Category: Prayer

Pathway Poem #19

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I lead a contemplative class on Sunday mornings. This week, one reading we had was from Mary Oliver’s Thirst.

Praying

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones, just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak

One of the most impressive prayers I have ever heard was voiced in 1971 when I was leading a youth group in El Sobrante, California. A teenager had joined our group (and church) a few weeks before. One night after church the young people met in a member’s home. At one point, I had invited the young people to voice their own prayers to God. Several did. Then toward this end, I heard the soft voice of this young man pray. He simply said, “Thank You.” I have never forgotten that beautiful two word prayer.

Mary Oliver asks us to do three things. First, pay attention to life. Second, voice thanks to the creator of life. Third, sit in silence to perhaps hear another voice respond. This is a good pattern for a contemplative life.

croaking frogs
chittering birds
Creator listens

May wisdom fill your mind and peace overflow in your heart,
LaMon

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Making Habits Holy

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Ritual is routine infused with mindfulness. It is habit made holy.

The quote above is in a book by Kent Nerburn entitled Small Graces: The Quiet Gifts of Everyday Life. Ritual becomes routine, or even a rut, when it is thoughtlessly done. The habits we develop in life can become holy if we pay close attention to what we are doing.

I have mentioned here before about some of my daily habits like prayer and journaling. However, Nerburn is not writing about things like this that seem important or vital. No, he is picturing small graces or quiet gifts.

He illustrates what he means with a morning ritual.

I take my morning mug of coffee in both hands and lift it ever so slightly toward the sky. I am alone. There is no one to see. This is my private gesture–my acknowledgement, my offering, my moment of thankfulness for the gift of this awakening day. . . . My morning cup of coffee . . . partaken with mindfulness . . . is a small act of worship, an act of consecration, a prayer of thankfulness to the awakening day.

I also have a morning habit. When I first get out of bed, I go the the sink in our restroom. I turn on the facet, running water into my hands, and I rinse my face three times, practicing an ancient Celtic Christian ritual. With the first, I say silently, “in the name of the Father.” With the second, “and the Son”. With the third, “and the Holy Spirit, I welcome this day.” Now here is the key to making a routine into a ritual or a habit into something holy. I must think about what I am saying. And I must mean what I say. I confess that some mornings, I just got through the motions and what I do had no spiritual blessing about it at all. But when I am mindful in doing it, the morning begins with a touch of holiness.

If you have some little ritual that you do most days, I would love to hear about it in a comment. If you don’t have any, perhaps you will be able to discover one that can be a daily blessing–if done mindfully.

paying attention

ritual is like rich soil

nurturing flowers

As always you are welcome to share this blog with others. If you want to receive my blogs in your email, simply toggle the follow button. May your day be filled with mindfulness and peace. LaMon

The Lord’s Prayer in a Time of Pandemic

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Last year, I wrote several blogs on the Lord’s Prayer (or the Our Father). It is certainly the most prayed prayer in the history of Christianity. Many churches use it every Sunday. Many individuals pray it daily. I am one of those.

The truth about praying prayers created or written by someone else is that, it is possible to say the words and not think about them. In order to really pray these prayers, we must learn to pray them with intention. This means pay attention to what we are saying.

During this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, certain phrases from the Lord’s Prayer have become filled with new meaning for me. When I pray them with intention, I am brought more closely into the presence of God.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I think about God’s desire for love to rule the day on earth as it surely does in heaven. So, in that phrase, is the implicit request for an increase in compassion on earth.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” I remember all the lines of people waiting for food in this time of scarcity and joblessness. They become a part of my concern.

“Let us not fall to temptation.” (This is the phrase I picked up from Roman Catholics which seems clearer than “Lead us not into temptation.) Two temptations are especially prevalent in today’s world; a temptation to despair and a temptation to anger. Both can be found in sad abundance, though the second one is more likely to rise in my heart. So, my concern for the emotional and spiritual welbeing of others and myself highlight this phrase.

Finally, there is “deliver us from evil.” I think of the evil of the virus and I think of the evil of divisiveness in American society. Both call for deliverance.

May praying the Lord’s Prayer bring you closer to God and to God’s will for your life.

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Peace, LaMon

A Prayer for Today

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It has been a while since I last wrote. I have been busy writing some memoirs for by grand-kids. What a great experience, going back over 40 years of journals, and remembering various events in my life.

Of course, that may not be the only reason I haven’t written. What can one write during these days of pandemic? Here is something I have found helpful.

Richard Rohr’s Center Center for Action and Contemplation sends out five meditations every week. Included with those meditations is this wonderful prayer:

O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.

I pray this prayer everyday. And I spend time praying for my “heart’s longings for the healing of our world”–for individuals, for groups special to me, and for the world. Perhaps you can find this prayer a helpful outline for expressing your own intentions.

As I have said before, prayer is one path into the presence of God–the “Great Love” of all creation.

Peace, LaMon

Forgiveness

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We have been meditating on the Lord’s Prayer or the Our Father as it is found in the Gospel of Luke. Prayer is one of the ways we experience the presence of God. In today’s passage we will be reminded of the importance of forgiveness, which action, I believe, is another significant way to know God.

This month we have come to “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” This does not have the words “transgressions” and “transgress” that many of us have used over the years. Neither does it have the words “debts” and “indebted” that others are used to. The word “sins” and “transgressions” are close enough to be used as synonyms. And in Luke’s version the prior word “sins” must be used to interpret the phrase “indebted to us.” So, to make it clear, in praying Luke’s version we are asking God to forgive us our sins because we are forgiving those who have sinned against us.

So, two ideas are at work. On the one hand, we have a need to be forgiven because of our own sins–doing wrong against God and others. And we have a need to forgive others who had done us wrong. I would simply point out that in this prayer, we are basically asking God to treat us like we treat others!!?!

While that sounds frightening, it need not be, as long as we understand what forgiveness entails. Forgiveness is seem most clearly on the cross. There, God in Christ was forgiving the world for its sin. This involved two types of acceptance. First, God in Christ accepted the pain of our sin without retaliation. The pain stopped on the cross. Second, God in Christ accepted the responsibility to help those who had caused the pain. (Remember Christ praying, Father forgive them.)

In forgiving others we accept two things. First, we accept the pain without trying to get revenge. We absorb the hurt as it were. Second, we accept the responsibility to help the other person. This can be most easily done by praying for that person’s own well being.

Forgiveness in it’s most basic elements does not involve forgetting (which we can’t will anyway!) nor the emotions of liking or loving.

Paul understood the connection between our forgiveness and our forgiving: “forgive one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” (Ephesians 5:7).

May we know the presence of God as we pray even for our enemies that God’s mercy would prevail in their lives.

Bread for the Day

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We continue to think about Luke’s version of the Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer. Today we will look at the phrase, “Give us each day our daily bread.”

In the ancient world of Jesus’ day, food security was not a given. Lack of nutrition and gnawing hunger would have been near at hand for many of the common people of that time–even as it is in parts of the world today. So, Jesus was encouraging his disciples to pray for daily needs. God cares about the total person, not just disembodied souls.

However, I imagine that all who read this blog will have access to the food you need, so, we can pray this portion of the prayer with a sense of thanksgiving for the physical blessing we have. In praying thus we recognize our dependence on known and unknown factors that impact our well being. We ask God to bless us–bodies included.

On an earlier occasion Jesus affirmed that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. That word is another kind of bread or nourishment–not for our physical being but for our spiritual being. So, we look for words from God to feed us. These words may be found in the Bible and other written material, in our inner life, and in conversations with others. At my church we respond to the reading of Scripture in this way: “For the word of God in Scripture, for the word of God within us, and for the word of God among us, thanks be to God.”

Finally, I must mention one other use of bread in the Gospels. It became a synonym for the presence of Jesus Christ with his followers. The bread of Communion is called the body of Christ. Whatever your theology of the Lord’s Supper, all of us can affirm that in some way, Jesus is with us as we participate.

When I pray the Lord’s Prayer, I am not literally taking the bread and the cup of Communion. But every time I pray “give us each day our daily bread,” I am asking Jesus Christ to be with me and near me in that day. It adds a wonderful dimension to the prayer and one that has come to mean a lot to me. I hope it may help you too to experience that Presence.

Praying to Love

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We are looking at Luke’s version of what we traditionally call the Lord’s Prayer. The form we are most used to is found in Matthew, but Luke’s gospel may contain the earliest form. Its simplicity may make it more ideal for examining how this prayer can help us experience God’s presence. In the first blog of this series, we saw how an Aramaic word abba was behind the word translated “Father”. It was a word that pointed toward intimacy, trust, and love. This is highlighted further in the next two phrases of the prayer: “Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.”

Unless one is at home in the Christian tradition, these phrases may sound strange–even off-putting. I believe that both of these phrases carried the same meaning. And that meaning is “May your purpose in creation be achieved.” It is a prayer that what God began in creation would be completed.

As the wonderful abba word focuses on the nature of God, it also helps us to understand God’s purpose. In creation, God’s desire was that God’s character would be fully revealed in all of the created order. And that character is love. God created us in love and wants us to manifest that same faithful love; to be open to the intimacy of love which can flow through all things.

Now, I am not naive about our world. Love is not yet seen in all things. Intimacy is not possible where patience, gentleness, and kindness have not yet blossomed. Nevertheless, God’s purpose still remains. If we want to join with God in fashioning the world of God’s dreams, let us pray.

The prayer might be something like this: Gracious God help us and all of creation to have spirits overflowing with your kind of love–a love that is patient and kind, unselfish and giving.

It may be that every time we pray such a prayer with sincere hearts, the world turns a little more toward love–God’s beautiful purpose.

Imagining God

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One pathway to God is through prayer, but not all prayers bring us into God’s presence. One day the disciples of Jesus asked him to teach them how to pray. The story and subsequent teaching is found in Luke 11:1-4. Here we find the earliest version of what is traditionally called the Lord’s Prayer. It is not the version most people know. The more liturgically full version is found in Matthew’s gospel. However, for the next several blogs I am going to look at what is surely the original version in order to think about how, in adapting and using this prayer, we can find ourselves in the presence of God.

It begins with one word–Father. (There is no “our”, nor “who is in heaven”). This prayer does have a corporate side as later blogs will show, but it begins one on one–the one praying and and the One listening. And the One listening is not far away, but is as near as a the air we breathe.

For those who balk at the use of the word “Father” as patriarchal, I would quickly add that in English I sometimes use Mother, for as Julian of Norwich correctly affirmed, “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother.”

But let’s stick with what Jesus said and try to imagine what he meant. In Jesus’ native language, Aramaic, there are two words for the male parent; abhi and abba. The first word is the ‘higher’ word. It is a word of respect and honor. The second word is one of the first words an Aramaic baby would learn to say (along with imma). It is the child’s word. It is also the word adult children would use for the male parent when there was a close feeling of love and trust between child and parent. It was the word of intimacy. Perhaps our English words daddy and papa correspond best to the meaning. This Aramaic word is found three times in the Greek New Testament, indicative that it was the normal word Jesus used in his prayer language and the word he taught his disciples to use. (A side note: as far as we know Jesus was the first person to use this familiar language for God.)

Jesus taught his disciples to imagine that God is exactly like what Jesus had experienced God to be. God is entirely trustworthy. God is infinitely loving. God is eternally open to an intimate relationship with seekers.

So, when you pray, no matter how you might address God, imagine God to be like that. Perhaps it will help you to find a path into God’s presence.

A Trans-Religion Spiritual Practice

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Last month I wrote about my experience with the Jesus Prayer. Here is another affirmation of the Jesus Prayer from perhaps my favorite modern poet, Scott Cairns.

Prayer in general, and the Jesus Prayer in particular, has become the sustaining focus of my waking days, and it has become a surprising accompaniment to my nights. I sleep less, waking every few hours–sometimes more often–to find the prayer on my lips. I spend a good bit of each night walking through the dark house, standing before the wavering vigil light of our family altar and icon wall, remembering friends and family–the living and the dead–in prayer. The more I do this, the more I want to do this. (p.257)*

It is important to note, as Scott does, that the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”–my preferred short form) can be used as we imagine the faces or names of our friends and family. God or Jesus will be merciful on “me” by blessing them.

My focus today is on two practices found in the Christian tradition that can be used with the Jesus Prayer or with other short prayer patterns. They are the Anglican Prayer Beads and the Orthodox Prayer Rope

Anglican prayer beads

And one hundred knot prayer ropes:

Ancient ways to pray

The use of something like prayer beads or ropes can be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, and Bahai. In those religions as in Christianity it is a way to focus one’s attention on prayer or meditation.

The Orthodox prayer rope is an ancient practice of the Orthodox church. The one I own is composed of 100 individual cloth knots separated into groups of 25 by 4 plastic beads. I use it in the evenings with a specific prayer for courage and peace and a heart full of love for God and compassion like that of Jesus. This is the prayer on the first three plastic beads. I follow this with 25, “Jesus my Lord, have mercy on me”, 25 “Jesus, my friend, have mercy on me”, and 25 “Jesus, my love, have mercy on me”. The last 25, I pray “Jesus, our savior, have mercy on us.” As I pray that last 25, I picture different people and needs in our world that I want God to bless or meet. On the last bead I give thanks for a God who always listens.

Anglican prayer beads have only been around since the late 1980s. I discovered them in the 90s. They are a blending of the Roman Catholic Rosary and the Orthodox Prayer Rope. The are composed of 33 beads–the number of years of Jesus’ life on earth. When I bought the prayer beads it included a wonderful leaflet that gave a variety of ways to use the beads including “rosaries” for the seasons of the Church year and patterns based on the Jesus Prayer, a prayer of Julian of Norwich, a Celtic Prayer, and several others. I have used these prayer beads off and on for over twenty years. (My first set eventually ‘wore out’ when the string holding the beads together broke!)

The use of either of these ways is not a magical cure-all or a sure-fire method of spiritual growth. They are simply a time-tested method that has helped me to focus more clearly and more often on my life of prayer.

*Scott Cairns, Short Trip to the Edge: Where Earth Meets Heaven–a Pilgrimage. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007. I also encourage you to check out his poetry.