I begin with a poem brought to us by Malcolm Guite for this day in his The Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter. The poem is by Kelly Belmonte, a modern American poet.
Coffee in one hand leaning in to share, listen: How I talk to God. “Momma, you’re special.” Three-year-old touches my cheek. How God talks to me. While driving I make lists: done, do, hope, love, hate, try, How I talk to God. Above the highway hawk: high, alone, free, focused. How God talks to me. Rash, impetuous chatter, followed by silence: How I talk to God. First, second, third, fourth chance to hear, then another: How God talks to me. Fetal position under flannel sheets, weeping How I talk to God. Moonlight on pillow tending to my open wounds How God talks to me. Pulling from my heap of words, the ones that mean yes: How I talk to God. Infinite connects with finite, without words: How God talks to me.
There’s really never, so far as I can remember, a time when I didn’t pray. Well, there would be gaps of various lengths, I’m sure, but never a complete abandonment of the practice. Most of it would come in silence, in moments caught out of the busyness of a day or evening or early morning: all of my working life, I was an early riser, often at 4:00 a.m.
There was a period when my prayers were primarily encapsulated by a single, semi-incoherent word on first awaking in the morning: “Help!” Shouted silently in my head so as not to awaken my sleeping partner.
My sense of what prayer is, or can be, has grown as I’ve gotten older, and I’m grateful for that fact. I don’t claim to have any secrets or really know what prayer is all about but I feel my practice shifting, and this poem both encapsulates some of what I’ve learned but also calls me to more. I’ve gone from, early on, seeing prayer mainly as asking (for things, for life to be easier, for relief from pains of the heart), through a long period (not entirely past) of thinking that God doesn’t pay much attention to the small stuff of life and/or doesn’t care about it, to an increasing willingness to simply cast my lot on the notion that for me to express myself, what’s in me at the moment, somehow matters to the God of the cosmos. Don’t ask me to explain this or how it might be so; I can’t really do that. For me, it’s a part of faith, and faith doesn’t have really good explanations.
There were several things that struck Merna and me as we read this aloud this morning, including especially the messiness of the “How I talk to God” of the haiku “calls” (see my use of “semi-incoherent” above) and the bits of ordinary in the “response” haikus. Have you ever felt a person’s touch as the touch of God on you, in your life? I have. In this poem, it’s a three-year-old’s simple words to its mother.
I suspect we often miss these small moments of God’s presence in our lives. The poet’s “First, second, third, fourth chance” to hear reflect this fact. I can remember, years ago, going to an important and likely very disturbing meeting and seeing a flock of Canada geese go over as I drove to the meeting place; that was 25 years ago or more, and I still remember the sense that, somehow, God would be with us in that meeting. Merna and I sometimes marvel at the small ways in which we see God’s hand: for us, birds frequently are the messengers, simply as they do what they do.
There’s no question that we’re attributing small events that can be “explained” as creatures and plants and the world as a whole simply taking the “course of nature.” I don’t want to dispute that; and I in fact believe in that, too. Pileated woodpeckers, after all, have returned to our neighborhood for complex reasons that a biologist or ornithologist can no doubt explain—and we non-scientists even know some of the reasons. Nonetheless, when we see one arrive at our suet feeder and perch there, gorgeous and ungainly because of its sheer size, we feel deep gratitude: beauty has entered our world, at least momentarily. And gratitude calls for an object, someone or something to whom one is grateful. It’s indeed a choice to direct that gratitude to God.
Back to the poem.
The “call” in the poem that grabbed me this morning was this:
. . . I make lists: done, do, hope, love, hate, try. How I talk to God
Unlike Belmonte, I never did this while driving (except, perhaps, mentally; well, yeah, a lot of the time, while driving, mentally). But while I was working for nearly 45 years at our business, I kept lists of things that needed to be done (mainly) or that I wanted to do (not as much; no time for that). I wrote these items down on a piece of scrap (previously printed on one side) 8.5 × 11" paper folded in half. My lists were long; and it helped me organize my life and gave me the satisfaction of crossing out those items that were done. Most of the time, I had to renew the list daily (at least), carrying over any undone things from the prior day.
Was I praying all those years? Well, yes, but I think now that (maybe?!) my conception of prayer was too small.
Malcolm Guite provides some help in his comments. After noting that “St Paul asks us to pray without ceasing” and that some Christians through the ages have taken this as a call in the direction of monasticism of some sort, with long periods of time committed to prayer; or that others have seen this as a call to have some kind of Christian mantra underneath all that they do, he says:
Both these approaches have their merits and have proved fruitful in the lives of some of the greatest saints, but they are not for everyone. Most people don’t have the opportunity or leisure, or the temperament or specific vocation, to detach themselves in that way; and yet in some sense continuous prayer remains a possibility. What this poem offers is a glimpse of how the very interruptions and mental preoccupations that sometimes clutter our days are themselves prayer if we will let them be, if we experience them in and with God. (p. 63)
Infinite connects with finite, without words: How God talks to me.