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Sunday Collection: Prayer

Let my prayer arise before you like incense
The raising of my hands like an evening oblation

From Psalm 140

Normally with these collections, I look back on Saturday at what has struck me during the week, decide on a theme then start writing.

This week, I knew as soon as I read Jen Lemen on Tuesday that I would focus on different kinds of prayer. Gety and the crybaby… tells the story of Jen’s Ethiopian neighbours and their celebration Christmas, which Christians of the Orthodox Churches celebrate on the 7 January.

I gave up on official representatives of major religions a long time ago. Or did I? When Gety opens my heart, the tears fall into kindness only a divine mother can hold. The kind of mother you cannot see, but who sees you and holds onto hope.

Artists of all different kinds can live lives of prayer, whether it is explicit or not. I enjoyed Christine’s interview with Bette Norcross Wappner. Bette talks of her journey of growing spirituality and the form of prayer she found in a particular type of poetry:

…as an adult, my true spiritual journey really started when I took a Beginning Haiku class online in the fall of 2002. When I learned how to be aware of nature and to describe my meditations in a disciplined 3-line, short-form poem, my mind, spirit, and soul opened wide up.

We sometimes beat ourselves up for being unworthy of God, and perhaps it’s right that we should. But we should also remember that our brokenness is enough. Abdur Rahman expresses this beautifully in his poem I have nothing, which begins:

I have nothing to offer You,
but this threadbare cloth,
this worn garment of me.

Do click the link to read the rest of this poem and his other beautiful words. This week I’ve also loved another of his poems, The Heart is an Eye.

Barbara has written Sensory Prayer in which she shares some words from Setting the Gospel Free by Brian C Taylor. Here’s the snippet that stood out to me:

Sensory prayer is not a matter of thinking about God every time we do something with our senses. It is prayerful enough to be present.

“To be present”. So simple, and yet so bloody difficult!

Barney writes of his tears during a major Baha’i commemoration of the twin birthdays of the Bab and of Baha’u'lluh. It’s also worth reading the first comment on the post, for the writer’s insight into the significance of the twin rainbows Barney saw and photographed.

At Hearthtalks, Kathryn talks of a situation in which she had to think “What would love do?”, which for me links to Lucy’s posts this week on love and fear, the latest of which is here.

Sometimes during prayer, however we define it, we make of it an aim, a goal. We can be as grasping after spiritual experience as after other parts of our lives. By striving and grabbing, we set ourselves up to fail and to be disappointed. HM quotes some words by Bede Griffiths which define the preciousness of the authentic experience:

…we lose the sense of time and enter into a deeper region of the soul, where it is withdrawn from the outer world: beyond all thought and feeling and imagination, there is an inner sanctuary into which we scarcely ever enter. It is the ground or substance of the soul, where all the faculties have their roots, and which is the very center of our being.

The Velveteen Rabbi posted a poem that really moved me called Rosh Chodesh Shvat. I want you to click over and read the whole thing, but here are the middle two verses:

as an impromptu waltz
breaks out in the aisle,
a love song to creation
the dancers stately and twirling.

How the psalms of praise
chanted this new moon morning
shake the room
and leave me quivering, hands uplifted!

The uplifted hands bring me neatly (and with no conscious planning, honestly!) back to the words from Psalm 140 with which I opened this post. No matter how we pray, and to which God, it is all one, and we are raising up our hands.

I end with k.d. lang’s rendition of the great rebbe’s song Hallelujah:

It’s so beautiful, although she doesn’t use my favourite verse:

I did my best, it wasn’t much.
I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch.
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you.
And even though it all went wrong,
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my lips but Hallelujah!

Have a blessed week, everyone.

Photograph by Beggs

© 2008 Anchors and Masts.