“On Prayer” by Billy Amoss

June 23, 2015

The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Amen.

The truth of our very precarious condition often is not driven home to us until we are adults, and sometimes we are well passed our prime before we come face to face with our ever present mortality.

Fear is a powerful motivator for prayer, and prayer is often a desperate call for help.

What do we do when we reach the point of complete despair, of utter hopelessness – when we know that we alone cannot remedy a situation and cannot find inner peace?

When we are in darkness and feeling utterly alone, prayer offers a way of bringing us into relationship with the Beloved.

“Out of the depths I cry to you.” (Psalm 130)

So surrender to what is is an important part of prayer. Help, help, help! But the important point here is that the cry for help is intentionally directed at something, at someone: God, the Source, the Beloved.

The other morning as I was walking to the office I was weighed down by an issue at work on whose positive resolution our most important children’s health program depended. Suddenly I thought: Why do I think it’s all up to me to solve this problem? So I invoked the Beloved and announced I was turning the problem over, it was just too big for me to handle. The simple admission that I needed help and asked for it almost immediately lightened my step and allowed me to breathe deeply and release the tension that had been building in me. When I got to the office I called on some of our board members to help in ways that I couldn’t, so, again, I did not sink into passivity. And though the outcome is still unclear, my prayers directed to the Beloved are giving me the faith that I can live with the outcome, even if it’s not the one I am seeking at the moment. And so I released the hard focus on the problem of the day and opened up again to seeing the enormous good in being alive, in recognizing beauty in everyday things and opening my heart to loving the world and all of creation.

So here’s another aspect of living that gives rise to prayer: the recognition of the miracles imbedded in ordinary everyday experience. To me this recognition is always a moment of grace, an unsought and unearned experience of lightness and joy that overtakes me, as when I hear in our garden the full-throated call of the diminutive Carolina wren, or exchange a smile with a passing stranger, or gather, as I did yesterday morning, with two close friends to dance and tell the stories of our lives that seek expression.

Here is Walt Whitman on the everyday nature of miracles:

 Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge

Of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed

At night with anyone I love,

Or sit at the table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honeybees busy around the hive

Of a summer forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of the stars shining

So quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles…

Leaves of Grass, Random House Publishing, 2004, p.324)

It’s actually possible and, I believe, important to pray in every situation, because in essence prayer is a way of cultivating our relationship with the divine, with that mystery that is the source of all of creation. And as we know, relationships take practice and need to be tended with mindfulness if they are to thrive in good times and bad, in sickness and in health, and all of the in-between times in which our lives unfold.

(Embodied prayer to Leonard Cohen’s If It Be Your Will)

AMEN.