​Wild Geese Rising

Thinking With Gayle Hansen Browne 
about Moment-by-Moment Prayer

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​A Book Review by Jay McDaniel
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​"This way of living prayer as moment-by-moment contemplative action is like wild geese rising. When it is time to act, the person who remains attuned to the Spirit, which is love, becomes more likely to recognize the nudge and rise to action. And when an entire flock of people arises to enact well-being for all relations in the world, it is a wondrous occasion to behold.”

- Gayle Hansen Browne

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​Part I: Wild Geese Rising
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​In Wild Geese Rising: Living Prayer as Moment-by-Moment Contemplative Action, Gayle Hansen Browne develops an understanding of prayer as “beholding and befriending” God’s dream for the world as it unfolds in the moment-by-moment occasions of daily life.

​This beholding and befriending is not focused on God alone—or even solely on God’s dreams—but also on the actual world that, in each moment, is given to us through our senses and our hearts, our imaginations and memories, our hopes and dreams, and even our anxieties and fears.
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This is a world that includes other people, other animals and plants, hills and rivers, trees and stars; and that includes memories of past occurrences, present situations, and undecided possibilities for the future. Prayer, in this sense, lies in beholding—that is, seeing and feeling the presence of these diverse realities as they become part of our own present world in each here-and-now moment—and in befriending them: responding to them, and to our own most intimate possibilities as well, in a spirit of love. 

God’s dream, she suggests, is that we might live with attentive hearts: beholding the goodness, truth, and beauty that present themselves to us, and sensing that we live in a certain kind of oneness with the world itself: a "kinship of equ1librium" amid which we listen and respond, give and receive, in a way that honor the diversity and the uniqueness of the many lives we encounter: human, to be sure, and also more than human.

Accordingly, Browne begins each day with a prayer that gives concrete expression to this posture of attentiveness:
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Today, may we behold and befriend what is beautiful.
Today, may we behold and befriend what is true.
Today, may we behold and befriend what is good.
Today, may we behold and befriend the oneness
that exists within the magnificent diversity of life.
Oh God, how manifold are the possibilities for this new day.
May we behold and befriend the aims of love. Amen.

​In the spirit of open and relational theology, Browne makes clear that the God who has dreams for us is a God of unbounded love rather than domination.  We experience the divine life as a palpable presence: not merely as an idea in the mind, but as a love-energy—a cosmic yet individually tailored breathing—that is both around us and within us.

The book is addressed primarily to a Christian audience, one of its great strengths lies in how it links this understanding of prayer with diverse forms of prayer in the Christian tradition, including petitionary prayer, prayers of praise, and prayers of confession. These practices, Browne suggests, are best understood not in relation to a God preoccupied with reward and punishment, but to a God whose deepest dream is the flourishing of each and every life—and of all life together—as it unfolds within an interconnected, evolving whole with planetary and even galactic dimensions.

At the heart of her way is the act of paying attention (being 'mindful') in the present moment:

With practice, we can learn to pay attention to this flow of divine and creaturely love energy within and all around us. We can pay attention mentally to our thoughts regarding what is happening at any given moment. We can pay attention physically to our body’s reactions to the events of the moment. We can pay attention spiritually to the emotions engendered by our experience of the moment. With practice, we can learn to recognize the fleeting insights, the gentle “nudges,” and the instinctive urges that invite us to pay attention to an inward energy that always flows in the direction of love. We can learn to use these mind, body, and spirit signals as signs that the energy of divine and creaturely love is “whispering” something of significance. And we can pause to invite the influence of this love energy to enter our awareness.

​For those seeking a contemplative and prayerful way of living in the world—a way centered in love, attentive to the aliveness of things, marked by a gentleness that moves beyond the freneticism of consumer culture and the darker forms of ideological zeal, including certain expressions of evangelical zeal—Browne’s book offers both comfort and guidance. You will sense this not only in the content of her writing, but in its spirit. Nowhere does she 'argue.'  Her book consists of many "lures for feeling," to use the language of process philosophy and theology. I turn, then, to some process reflections on her book
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​Part II: Process Reflections

God as Deep Listening

You will hear a great deal of process philosophy in this approach, of which Browne is fully aware. The very idea that God works in our lives, in the world around us, and in the universe as a whole through “dreams” resonates with a process intuition: that we discover God in and through fresh possibilities arising in the immediacy of each moment of our lives—possibilities for goodness, truth, beauty, and sensitivity to oneness. This resonates strongly with what many process philosophers and theologians describe as the divine lure at work in the world. This is how God is actively influential in the world.

Less pronounced in Browne’s account, however, is an emphasis on the receptive side of God: that dimension of God which feels the feelings of each and every sentient being, on its own terms and for its own sake, and which, as Alfred North Whitehead famously writes, is “a fellow sufferer who understands.” Whitehead speaks of this as the consequent nature of God, because it is consequent to (or comes after) what happens in the world itself.

Most of us know the power of such listening because the need to be heard—to be genuinely received—is among the most powerful needs in human life. To be listened to is to be affirmed as real, as worthy of attention, as mattering. This is why listening can be healing even when no advice is given and no solutions are offered. It is, as we might say, the listening side of love.

Good counselors, chaplains, therapists, and trusted friends understand this intuitively. They know that listening is not passive. It is an active, disciplined openness—an act of hospitality toward another’s inner world. It requires patience, humility, and the willingness to be changed by what one hears. In this sense, deep listening is already a form of compassion.

Process theology invites us to imagine God as the supreme instance of this kind of listening. God does not stand above the world as a distant observer, nor over against it as a controller of events. God listens from within the unfolding life of the universe, receiving each moment as it becomes, feeling it from the inside. Every cry of pain, every whisper of hope, every unspoken longing is taken into the divine life—not erased, not overridden, but held, remembered, and honored.

This divine listening does not negate God’s role as a lure toward new possibilities; rather, it grounds it. God’s invitations to the future arise out of God’s reception of the past and present. What God offers next is shaped by what God has heard. In this way, divine love is not abstract or generic but exquisitely responsive—tuned to the particularities of each life, each situation, each moment.

To say that God listens deeply is to say that nothing is lost—not the suffering that seemed meaningless, not the love that went unrecognized, not the quiet acts of courage no one else saw. All of it enters into a larger listening, a larger remembering, a larger compassion. The universe, in this vision, is not indifferent to our lives. At its heart is an ear, a receptivity, a love that listens all the way down. And perhaps this is why learning to listen—to one another, to the more-than-human world, to our own depths—can feel like a spiritual practice. In listening well, we participate, however modestly, in the listening life of God.

Silent Prayer

Browne’s emphasis in Wild Geese Rising falls more heavily on how God influences the world than on how the world, in turn, influences God. Her work could be enriched, I believe, by a complementary emphasis on God as the Deep Listening of the universe.

One way that this Listening is directly felt in human life is in prayer that seeks to communicate with God in some way. In the act of reaching out to God in words and feelings, there is a sense of being listened to. Still another way this Listening is felt is in silent prayer, where the aim is not so much to communicate with God or to respond to God’s guidance, but to rest in the arms of a listening love deeper than words.

Silence is mentioned only once in her book, and yet, as you read her book, you will sense that this kind of prayer would also be important. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” writes Augustine in the Confessions. The rest, I suggest, is not a matter of being guided by God but rather being embraced by God, with an accompanying sense of peace and safety. At some point in the life of contemplative action, there must also be a sense of comforting presence—a comfort that undergirds the moment-by-moment nature of the active prayerful life.

​Moments

This takes me, then, to Browne’s treatment of “moments” in moment-by-moment prayer. She is quite explicitly influenced by process philosophy and its idea that life consists of “moments of experience,” and she offers a beautiful account of entering into the world of a single moment. And yet, when it comes to considering the whole of a person’s life, she seems a bit torn between two options. As she writes:
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​This pattern holds whether we think of rapid-fire moments that last only a few seconds or consider an entire lifetime as a “moment” made up of a collection of chronological moments, building one upon another. All moments bear this same pattern of becoming, perishing, novel becoming. And each moment nests within the next moment like a collection of progressively larger figures in a Russian nesting doll.

​For my part, I do not find either of these two options helpful in thinking about the whole of a person’s life—neither the rapid-fire option of discrete moments nor the lifetime-as-one-moment option. The rapid-fire option does not capture or resonate with the sense of continuity over time that most of us feel. It assumes a third-person or spectator perspective of “watching” rapid-fire moments in the mind’s eye, or perhaps on a chalkboard, without really asking who is doing the watching. From the inside of lived experience, we do not encounter ourselves as a flickering sequence of detached instants.

And the second option—that of saying our whole lifetime is a single moment—does not do justice to the recognition that our lives truly consist, among other things, of different phases and stages and, yes, moments. If we are forty-two, we are indeed different from who we were at age two, twelve, twenty-two, and thirty-two. If these times in our lives consisted of discrete “occasions of experience,” to use Whitehead’s phrase for moments, it seems odd to say that we are really but one moment. Somehow, we are more than one moment, even as we are always living in a moment.

We are Always Here and Now
and Always More than Who We Were

I want to suggest an image that might help make phenomenological sense of the moment-by-moment nature of human life: that of being akin to the crest of a wave. The crest is always here and now, always the present moment—and yet it is never the same from one instant to the next. It carries forward what has come before, it is shaped by deeper currents beneath it, and it is always moving, always becoming. In this way, the crest is one moment, but it is also continuous with other moments, forming a lived trajectory rather than a series of isolated points.

This image, I suggest, preserves what is most valuable in Browne’s emphasis on moment-by-moment prayer while avoiding the difficulties posed by both the rapid-fire model and the lifetime-as-one-moment model. It allows us to affirm immediacy without fragmentation, and continuity without flattening the rich differentiation of a human life. And it allows us to dive, with Browne, into the immediacy of a given moment as an exemplar of what life is about.

When Browne describes a moment, her focus is on how a given moment is preceded by pre-existing conditions—personal, cosmic, and divine—and how, upon receiving these conditions, it can be mindful of them and discern their sources and values, along with possibilities for responding; how it can then respond by making a decision for some possibilities over others, after which its subjective immediacy perishes and it becomes an influence on the future.
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Everything is Present in Everything Else

Nevertheless, there are things that Whitehead and process philosophers say about moments that she does not note. The first is that given moments in a person’s life consist of feelings not only of past personal experience and cosmic forces, but also of other people, plants and animals, landscapes and waterways. These realities are not simply influences upon us, as if they were entirely outside us; they are, in Whitehead’s words, “present in” us under one or another of their aspects. He puts it this way:
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“The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum, ‘A substance is not present in a subject.’ On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact, if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity.’”

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​Thus a given moment of experience is, in his words, “a concrescence of the universe.” This idea has radical implications for a sense of oneness. It means that oneness is much more than the way entities in the world are entangled with one another; it is also how they are “one” in the immediacy of each unique moment.
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Everything is More than Everything Else

A second idea is that each moment contains within itself a spark of self-enjoyment. A moment is not simply an object in the world; it is, says Whitehead, a concrescing subject with its own self-concern. He puts it this way:
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​“The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the ‘self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.’”

And, again:
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“An actual entity considered in reference to the privacy of things is a ‘subject’; namely, it is a moment of the genesis of self-enjoyment. It consists of a purposed self-creation out of materials which are at hand in virtue of their publicity.”

Here there is still another kind of oneness: that of an individual entity, a concrescing subject, with its own life, which seeks to enjoy that life. 

Each Creature has Intrinsic Value

This emphasis on self-enjoyment lies at the very heart of Alfred North Whitehead’s theory of value, as explained by John Cobb in Whitehead’s Theory of Value. A recognition that other living beings are subjects of their own lives—and not merely objects for others—and that their aim is to find, in Whitehead’s words, “satisfying intensity” relative to the concrete circumstances of their lives, can further deepen Browne’s understanding of oneness.

​The point is that, even as all sentient beings are profoundly interconnected, they also possess unique and irreducible worth--intrinsic value, to use a process phrase. At our best, we behold them in this way: attentive to their incomparable singularity and responsive to their own inward striving for fulfillment even as we also see them as sacraments and revelations of God.

​Contemplating Nature

Another contemplatively minded writer, the late Kallistos Ware, gives eloquent voice to this sensibility in The Orthodox Way.
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The contemplation of nature has two correlative aspects. First, it means appreciating the “thusness” or “thisness” of particular things, persons and moments. We are to see each stone, each leaf, each blade of grass, each frog, each human face, for what it truly is, in all the distinctness and intensity of its specific being...Secondly, the contemplation of nature means that we see all things, persons and moments as signs and sacraments of God. In our spiritual vision we are not only to see each thing in sharp relief, standing out in all the brilliance of its specific being, but we are also to see each thing as transparent: in and through each created thing we are to discern the Creator.

Kallistos, Bishop of Diokleia . The Orthodox Way (p. 138). St Vladimir's Seminary Press. Kindle Edition. 

​My sense is that Browne would be fully on board with this understanding of the contemplation of nature. She would add that nature is an evolving whole of many dimensions: galactic, geological, biological, and cultural. Here she is influenced by the cosmic vision of Teilhard de Chardin as developed by Ilia Deleo. But the cosmic perspective in no way invalidates the thusness and thisness - the dignity - of each individual: each frog, each blade of grace. Nor does it undercut the dignity of each person. With their affirmation of the intrinsic value of each actual entity and each moment of experience, process philosophers will heartily agree.

Taking Care of all our Kin

But there is still another kind of oneness important to Browne that also finds resonance in process philosophy. It is the oneness of the family of life on earth: the kinship we humans have with one another and with all creatures. In Browne's words:

"There is one family but a host of diverse ancestors. There is one world but a magnificent diversity of life that dwells therein. There is a way of balancing, a way of seeking, a way of walking, a way of listening, a way of giving, a way of receiving,..When we respect and celebrate this kinship with all relations, our aim remains focused on the well-being and flourishing of all our kin. And we come to realize that the broader the diversity within the kinship, the stronger the “tribe” or “clan” becomes. Day by day, opportunities abound to behold and befriend the kinship within the magnificent diversity of oneness that already exists." (Gayle Hansen Browne)

What can it mean, then, to live in ways that are healthily related to all our kin? The ideal, for most process philosophers and theologians, is to try to cultivate local communities and larger societies that embody the spirit of what they call “ecological civilizations.” Such communities and societies live with respect and care for the community of life, humans much included. They are creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, humane to animals, good for the earth, with no one left behind. They need the kinds of people, with the kinds of qualities of heart and mind, who can live into such communities. Browne’s book points toward just this kind of person: a prayerful person whose life is a living prayer of moment-by-moment contemplative action.

This raises the question of whether the spirit of moment-by-moment contemplative action can be embodied by groups of people as well as by individuals. And if so, where might those groups best be found? Perhaps in churches or synagogues or mosques—but perhaps in other sites as well, beyond traditional religious settings.

They will need to think beyond moments. They will need to think in terms of decades and years and generations. They will need to have a sense of deep history. They will need forms of governance that are conducive to listening and caring, leaving no one behind. They will need economic systems that are supportive and do not leave people stretched, almost broken, due to a lack of resources.
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This is a tall order. But my hope is that Browne and others will help point us not only toward contemplative individuals and contemplative moments, but toward contemplative communities and, if truth be told, a more contemplative world. This world need not be essentially religious, or it can include many different religions, but it will have to emphasize listening—feeling with—as a cardinal virtue of the life well lived.

Part III: What about Evil?

Browne and process philosophers alike do not think that God causes evil. God is all-loving but not all-powerful, all luring and (process philosophers add) all listening, but not all controlling - not even in principle. Still it remains the case that the world we encounter in a life of prayer, moment by moment, is includes evil. What might Browne, and for that matter process philosophers, say about befriending it? 

In a process context, evil is not a single, simple thing. It names at least two closely related but distinct realities.

First, it names moral evil: the harming of others through intention or omission, whether by individuals or by groups, institutions, and societies. This includes acts of cruelty, exploitation, neglect, domination, and indifference, as well as the systemic patterns that perpetuate them. Moral evil involves responsibility, agency, and the misuse—or failure to use—power in ways that damage the well-being of others.

Second, evil also names what is often called natural evil: forms of suffering and missed potential that arise not from human intention but from the workings of the natural world itself. This includes earthquakes, floods, disease, genetic disorders, accidents, ecological breakdown, and other processes that can devastate lives. From a process perspective, these are not punishments or divine intentions, but tragic features of a universe that is creative, evolving, and not fully controllable. Natural evil includes debilitating suffering for which no instrumental good can compensate, as well as unrealized possibilities—lives truncated, relationships never formed, capacities never developed, and forms of beauty, joy, and contribution that never come to be.

To speak of befriending evil, then, is immediately troubling. It cannot mean condoning harm, excusing injustice, or reconciling oneself to cruelty. Nor can it mean romanticizing suffering, whether moral or natural, or absorbing it into a narrative in which “everything happens for a reason.” Any contemplative posture that dulls moral clarity or weakens resistance to injustice—or indifference to preventable suffering—would, from a process perspective, be deeply suspect.

And yet the language of befriending raises a genuine spiritual question. If contemplative action involves deep listening, radical honesty, and a refusal to turn away from reality as it is, then what does it mean to relate truthfully to evil—both moral and natural—without either denying it or being consumed by it?

One possibility is that befriending evil refers not to befriending harm itself, but to refusing to disown or repress the reality of suffering and loss, including the grief that accompanies missed potential. It may mean allowing the full weight of pain, anger, sorrow, and lament to be felt and named, rather than bypassed, explained away, or prematurely resolved. In this sense, befriending is closer to staying with than to approving: a disciplined willingness to remain present to what is unbearable, without false consolation.

Nothing is Erased

From a process perspective, this resonates with the idea that nothing that happens is simply erased. Moral evils and natural tragedies alike—along with the unrealized goods they foreclose—enter into the ongoing life of the world and into the divine life, not as goods, but as realities to be carried, felt, and responded to. To be contemplative, then, may involve learning how to hold moral clarity and compassion together: resisting injustice where resistance is called for, alleviating suffering where possible, mourning what cannot be restored, and accompanying those who suffer when no remedy is available.

Still, this remains an unresolved tension. How to be radically compassionate without becoming morally lax; how to face suffering and missed potential without clinging to them; how to respond to a world that is both creative and dangerous without despair or denial—these are not problems with tidy solutions. They are ongoing discernments, lived out moment by moment, by finite beings seeking to respond faithfully within a complex and wounded world. In this sense, the question of “befriending evil” may itself be one that contemplative practice does not answer once and for all, but continually returns us to humility, courage, and careful judgment.

Part IV: Love and Beauty

I close with a word about love and beauty.

In Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead asks whether there is a crowning experience in the journey of a soul, and he proposes that it is a sense of Peace—not that everything happens as it should have, or that everything was wonderful, but that there is, in his words, a Harmony of Harmonies in which all things are unfolded. This is what, in Process and Reality, he calls the consequent nature of God, and what above I called the Deep Listening.

He adds that an experience of this peace involves a relinquishment of self-preoccupation and acquisitiveness, a surpassing of personality, and a trust in the efficacy of beauty. The beauty of which he speaks includes suffering and thus a sense of what he calls “tragic beauty.” This peace does not arise from mastery over life or from the successful management of events, but from a widening of perspective in which the self loosens its grip and allows itself to be gathered into a larger whole. It is a peace born not of certainty, but of trust: trust that the universe is not finally hostile to value, and that the work of love, however fragile, participates in a beauty deeper than immediate outcomes.
In this way, tragic beauty names a form of reconciliation without denial—a harmony that does not erase discord but holds it, remembers it, and gives it a place within a larger pattern of meaning.

Recall the prayer with which Browne begins each day. It begins: “Today, may we behold and befriend what is beautiful.” She then turn to truth, goodness, and oneness.

In life there are so many forms of beauty. There is sublime beauty, felt in experiences that overwhelm us with vastness or depth—starlit skies, mountain ranges, the immensity of time itself. There is natural beauty, present in forests and fields, rivers and oceans, animals and plants, and the intricate patterns of the living Earth. There is relational beauty, found in moments of genuine connection, forgiveness, shared laughter, or quiet companionship. There is tender beauty, present in small acts of care: comforting a child, sitting with the grieving, tending the sick or the lonely. There is moral beauty, seen in courage, integrity, and the willingness to stand with others at personal cost. There is artistic beauty, expressed in music, poetry, painting, dance, and story—forms that give shape to feeling and meaning. And let us add tragic beauty: the beauty that does not turn away from loss, suffering, or failure, but holds them within compassion and memory, affirming that even what is broken is not without value.

In Whitehead's philosophy, truth and goodness themselves are forms of beauty. Truth is beautiful insofar as it discloses reality honestly and fully, without distortion or evasion. Goodness is beautiful insofar as it contributes to harmony, intensity, and the well-being of others. Beauty, in this sense, is not ornamental or secondary; it is the most inclusive value of all. Indeed, Whitehead goes so far as to suggest that beauty is the one self-justifying value—the value that needs no further justification beyond itself. Truth matters because it is beautiful; goodness matters because it is beautiful.

Seen in this light, the first line of Browne’s daily prayer - to “behold and befriend what is beautiful” - includes all that comes after. It is not a sentimental aspiration but a profoundly metaphysical one. It is a commitment to live in response to the deepest aim of the universe: to participate, moment by moment, in the creation and preservation of beauty—in all its forms, including those shaped by struggle, care, loss, and love.

From a process perspective, the title of Browne's book - Wild Geese Rising - is perfect. It is an image, borrowed from Kierkegaard, of wild geese rising, albeit in ways amplified by Celtic Christianity, that reflects the active, wild, and vibrant side of the contemplative life. She writes:

​“In Celtic Christian tradition, ‘Wild Goose’ represents the Holy Spirit. The image captures that certain ‘wildness’ in the Spirit of God alive amid life. Biblical and religious traditions refer to that same wildness when speaking of the Holy Spirit as wind and fire. With wildness comes risk. It is elemental. It is energetic. It rises to action in response to what life needs—like wild geese rising to fly when it is time to migrate.

Tamed geese do not fly. They may flap their wings a bit but never really take off.
Today, it is still through this way of living life open and attuned to the Spirit that one is able, moment by moment, to discern and put into action what the Spirit knows is most necessary and possible at any given time and in any given place for the well-being of the world.

​This way of living prayer as moment-by-moment contemplative action is like wild geese rising. When it is time to act, the person who remains attuned to the Spirit, which is love, becomes more likely to recognize the nudge and rise to action. And when an entire flock of people arises to enact well-being for all relations in the world, it is a wondrous occasion to behold.” ((Gayle Hansen Browne)

I must say that I love this image, and that Browne’s Wild Geese Rising will make us all want to fly in just this way. To this I add that there is beauty in wild geese resting, too: sleeping at night while floating on the water or resting along the shoreline. The image of wild geese sleeping can complement the image of wild geese flying. They sleep in the deep listening, surrounded by the Spirit, and they fly when prompted to move by the Spirit in creativity. There is love energy in both: in the sleeping and in the flying, 

Together, these images suggest a way of life that knows when to rest and when to rise, when to listen and when to act—a rhythm of contemplative attentiveness and responsive movement that lies at the heart of living prayer as moment-by-moment contemplative action.