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I am still asking myself the question: Do I pray? I believe that the answer is, “I am learning how.”
I laughed when a talk show host recently asked a little girl performing back flips on her show, “How did you ever learn to do all of that?!” and the girl responded, out of breath, “Practice.”
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Prayer is a truly powerful thing, and represents our spiritual connection with the Creator.
Prayer is our time to give thanks for the blessings we have been given and to ask for help for those in need. Prayer is one of the most important aspects of our lives, and, unfortunately, it is one aspect we often neglect.
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When my wife and I adopted our daughter Mattéa as an infant, we knew that we wanted to build something into our lives together in the way of prayer or ritual. Nothing too formal or fancy, but something that regularly reminded us that we belonged to something larger than our own little selves. We settled on singing a table grace at dinner:
Thank you for this food, this food,
This glorious, glorious food
And the animals, and the vegetables,
And the minerals that made it possible.
This works for us. It covers the basics. We need to say thank you for what we are given—the animals, the vegetables and the minerals which are constantly in interaction with us, and on which our lives depend. Just who or what we are giving thanks to doesn’t matter so much. That bit can remain open. Perhaps it’s the Source of Life, or the Evolutionary Process, or the Interdependent Web. Maybe how each of us pictures it, or doesn’t picture it, changes over time. Frankly, we don’t talk about it much—we just sing, and then eat. Sometimes we toss in a thank you for the cooks, although technically the cook is covered under the “animals” clause.
One day, when she was perhaps seven or eight, we got to the end of the song and Mattéa threw her hands up in the air and hollered “Boom!” Kelsey and I were, needless to say, perplexed. “Boom?” we asked, “Why boom?” “It’s the fireworks,” declared Mattéa, in a matter-of-fact tone.
It’s the fireworks. That’s what was missing from our brief moment of family prayer. The fireworks. The wonder and excitement and glory. Of course the marvelous fact of animals and vegetables and minerals, of life in general, deserves a nightly fireworks display—a grand celebration of the utter fabulousness of it all.
Prayer can be giving thanks in moments of quiet contemplation. But prayer can also be ecstatic, energetic, exuberant. Some of our human family’s most ancient forms of prayer involve drumming and dancing, bodies moving together, voices chanting, feet pounding or hips shaking in a glory of sound and movement. That “fireworks” version of prayer is every bit as real and valid as a monk praying silently in his solitary cell.
What does prayer look like for you? Do you have a way of addressing something that is larger than yourself, tuning into whatever is biggest and most holy? Some people pray as introverts: writing in a journal, sitting in meditation, reading poetry, walking in nature, finding God in the silence, or listening for the “still, small voice.” Some people pray as extraverts: singing, chanting, dancing, drumming, sharing joys and sorrows and lifting up the community in prayer. Some people pray to find their center, to listen for the voice inside. Some people pray by to be in communion with God, or Jesus, or the goddess, to be in the beloved presence of the Divine.
And, of course, lots of people don’t pray at all. Nor do they have to. But what if you wanted to pray, but didn’t know how to go about it? With all these ways of praying—quiet and loud, introvert and extravert, table grace and fireworks—how might a person get started?
Here’s what I think. Start with what you love. Maybe it’s gazing at stars or snuggling your cat or running for miles. Begin with a thing you love, and then add to it the intention to open your heart. So as you lie there with your cat on your chest or the stars shining down from the unimaginable distances, just focus on opening your heart to where you are and what you are doing.
And maybe once you are there, doing what you love with an open heart, you will want to invite someone else in—not literally, although that would be fine, too. But while you’re there, open heart and all, you could imagine the presence of those you love, or those you know who could use some extra support and compassion, and you could imagine them wrapped in that open-hearted beauty of the stars or the purring.
Maybe in that open-hearted space you’d like to reflect on a few things that you’re grateful for. Maybe you could hold yourself in that open-hearted space while you thought about things you were sorry for, and want to mend or do better next time. Maybe, while there in that soft heart-space you would want to ask for help, or forgiveness, or courage.
Don’t worry about who or what you might be asking to help or forgive you. Really, I don’t think that’s the part that matters. But if you want an image rooted more in science than religious tradition, think of this. Scientists recently proved the existence of the Higgs boson, what some people call “the God particle.” I’m not sure why exactly they call it the God particle, but my understanding is like this. Space isn’t empty. Even what looks like a complete vacuum is full of the Higgs field, which is only in evidence because things, well, are. Scientists know it’s there because without it, nothing would have mass, and there would be no atoms, let alone all the animals, vegetables and minerals of our world. Emptiness isn’t empty. There is always something which holds and catches the tiniest bits of the universe, allowing things to bind together, to connect.
Pray, if you will, to the Higgs field that holds all of everything, in which we are all linked. Surely it deserves to set off a small “Boom!” of fireworks in your heart every now and then.
“Help” is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn’t matter how you pray—with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Read more →
November 2012
“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.” —Mahatma Gandhi
What will you wear for Halloween?
The trees are changing faces, and the
rough chins of chestnut burrs
grimace and break to show their
sleek brown centers. The hills
have lost their mask of green and grain,
settled into a firmer geometry
of uncolored line and curve.
Which face will you say is true—
the luminous trees or the branches underneath?
The green husks of walnuts, the shell within,
or the nut curled intimately inside,
sheltered like a brain within its casing?
Be careful with what you know,
with what you think you see.
Moment by moment faces shift,
masks lift and fall again, repainted
to a different scene. It means,
the cynics say, there is no truth,
no constant to give order to the great equation.
Meanwhile, the trees, leaf by leaf,
are telling stories inevitably true:
Green. Gold. Vermillion. Brown.
The lace of veins remaining
as each cell returns to soil.
Lynn Ungar’s book of poetry, Bread and Other Miracles, is available at www.lynnungar.com
Like many people in North America, today I am watching the weather maps anxiously, wondering if the people I love in various places will be safe and sound. Though I am personally far from any swirling images, I wonder whether people I know, and those I have never met, will have a warm place to sleep and food to eat.
Extreme weather is such a clear reminder that we’re not in charge. Sure, people can and do buy batteries, generators, milk and bread, if they can afford to. People go vote early and take in their lawn furniture. People move to a home in a safer place if they have the opportunity to. They adjust their schedules, confer with their neighbors, stay close to pronouncements from public officials. But underneath all of this activity, what is fundamentally clear in these times is that people are not in charge of our planet.
Knowing that we’re not in charge is scary, as are these major weather systems. And yet there is fundamentally something positive about it as well. Someone tweeted today that Hurricane Sandy is saying, “Ignore global climate change in the debates, will you?” The truth behind that humor is that global climate change doesn’t care whether or not it is mentioned. It is on its own trajectory, as all weather is.
So, I pray that everyone is safe this week, that all have food to eat and a place to stay dry. I pray that houses and freeways, libraries and airports are not damaged. I pray that these storms pass over and quickly become nothing but a distant memory of another calamity that did not befall us.
But I also pray that the alertness we are all feeling, the clarity that we’re not in charge, the realization that we need to look out for everyone and hope that they will also look out for us, stays in place whether Hurricane Sandy blows by or hits land. These are life-affirming pieces of awareness, most vivid in times of crisis but useful every day of our lives.
For those of us in the U.S., it feels particularly important, in these last days before the election, to realize how much we are all in it together. Whatever the slogans of parties and candidates may be, in times like this, we all need each other to make it through—the practices of various parts of various levels of government, the generosity of business and churches and civic organizations, the ingenuity and initiative of indviduals.
May we all be safe, and may we all remember how much we need one another in these times, and in all times.
Let’s be fair, here. I’m sure that Richard Mourdock did not in any way mean to defend rape when he said that he thinks that God intends for babies to be born who are conceived through rape. I would hope that no one could believe in a God who intends for women to be raped. But I’m sure there are brave women who have borne their rapist’s baby, whether that rapist is a husband, boyfriend or stranger, and who regard their child as something precious that managed to grow from a terrible beginning. Such is the amazing resilience that can come to the human heart, and wouldn’t God be present in that beautiful redemption?
But let’s get real here for a moment. One could certainly imagine a God who could redeem even something as terrible as rape through the love of an innocent child. But when did it become the government’s job to determine on God’s behalf that this is the necessary outcome? For every woman who has chosen to keep and love a child conceived through rape there are probably many more who choose a morning after pill or abortion to end a pregnancy that they never wanted, and which would be an intolerable life-long symbol of a great violation. Why would you assume that God is not in that decision as well? Why wouldn’t God be there at the side of a woman as she struggles to reclaim her life and her strength and her ability to move forward in the world? Is God not in that woman’s choice to restore her own integrity and wholeness as she understands it?
I won’t presume to speak for God, but I will tell you what I think. When a woman is raped, God’s body is torn as her body is torn. When a fetus is aborted, some piece of God’s potential is lost. But God’s potential is infinite, and a woman reclaiming her life is no less a part of God’s potential. Indeed, every moment when every person chooses life, whatever that might mean to that person at the time, is a part of the potential of God unfolding.
It isn’t the job of politicians to decide which bits of potential God finds most precious. It is the job of each us, day by day and minute by minute, to decide what will constitute life more abundant for ourselves and the world we inhabit, and to act as the body of God in living out that choice. The role of the government is to support those decisions or get out of the way.
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