“As long as you believe that God is only in heaven 
and does not fill the earth – let your words be few.
Only when you come to know that you too contain His Presence —
only then can you begin to pray.” 

Rabbi David Shlomo of Tulczyn (18th century)

What exactly is prayer? My lifelong query has been renewed lately in anticipation of the cohort. Is it our group prayers? Is it in the early morning  when words stumble out of a mouth seemingly filled with marbles? Is it when I see the magical rime ice and something in my equally icy heart suddenly melts towards God? Sometimes prayer is palpably real but many times it seems anything but. One thing I know for sure. God has planted in me – in all of us – a desire to pray and be connected to our Creator. To Mystery.

It’s a wonder this desire didn’t get extinguished considering all the non-life giving prayer rituals around me growing up. There was the dreaded Saturday night ritual with the family in the living room – kids, parents, great aunts, grandmother, the whole lot – kneeling on the rug, each taking our turn at prayer starting with the youngest (me). Oh the agony that ensued. It seemed the older you were, the more words the Almighty needed, and by the time we got to the oldest, Tante Greta, my spirit had withered within. They meant well but…did God really need to hear all those words? Wouldn’t God have been much happier to see me playing outside instead of feeling like scratching my eyes out? Relief came only with the last Amen. 

Then there were the mealtime rhyming prayers in German. I could say those in record speed (just ask me), but they were followed by a long prayer from my dad which had to include gratitude for the entire plan of salvation, as we drooled impatiently over the waiting supper. Prayers from the pulpit didn’t offer much consolation either as they sounded more like entries in a yelling competition. God seemed remote up in “heaven”, far above those wooden ceiling slats I counted to bide the time in church.  

Jesus didn’t seem to have this problem. Like our “Welcoming Prayer”, Jesus embraced everything that came in each moment. Jesus knew how to make even the “boring” temple rituals come alive. Rohr writes that Jesus was the first nondual religious teacher of the West, meaning he was both/and — coming to earth both as a full human, while also never losing connection to his divine Source. His nondual mind/heart knew that everything belongs, entrusting even his eventual murder into his Father’s loving care.

Rohr thinks that over the history of Christianity, we lost that sense of connection to God in the “no-matter-whatness” of life. “People were so thrilled with the great ‘I AM’ in Jesus (his divinity) that we forgot to balance it with his more strongly proclaimed humanity.” Jesus only ever called himself ben’ adam, a son of the human one (no formal caps). Our problem, says Rohr, is that we’ve tried to understand his teaching with a dualistic mind. Jesus might have been both human and divine but surely not us, and so He became only divine and human beings only human. We lost an understanding of ourselves as divinely beloved as Jesus was. 

This explains the “up-in-heaven” place I (and many others) mistakenly imagined God to be. I confess that for much of my life I’ve thought of myself as a mere human, desperately trying to become “spiritual”. Rohr says that “the Christian revelation was precisely that we are already spiritual (‘in God’)”. Our difficult but necessary task is to learn how to become human. 

For me, becoming human means becoming aware of my humanness and opening to just being a beloved daughter of God, “warts and all” in what Rohr calls the “naked now”. Joe Stabile, leader of the coming cohort, said it well. “A spiritual practice is any act habitually entered into with your whole heart that awakens, deepens, and sustains within you a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment.”

It’s a miracle that God has a way of finding us anyways and waking our hearts despite our fumbles. 

Yesterday I thought back to another ritual I had as a kid. Remember those envelopes with see-through windows? When those came in the mail, I would hold the  discarded envelope against a wall, and whisper into those windows. What was I saying? I have no clue, but it did feel sacred. I remember the yearning in my heart; the hope that just maybe, Someone was listening. Maybe those Saturday night prayers weren’t so bad after all if they’d given me a nudge towards God. Aren’t we all just stumbling through this life, hoping for prayer portals, as my parents had? Aren’t we all just yearning for Someone to listen?

Recently I received another “prayer window”. My house church Watershed has a tradition to pray over someone about to embark on a journey. And this past Sunday it was my turn to receive the blessing. Our homily had been about Jesus’ baptism, and my friend Cal introduced the prayer. 

“Lydia, as you journey to Dallas, our prayer for your trip is a baptism. And I hope that the whole experience becomes a way for you to understand your belovedness. Enneagram 2s have a hard time knowing they’re beloved. That’s one of the things they have to struggle with. They don’t believe it. The Contemplative Cohort is really learning that you are beloved. You will touch so many people, including us, with that joy; that Good News that we’re all beloved.”

And so, just as I had long ago during my Saturday prayer ritual as a kid, and even though it felt kind of goofy, I knelt on the rug. Only this time I wasn’t squirming to get away. Everyone laid their hands on me, and I was gifted this prayer.

“God, our hands are on our beloved sister Lydia. We pray that Your Spirit goes with her. That she deepens in her knowledge of Your love for her, and that the gifts she brings back from that experience becomes a joy and a gift.”

What a gift. The prayer ran palpably through everyone’s hands into my heart, like a wave. I’m so grateful that Someone is listening. No doubt  Someone was listening all along

(Originally published January 17, 2023)