From Your Minister
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As I reflect on this month’s theme of prayer, scraps of poems and songs I love dance before me. Often poetry and music form a bridge from what I know to what I can’t say. They help me to hold this broken, hurting world and touch the world I long for; they give me a rhythm to dance my deepest joy and gratitude. That’s also what prayer does for me. It’s a bridge from me to the rest of the universe.
When I pray, I am both creator and participant. When I pray in my own words, quite often I pray out loud, so I can hear the words and find a rhythm. Sometimes I sing my prayers. When I put my prayers on the wings of someone else’s music or words, it’s because that person speaks my heart’s language more eloquently than I can in a given moment. Sometimes when I pray out loud with my own language I hear words spoken as if someone else said them. Strange and surprising words. Sometimes when I am reading a piece of news that breaks my heart I begin to pray it out loud, letting my heartbreak transform the very pain of the words into prayer.
Ralph Ellison said about the blues that they are “an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-cosmic lyricism.” Sometimes this is how prayer works for me as well—the direct pathway from my tiny heart to my big heart is naming the truth, as awful as it may be. Sometimes prayer lifts me from the depths to a place of near-bliss. Prayer comes from the deepest depths and highest heights of my being. And pretty much every place in between.
Sometimes in order to find my heart’s language I go looking for new music or poetry. When the US was preparing to invade Iraq, I needed to speak poetry by Iraqi women to connect my heart to Iraq’s. My own prayers didn’t feel as if they could bridge where they needed to go. Reading those poems out loud became my affirmation of connection, claiming the power of love that I had to believe still mattered even with the bombs. Those personal prayers gave me stamina for marching for peace week after week with thousands of other people that cold winter, and the peace demonstrations themselves became a form of prayer.
Sometimes words, or peace marches, or even the blues, simply don’t help. I have a friend who is suddenly, at age 68, in physical agony, abruptly diagnosed with an obscure disease which renders her entire body so itchy that she doesn’t want to wear clothes or go out of her house. She says, “I have spent my life with words—finding words, crafting words, using words. Now words cannot express this pain, nor is it of any help to describe it.” The words the doctors have given her do not lead to healing.
My friend says she is so bored talking about this after six months that she can hardly stand to hear herself. Her body itself has become her prayer, a prayer of pain and longing for the end of pain. When I tell her, as I often do, that I am praying for her, what do I mean? I don’t believe that holding her with love will ease her painful condition. But I do hope that, even in her misery, my love will be a source of solace—if not to her skin, than to her heart.
With and without words and harmonies, our lives can be lived as prayers. The longer I’ve been around, the more ways I have prayed, the more I see that my life itself, lived in dynamic relationship with all that is alive, is prayer. Prayer bridges between my smallest self and my largest self, my individual consciousness and my interdependence with all that is.
Recently, traveling in northern Minnesota, I stopped at a rest stop where a historical marker was titled, “A three way continental divide.” It read, “A drop of rain water falling here…may flow either north into icy Hudson Bay, east into the Atlantic Ocean, or south into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.” The marker goes on to detail which creeks and rivers that raindrop would travel in order to reach any of these far-off destinations, and then explains that this unusual continental divide is because this part of Minnesota is very near the center of the North American continent.
For me, prayer is like that. When I pray from my own center, I’m not sure which direction these currents of energy and longing will travel—whether they will end up in warm or icy waters. But it really doesn’t matter. Prayer affirms that my own tiny self—that raindrop—is connected to interconnected currents. Prayer is the voice of my longing to know that I have a place in this vast universe, that my life is an essential part of all that is. Prayer is my path to find my way back home.
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