When all else fails

An old man would sit motionless in church for hours on end.

One day a priest asked him what God talked to him about. “God doesn’t talk. He just listens,” was his reply.

“Well, then what do you talk to him about?”

“I don’t talk either. I just listen.”

-       Anthony DeMello, Taking Flight

I appreciate DeMello’s characterization of prayer: listening all around.

These days, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by what masquerades as “news.” So much cruelty, greed, and noise; so little decency.

But that’s not the whole story. Yes, bad stuff happens. But courage and compassion are far more common. They just don’t make the headlines.

Want proof? Look people in the eyes. Thank a clerk at the grocery store. Stop surfing the internet and check out the scenery. If that doesn’t work, pray. It may not help. But it can’t hurt.

On my travels through America looking for God, I was surprised by how few people cited prayer as a door to the Divine. Maybe that’s because we perceive it too narrowly. While four Jewish kids in northern California alluded to it, a woman in Sudbury, Massachusetts made a good case.

Bobbi Fisher had been a kindergarten teacher for most of her career. Upon retiring, she earned a master’s in divinity and began caring for hospice patients. She described her path to God in a single word: prayer.

“I feel called to pray for others,” she said.

When I asked about the form and intent of her pleas, she paused. “I don’t pray for healing, per se,” she reflected. “I just pray for people in general.” Every morning, without fail, she did so for at least 45 minutes.

“I’m not sure how it works,” she explained. “But I believe, somehow, it makes a difference.”

A couple months later, while staying with my parents in Florida, I found my father kneeling over his bed in prayer. The tender sight evoked long forgotten memories of my own childhood petitions—which, while kneeling beside my father at my own bed, included the Catholic “Our Father,” “Hail Mary,” and “Glory Be,” followed by blessings on family members and friends, all reverently voiced. It made me aware of how my approach to prayer has changed through the years—and those who’ve influenced the evolution.

Anthony DeMello is one. Mark Nepo is another. In The Book of Awakening, Nepo writes, “Beyond our small sense of things, a magnificent light surrounds us, more than anyone could ask for. This is what prayer as gratitude can open us to.”

The Irish author and poet, John O’Donohue, suggests how we might use that light:

“Close your eyes,” he reflects in Anam Cara,

and relax into your body. Imagine a light all around you, the light of your soul. Then...draw that light into your body and bring it with your breath through every area of your body. This is a lovely way to pray, because you are bringing the soul-light, the shadowed shelter that surrounds you, right into he physical earth and clay of your presence.

In Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Richard Rohr presents the ideal: life itself as prayer. “In the beginning,” the Franciscan priest contends,

you tend to think that God really cares about your exact posture, the exact day of the week for public prayer, the authorship and wordings of your prayers, and other such things. Once your life has become a constant communion, you know that all the techniques, formulas, sacraments, and practices were just a dress rehearsal for the real thing—life itself—which can actually become a constant intentional prayer. Your conscious and loving existence gives glory to God.

While I’ve yet to realize Rohr’s aspiration, I have embraced Nepo’s recommendation to begin with gratitude and O’Donohue’s encouragement to breathe the “secret and beautiful soul-light” into my core. Suitably grateful, I pray for wonder, for empathy, for humility, for kindness. Lots more kindness. Like Bobbi, I pray for others, too. Now, however, it’s more like sending good energy their way—and I do it silently throughout the day rather than aloud at bedtime. I hope it benefits them. But I know it helps me. I feel useful. Connected. And somehow, more grounded.

Once upon a time, the world awaited a “light in the darkness.” Some still wait. But I think O’Donohue is on to something. The light is right here, within and around us. We just don’t notice. Or notice enough.

I’m sure I could do a better job of tuning in to what really matters—especially the people who matter. And trying to make my life the “constant intentional prayer” Rohr describes—not only absorbing the light, but being the light.

May I be more of a light this holiday season. That’s my Christmas prayer. And Susanne’s as well. We invite you to join us.