Sketchbook II

On Prayer, Mostly

Grass near Estes Park, Colorado: 2019

Dear Friend,

It’s chemo week, which means the routine is still the routine, and I have been more aware of how I use my time. If you had to pick a good/bad bin to put these into, choose good. But being aware of how I spend my time comes at a cost. Some of the things that matter get left behind because deep breath matters more, or at least I better recognize that each deep breath, like a prayer, is priceless, and am slower to trade them, even for other good things.

Texts take longer to respond to, and emails go unanswered, and conversations sometimes end abruptly. Thank you for grace.

My hope is to carry this into next week. Will you help? And if you want to join, maybe we can remind each other. Take a walk in the forest or even a field of grass, and let it wash us clean, Together.

Let My Silence Speak 

My words, whether carefully embossed onto fine linen paper,  typed into 
a machine or scribbled onto a paper towel with a blue felt-tip so that 

they run together, illegibly. Whether spoken or recorded or attached to 
a beautiful melody and finally delivered to the underside of your pillow 

as you come into time - from Time - are ever just longish fingers 
pointing to what  you know to be true already, but still long 

to be reminded of.  Sometimes I forget to say the words, yet I wonder if 
Silence might say them more clearly, more beautifully than any characters I 

might cobble together at 4:00 am.  If Silence might invite you to notice 
the wind chime giggling on the porch like a toddler as the breeze licks her feet, 

like a puppy. To consider the morning song of the cardinal and hear how the 
white-tail hawks and crows play chase and loudly in the woods each morning 

near our cedar house. If ever you cannot hear me, go to the woods in the park 
near our cedar house. By the secret grove near the stream. Listen.  Wait for me. 

I will find you. Perhaps you will know by my silence. 
And if you forget, the crows and hawks will remind you.

Mary Oliver writes, “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is…” She wrote this right in the middle of one of the most beautiful prayers that somehow found its way to me. You might recall it.

Poem 133: The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

---

Ann Lamott suggested there are three essential prayers: Help, Thanks, and Wow.  She wrote a whole book on it. Didn’t we read it together that time? At least part of it, the two of us sharing one pair of headphones on a plane over Colorado on our way to the Rogue Valley? But when I look beneath her three essentials, I see only one prayer. Only one:

Help.

I surrender (to your sovereignty).

Thanks.

I surrender (to being loved). 

Wow.

I surrender (to your glory).

---

It’s not lost on me that most, and maybe even all of Jesus’s prayers seemed to be prayers of surrender, or that is how I hear them today. Surrendering to the Father’s will and glory. Not my will but thine. Surrendering to the Father’s sovereignty as he prayed for others. Forgive them, Father. And when he taught his disciples to pray? Surrender. Surrender. Surrender.

---

St. Anthony of the Desert wrote:

It is not a perfect prayer if one is conscious of oneself or understands one’s prayer.

Can you see the beauty of the paradox? To pray perfectly, I think he suggests, is not to carefully craft perfect words, or to paint a perfect picture. It is not to rely on one’s self at all. It is to lose faith in one’s prayer, and find it in one’s God. Prayer, he suggests, is abandoning oneself into the palm of God to the point of, and even beyond understanding. And if I walk toward God, but only to the limit of my understanding and refuse another step, is that surrender at all, or might it rather be insisting that God be small enough to fit into my pocket?

Perhaps this is how a song or a poem or a work of art or the night sky or lightning on the ocean can invite us to pray. How awe and the sublime and prayer grew up in the same home - maybe even shared a bedroom. Brothers and sisters, inviting us across that line of merely understanding, where God is small enough to control, into a place where God is not merely larger, but boundless. Numinous.

---

This changes everything for me. “A life of prayer” means more than just an ongoing dialogue with God in my head  - which might be self-talk, after all - or even in my heart. It is more than simply laying my list of longings at the feet of the divine. It’s leaving my list there for the divine to do with as the divine will do, and believing that God is good and merciful and full of grace, even if “it doesn’t work out” in the way in which I desperately long.  A life of prayer becomes continuous - deep calling to deep, and deep responding. It’s paying attention to who God is and knowing that God is God, and surrendering, and knowing the story will continue not just into time, but into deep Time.

If you read this and start to wonder where I think the line between worship and prayer and awe lies, well, so do I. But I also wonder if having a line really matters all that much. 

What would you say?

---

The funny part? This definition of prayer suggests to me that we are in a constant state of prayer to something, as we are forever surrendering to something. To our own intellect and our own abilities. To our community. To our culture. To our political party. To wealth. To power.  To our religion or our denomination, even.

My friend talks about empire living. I love the term, at least as I understand what he is suggesting. I hear him say the empire is broad and vast, and contains all of these things, and many more. We surrender to the emperor until we surrender to God. Though I believe the ways in which we surrender may vary, those are the only two choices. And at least to me, choosing the emperor is to deny God, but empire is my default setting. For me, the fraud of the empire’s had to be exposed before I was willing to give up on it. 

---

Can’t go without sharing a thought from my friend, Thomas. You remember him, don’t you?

When in the soul of the serene disciple
With no more Fathers to imitate
Poverty is a success,
It is a small thing to say the roof is gone:
He has not even a house.

Stars, as well as friends,
Are angry with the noble ruin.
Saints depart in several directions

Be still:
There is no longer any need of comment.
It was a lucky wind
That blew away his halo with his cares,
A lucky sea that drowned his reputation.

Here you will find
Neither a proverb nor a memorandum.
There are no ways,
No methods to admire
Where poverty is no achievement.
His God lives in his emptiness like an affliction

What choice remains?
Well, to be ordinary is not a choice:
It is the usual freedom
Of men without visions.

Can we even make the choice to surrender before the Spirit demonstrates to us that the sacrifice we offered for hope on the empire altar simply turned to ash and no more? So then, perhaps suffering is necessary, but not sufficient. Which, I suppose, is good. Who has not suffered at the hand of the  lucky wind? Who has never drowned in the lucky sea? 

Help. I surrender.

Thanks. I surrender.

Wow. I surrender.

Oremus,

C