the God will companion you along your journey to the God. It will take the unnamed yearning of your heart and lead it along paths both wild and strange to fulfillment and a deeper connection with the God. He will partner your soul—His Goddess, the Beloved One—throughout the year. Receive His love.
Blessed Be.