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God, I am often so sloppy or lazy at my prayers, or, even worse, my prayers are lovely and pure and the next sixteen and a half hours are a mess.
I do not pray to become holy,
but simply this: to remember.
To be mindful of your goodness,
to remember that you are here,
to be present in the moment you grant me,
to look around me, to listen...
to remember. Amen.[From Unfolding Light by Steve Garnaas-Holmes, October 27, 2014.]
The concept of doing prayer is an ancient one. For many of us, religion needs to be accompanied by moving the body: standing or kneeling in church, lighting votive candles, raising hands and arms during praise, or walking through the dark, ferny woods while murmuring the Jesus Prayer.
For many Jews prayer can mean recitation, but they put the emphasis on mitzvah, or a good work. To love another as yourself would be prayer, and so would picking up the oranges that have fallen to the sidewalk at an outdoor fruit stand and putting them back. You do prayer when you hand twenty dollars to the homeless woman standing in the median strip holding a sign. Bringing in your disabled neighbor's empty garbage can is mitzvah and therefore honors God.
Just as prayer sometimes needs words, so does it sometimes need the non-rational. Prayer can be looking—not just reveling in sunsets, but in anything God calls to our attention. It might be an ordinary black rock on the beach, lying in the sun; or a tiny bird, fallen from the nest with its parents screeching and frantically swooping; or a painting of Jesus by William Blake at the Fogg Museum. When you first saw the World Trade Center buildings fall as if bending their knees in genuflection, your soul probably leapt into prayer, responding with unspoken petition and outcry and begging for mercy, whether you knew it or not. The eighth chapter of Romans says that we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words (Rom. 8:26).
The prayer of the eye is gaining followers. [It shows me] something about God I had not known before. . . . Once I was lying on the forest floor, trying to shoot a picture of a wild calypso orchid that waved above a thick mat of moss. I nudged my amazing macro lens to the right setting and was about to click when I noticed tiny white flowers on the moss, flowers that were invisible to the naked eye. They were so pearly, so perfect, unseeable except to one another, that I began to weep with awe. The prayer of the eye needs no words because what we see dances straight through our whole brain and nervous system and imprints forever on memory and spiritual life.[From "Being Prayer," Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life, Vol. XVII, No. 3 (Nashville, TN: The Upper Room, 2002), 30-31.]
prayer is also the source of everything;
prayer is the driving force of everything;
prayer is also the director of everything.
If prayer is right, everything is right."[Theophan the Recluse, 19th century spiritual guide]
Prayer for March 2015
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