Spontaneous Prayer

I started the month of August nose-deep in a memoir (Found by Micha Boyett) on learning how to pray amid the busy, the chaos, the to-do lists. A birthday present from my husband who understands my seeker soul. I found myself nodding my head with the writer as she learned to shed the guilt that has mixed in with her faith, embracing the idea that we don't choose Jesus and we certainly don't earn Him. I grasped onto her insights of the Benedictine Rule, which fascinates and excites me. And I smiled in recognition as she learned to weave prayer into her everyday moments of running errands and showering and cleaning up the kitchen.

Prayer has only ever worked for me this way. I've tried to regiment it, getting up before dawn to recite Psalms or setting a goal to read certain passages on certain mornings but it has never worked well. Prayer is too spontaneous to be molded into a to-do list. I don't schedule conversations with my husband so I've stopped trying to force myself to do so with God. The notion that prayer is not a performance but an earnest, truthful talk with God and the idea that our everyday work is a form of prayer is something that speaks to every fiber of my being. Sometimes I pray without words, instead communicating my needs or awe with my eyes, my hands, or my breathing. God is outside the language of human beings. I only ever think I hear him when I am outside anyway.

I am encouraged when I remember that faith is not guilt. It is not the opposite of doubts and questions. It is not a single life-affirming moment of conversion but a gathering-home that takes place every new day. And so is prayer. Prayer is one spoken word that can hold a dictionary of meanings. It is listening as well as speaking. It is in the work we do and in our relationships with others. It is the inhale and the exhale.

Holy Week Holy Life

Beginning of Holy Week. Bread in my mouth, wine on my tongue. Hymn song, stained glass light, walking through a cloud-spattered morning waving palm branches and calling my Hosanna to the crows above. I pray in the shower, the steam rising from my skin. Besides driving in the car, it is one of my favorite places to pray, where I am naked and vulnerable before my God, without armor and distractions, cut off from the things of this world. Just me.

I am convinced that I have become crazy, that the soul thirst I have been feeling for months has consumed me and I embrace it, flinging myself into an awe too great for words, at this existent Great Spirit that I happen to call God. I am a soul with a body, a spiritual being, connected to the universe in unimaginable ways. We all are. This is the spring of my reawakening. I swear I can feel myself growing. It's all starts and stops, fits and spurts, but it's happening in a wave of vulnerability and connection and humbling and exalting. I hunger for words,  from the Bible, from Jesus, rediscovering Paul (I used to really dislike that guy), but also from women of faith I respect: Sarah Bessey, Jen Hatmaker, Anne Lamott, Rachel Held Evans. Reading histories of the Bible, discovering how it was written and how it has been passed to us over centuries. And I still have no answers, only questions, but the questions exhilarate me. I love not having the answers.

Lent has been a practice in trying to embrace and accept who I am- even the messy, the unlikable pieces- instead of working to be someone I'm not. Trying to show myself grace even as I work to give others even more grace. I've started to realize that we all have the answers, that we are all living the best way we know how, and I am learning to accept everybody for exactly who God created them to be. I'm learning that people of faith come in all guises- that the definition of faith is far greater and more radical than I ever understood. I see now that there is no black and white, no either/or. There is both/and, there are gradations of gray, and God is in all of it. I try to worship not only with my voice, but with my eyes, with my hands, with a smile. And I see God everywhere now. He is in the sacred stillness of ritual, in candle flame, in the grass under my feet, in the songs of birds, in books, in the rude patron, in the garbage, in awkward silences, in the growth. And I'm amazed all over again.

The vulnerability, the opening-up, the deep gratitude, the connection, recognizing the souls of others- this is holy.