Worship

Last week, I sat next to an 11 year old boy in church. He goes to church on alternate weekends when he is with his father and stepmother.

He started out by timing how long his toddler brother would last -- four minutes as it turned out. When it was time to sing, he did not open the hymnal but he did look on with me. I don't know if he was singing or not, but I think he was humming along sometimes. During the confession through the scripture, he took the bulletin apart and start carefully folding it. I thought he was making a paper airplane but I was wrong. During the sermon, he handed me a lovely origami butterfly, made out of the page in the bulletin with the church's prayer list. I don't know that he thought this was significant but I did. I thought of all those people on that list, cocooned in illness and trouble and loss, and the folded paper seemed to me a prayer for all them. It was a prayer that they would be transformed, that there would some new life and beauty for them, and the prayer was shaped by the hand of a little boy.

I don't know what he got out of that service, but I do know what a blessing it was for me to sit next to him.

Praying

The daffodils are starting to bloom, opening their little yellow faces to this tentative spring. They stand with their heads bowed, nodding gently in the still-cold breeze. I wonder if a flower can pray -- that is what they look as though they are doing. Are they offering obeisance to their Maker? Are they giving thanks for the light after being buried almost all year? Are they just glad to be alive? And whether these are their prayers or not, shouldn't they be mine?

Japan

The images from Japan are wrenching. The destruction is beyond imagining. There are untold lives lost, and for the survivors, whole ways of life gone forever.

The earthquake and the tsunami did not happen here. The ground underneath my feet in my little neighborhood is stable, there is no radioactivity falling from the sky, houses sit firmly on their foundations. The devastation that I see on television is halfway around the world. And yet the faces that I see are the faces of my neighbors. Our ever-shrinking world brings us closer together. Sometimes that global closeness magnifies differences and conflicts. But sometimes it illuminates our common humanity.

Japan is not another world. Last week, I sat in a meeting with a colleague from the University of Tokyo who is back home – whatever that may mean for him now. My niece has traveled there; my friend’s sister has lived there. Fifty students and faculty from my school are there now, trying to figure out when and how they can leave.

The poet and preacher John Donne once said “No man is an island.” And no island, whether it is Japan or any other, separates us one from another. So our hearts break for our neighbors, our sisters and brothers, our unknown friends.

Praying in the Produce Aisle

Grocery shopping can be a chore: something on the weekly to-do list, necessary but not especially rewarding or exciting. I suspect it is safe to say that most folks don’t approach this task as an occasion for prayer -- but perhaps we should.

The next time you are in the produce aisle, take some time to reflect on the bounty before you. Even a regular grocery store will have at least six varieties of apples, maybe eight different lettuces, five kinds of tomatoes. Kale comes in two or three forms, each one colorful and interesting; there are red, yellow, orange, and green sweet peppers, and small fiery chiles. For relatively small amounts of money, we can have the fruits of someone else's labor in unimaginable array.

When I am in a hurry, tired, stressed, it is easy to miss the extraordinary beauty and abundance in this ordinary place. But instead of mentally griping about the high prices or the hassle, I am trying instead to engage my shopping chores with a sense of gratitude and thanksgiving. I am trying to be mindful of the care and provision that God makes for all creation, understanding that as pure grace, and rejoicing.

And I am also reminding myself of those unable to partake of the bounty because they are poor, disabled, ill; because there is no real grocery story in their neighborhood; because they have to ride a bus to shop. I am reminding myself to offer prayers prayers of intercession on behalf of the hungry in my own area and then concentrating on putting those intercessions into action.

And finally, I think that produce aisle might also be a call to repentance. There is enough food in the world so no one has to go hungry and yet people are still starving to death. The problem is not lack of food, but lack of will. Might we repent of our self-focus and turn our skill and ability to repairing the structures that keep the hungry from being fed?

Physicist Brian Swimme writes about the creation of the universe as “a titanic bestowal, a stupendous quantum of free energy given forth from the bottomless vaults of generosity.” All that gift is played out in microcosm right there in the midst of the squash and the celery and the peppers. Let us pray that we may be part of realizing that overflowing abundance.

The Lord's Prayer

I can't remember when I learned the Lord's Prayer. It seems I have always known it. In English, that is. I do remember learning it in Greek, memorizing it, not because I had to but just because I wanted to. That was quite a wonderful experience: the words curling around in my mouth, strange and beautiful, joining me to the ancients who first recorded and prayed them, sending me in search of translations that led me to fresh (for me) and deeper meanings of words grown overly familiar.

I love to say the Prayer when I am in North Carolina, in the church of my childhood. There is a rhythm, a cadence, that is so different from "up North." Here, sometimes, it almost feels as though we have to say it as fast as we can, maybe because we are afraid God will lose interest if it goes on too long. But when I pray this prayer with the people who have known me all my life, there is a spaciousness between the words, a leisurely pace that seems to provide space to rest and be restored. I hear what I am saying, really hear it, and I have time to think about what I am praying.

The Prayer is outrageous when you really listen to your own words. Even the very first word: "Our." Not "my." Right at the get-go, I am gathered up into the great family of God; I belong. And all those others saying that word "our" -- in whatever language -- belong, too. And because we belong to God, we belong to each other. It is a radical connectivity, one that I mostly fail to live into. But there are other parts of the prayer that help with that: "Forgive us." And then there are the other demands: "Give us;" "Lead us not;" "Deliver us." How can we dare to command God, and yet we do every time we pray this Prayer.

A pastor I once knew who worked with Alzheimer's patients said that the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer stayed with those who were Christian longer than almost anything else. These are words that we know in the core of our being. But we know them so well that it is easy not to hear them, even when we are saying them out loud. So I cherish my Southern praying, being slowed down, surrounded by those who know and love me best, and hearing -- really hearing -- what I am saying to God.

For thine is the kingdom,

the power and the glory,

for ever and ever.

Amen

Work

My garden has been slow in ripening this year. I planted things late and then the weather has been (until recently) cool and wet. But this week I have picked beans, cucumbers, and a few tomatoes. I’ve cooked food that has traveled only a few steps from plot to plate. It is good. I have also been sewing. Last weekend, I made pillowcases for my three young neighbors, two with cars and tools on them for the little boys and one with fashion items for their sister. I suppose that was a frivolous project, making something that is so easily available already made, but I loved doing it.

I spend my days in a job where “work” is something I do with my brain, and I live easily in that world. But the joy of these homely tasks where I physically do something reminds of the psalmist’s prayer: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands—O prosper the work of our hands!” (Psalm 90.17)

And here is my version: Prosper the work of my mind. And give me work for my hands, too, because that will prosper the peace of my soul. May it be so. Amen.

No Cloistered Airport

I have been reading "An Infinity of Little Hours" which is about five young men who seek to become Carthusian monks. The order is one of the most demanding, with the monks living lives of solitude and silence, in a setting that is much as it might have been when the order was founded just after the first millennium. I had this book in my bag on Wednesday when I was traveling. It was a morning of snow and ice, and the airport was shut down for about five hours. There were crowds of people trying to get to warm places, or places for business, or just places other than where they were. And the planes were not flying and the children were fussy and so were the grownups. I tried to read a bit in the book, but it seemed such a contrast that I gave up. And I have been wondering about the struggle of the monks to sense the presence of God, to immerse themselves in prayer, to live faithful lives in a place where the the distraction is themselves. It was a struggle for them, as the book recounts, and not all of them succeeded. And how much more for those of us in places like that airport on Wednesday morning, with noise and crowds and frustration, with short tempers and long waits, with too much coffee and too little sleep and nothing even to remind us of thinking about the presence of God. But there we were, and God was there, too, I suppose, even if it was hard to know that. No one I know lives the kind of life that the Carthusians do, but I do know people who live faithful lives of prayer. It is just a lot harder to do outside the cloister.

Centering Prayer, cont.

In giving instructions about prayer, Jesus said: “Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” I think the KJV uses the word “ closet,” and that strikes me as somehow more powerful. First of all, a closet is a small, dark space, without room for distraction. And second, if I were to pray in my closet I would need to do a lot of work first – and maybe that is just the point of this instruction, at least to me.

My closet is packed with stuff. I have more clothes than I can possibly wear in a month, I suppose. And just how many pair of black shoes does one woman need? If I were really to go into my closet to pray, I would need to get rid of a lot of stuff, literally and figuratively. I sit to pray and I am surrounded by my physical and mental accumulations. They crowd out my silence, intrude into my spirit, and disturb my soul. Instead of focusing on God, I think about what to wear, which bills need to be paid, whether I did the agenda for the 8:30 meeting. I try to pray in the midst of a soul crammed with the accumulations of too many seasons. I have held onto that which should have been discarded or recycled long ago: old grudges and hurt; imagined identities that no longer fit the reality of who I am; unnecessary busyness that bounces around my brain like a pack of chattering monkeys.

The room for centering prayer at the cathedral is dark and plain. It is a physical representation of what I would want for my spiritual reality. So I work on emptying my spiritual closets -- and my physical ones, too -- so there will be a little more room for the Holy Spirit, even in the midst of all the stuff of my life.

Centering Prayer

Every Wednesday, the cathedral has a half hour or so of centering prayer. The space is wonderful, dark and still with smooth white walls, one candle burning and the morning light coming through a high stained glass window. This morning, a woman came in and sank down in her chair and said "Oh, yes." And her "yes" hung in the air and resonated in my soul and I felt "yes" too.
I am not very often quiet and almost never quiet in the company of others. There is something about a collective silence in a place that has known hundreds of them that soaks into your bones. I do not need to pray -- somehow the space and the silence pray with and for me. I will cherish this when I leave, when I am back home where my praying is filled with to-do lists and garbage trucks and the paper thumping against the front door. But for now, the prayers still linger within, my poor prayer and all those powerful ones of the other people, unknown to me, whose silence enfolded me this morning and continues to do that.

Bells, bells, bells, bells......

Marie Borroff has a lovely poem “In the Range of Bells” about walking down the hill in New Haven and listening to the bells ring. I am here at a cathedral also in the range of bells, but I do not find it a thoughtful exercise. Instead, it just seems like (dare I say it) noise. The ringing yesterday and again tonight seems random and unpredictable. It is not music to me nor is it a sound that counts the hours, coming, as it does, at odd moments. It is as though some unseen hand needs to practice a six- or seven-note scale – over and over and over. And maybe that is in fact the case. I prefer the sound of acorns falling from the tree outside, birds going to sleep, and even a siren in the distance that calls me to prayer for someone in distress. The disembodied dinging of these bells is not peaceful, not prayerful.
There is much about this place that is lovely and calls to the contemplative in me, but there is also much that seems of pomp and privilege, and I do not connect with it. I wonder if the appreciation of grandeur is, as they say, an acquired taste. I have been formed in a small country church, not a cathedral, where the music was an often out-of-tune piano and the voices of those I loved singing over my head. There were no sophisticated choirs, no carillons, no majestic organs. But all the music, here and there, is the praise of God. Even, I suppose, these interminable bells…..

Walking the Labyrinth

At the National Cathedral this week, there have been opportunities for interfaith prayer practices focusing on peace. There was a big concert with Graham Nash and David Crosby, Emily Saliers, Jackson Browne, and Keb’ Mo’. Tibetan monks have chanted and made a sacred sand Mandela. There have been prayers and songs and services. This afternoon I walked the labyrinth that has been put in place as part of this.

The piece of painted canvas is laid on the stone floor of a chapel with a large mural of Jesus after the crucifixion being carried to the tomb. There are candles on the altar and rows of chairs with kneelers. It is a very Christian space. Two people are chanting there, in a language I do not know, accompanied by harmonium and drums. When they pause between chants, there is the sound of a choir from somewhere else, singing a traditional hymn. Some people are walking, some are sitting in the chairs, some are kneeling.

I watch for a while, and the labyrinth seems crowded. I am reluctant to put myself in the midst of all those people, all bunching up together. One woman makes her own path, skipping over parts of the labyrinth, going her own way. I am a little amazed by this, and then amazed that I am so rule-bound that it would not occur to me to do that myself. I wonder if she missed something, or if it was an act of courage to break off in her own direction. I know that when I walk, I will stay within the lines.

I begin to walk, and I am in a hurry. It is hard, so hard, to slow myself down. But bit by bit, I absorb the rhythm of those who are more patient, more prayerful than I am. As I wind around the circles, I feel my soul unwinding. There is a middle-aged man ahead of me in khakis and a green polo shirt, a little wobbly in his sock-feet. Going that slowly puts me off balance at first, too. And then I feel my feet on the canvas, and I feel the solid stone underneath, and I somehow get my grounding. I can feel my feet slowing, my breathing slowing, my mind quieting.

There are children and teens walking, too. Two brothers enter the chapel. They are maybe nine and twelve. They take off their tennis shoes and begin. They are followed by two girls roughly the same ages. They walk, too, while their mother sits on the side and watches them. When I pass the man in the green polo shirt, I smell his cologne. When I pass the boys, they smell like clean laundry. We all follow the path, around and in and out.

In the center, I find a deep prayer within myself. And even when I leave the labyrinth, leave the chapel, leave the cathedral, the prayer stays with me, and so does the quiet and the unhurried feeling.