Speaker 1: Emily Dickinson wrote this poem. . . .
Speaker 2: Prayer is the little implement
Through which Men reach
Where Presence — is denied them.
They fling their Speech
By means of it — in God’s Ear —
If then He hear —
This sums the Apparatus
Comprised in Prayer —
Speaker 1: To whom do you fling your speech when you pray?
Claven: I pray to the triune God. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. If I am praying conversationally, I usually address my prayers to “Father” and I end them “through Jesus Christ.”
Jim: I don’t pray in the conventional sense of the word. I send my thoughts out to the Universe. What do I expect? To be surprised.
Kirsten: I address God, Holy Spirit, Creator or Great Spirit.
Joey: The word “praying” to me suggests a personal communication with a personified deity. I don’t believe in the Divine as a person to whom one can “talk.”
Speaker 1: Carl Sandburg cast a prayer in the form of a poem:
Speaker 2: Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.
Speaker 1: What forms do your prayers take?
Joey: Some feminists say that “God is a verb.” One doesn’t talk to such a God. One lives with It, helps sustain It, and tries not to violate that force for good. I guess my closest analogy to the experience of prayer is a sense of losing my ego to this Force, feeling my connection to other parts of creation (human, animal, earth) and considering how to act in greater harmony with it. I love those times when I feel part of this larger energy – attending to our garden or to the majesty of creation, being loving to others in whatever small way, singing in chorus, struggling for justice.
Jim: Throughout my life I have changed my prayer practices. I began conventionally, with folded hands, and closed eyes, flirted briefly with concentrating on a mantra, perched on a zazen stool. I’ve abandoned all that.
Today, I think that at best, prayer is, in Frederick Buechner’s words, “wishful thinking.” It is a form of energy projection, of visualization, of exercising that divine bit of the Universe within us that is left over from the Big Bang.
By the way, I still have my zazen stool up on a shelf in the basement. If anybody wants it, it could use a good home.
Claven: I pray in different forms. On Sunday, we pray congregationally, and then we have liturgical prayers for the morning and evening. I have snippets of prayer throughout the day. You could call them “comments to God” that do not follow any particular form. But when I am deeply troubled about something, I get away by myself and down on my knees and pray privately. I also tend to pray briefly before I study, and if I am celebrating a meal with friends, or eating alone.
Kirsten: I sit in my upstairs meditation room, light candles, fold hands in lap and speak. Or squat or kneel at the riverbank, take water and put it on my forehead, then put hands in prayer position at forehead or heart and whisper. I begin with gratitude and have a strong focus on gratitude, and I think this has helped bring this attitude to a cellular level.
I give thanks for the day and the features of the world around me, for people in my life, especially on that day or the previous day. I also pray in snatches during the course of the day, particularly in stressful moments, silently; I ask for aid.
Lola: Since I am a woman and can multitask, I pray while walking, driving, doing house work, but also when I am quiet and alone.
Speaker 1: In an article titled “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer,” published in Poetry magazine in 2005, poet and alcoholic Mary Karr wrote the following about a conversation with a fellow poet about prayer.
Speaker 2: Thomas Lux was somebody I saw a lot those days around Cambridge . . . . One day after I’d been doing these perfunctory prayers for a while, I asked Lux – himself off the sauce for some years – if he’d ever prayed. He was barbecuing by a swimming pool for a gaggle of poets. . . .
The scene comes back to me with Lux poking at meat splayed on the grill while I swirled my naked son around the swimming pool. Did he actually pray? I couldn’t imagine it – Lux, that dismal sucker.
Ever taciturn, Lux told me: I say thanks.
For what? I wanted to know. . . . I honestly couldn’t think of anything to be grateful for. I told him something like I was glad I still had all my limbs. That’s what I mean about how my mind didn’t take in reality before I began to pray. I couldn’t register the privilege of holding my . . . boy, who chortled and bubbled and splashed on my lap.
It was a clear day, and Lux was standing in his Speedo suit at the barbecue turning sausages and chicken with one of those diabolical-looking forks. Say thanks for the sky, Lux said, say it to the floorboards. This isn’t hard, Mare.
Speaker 1: Some of us are curious about what prompts the prayers of others. Is it a daily ritual? Do you use prayer as spiritual first aid, mostly in emergencies? Or, as Lux suggests, to give thanks?
Claven: I pray because it’s impossible to identify God’s voice without being in relationship with him, and I need to be in relationship with God for guidance, admonishment, comfort (and all the other things that a person is in relationship with someone else for).
Joey: I do hold people in my thoughts when I think they are in need of a little extra support, wishing them well. I don’t know, is that prayer?
Jim: Lord save us from this earthquake, we pray in San Francisco. Lord, save us from that tornado, we cry out in Kansas. Please God, let me find a parking place. Still the earthquakes come, still the tornadoes form in the sky, still the parking lot at the mall is full.
Yet I do have a vivid memory, from the spring of 1976. I was at a particularly low point in my life. I was stuck in a low-level, dead-end job, and an early marriage had collapsed. Completely at loose ends, having nothing to tie me to anyone, anywhere, I cried out to Whomever Was Listening Out There, “I’m lonely.” And I remember hearing a very distinct and rather testy voice whisper from behind me over my right shoulder, “I’m working on it!” It startled me. Of course when I turned to look, no one was there. But the voice was real.
Kirsten: Sometimes I lose some object and pray to find it; I often do. I have extended that to non-tangibles, as in help me find my relationship with so-and-so. It helps me be more intentional and mindful.
Lola: My prayers probably are heavy on the petition side, but I also give thanks and praise. I believe that many of my prayers have been answered. Many times I have felt God’s presence with me. At times I have thought my prayer was not heard or answered, but in time I saw the results of that prayer. In some cases – I’m thinking of the children – the results took years.
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 1: Did you pray as a child?
Kirsten: Not much.
Lola: I learned about prayer from my mother when I was a child. She had beautiful prayers of petition, praise and thanks. My early prayers were mostly habit. It was not until much later that prayer became meaningful.
Claven: I was raised Mormon, so adults “helped” me pray, by whispering long prayers into my ear (bit by bit) that incorporated passages of scripture (always from the King James translation) and I would repeat what they had said at each pause.
Jim: I did “Come Lord Jesus Be Our Guest” and “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”
Speaker 1: Here’s more from poet Mary Karr.
Speaker 2: Last winter . . . my faith got sandblasted away for some weeks. . . . Right after a move to New York, fortune delivered a triple whammy: my kid off to college, a live-in love ending volcanically, then medical maladies that kept me laid up for weeks alone. In a state of scalding hurt – sleepless and unable to conjure hope at some future prospects – suddenly (it felt sudden, as if a pall descended over me one day) God seemed vaporous as any perfume.
To kneel and pray in this state is almost physically painful. At best, it’s like talking into a bucket. At worst, you feel like a chump, some heartsick fool still sending valentines to a cad.
Speaker 1: Sometimes, prayer doesn’t seem to work – or to provide the expected result. Why do you think that is?
Lola: I think that people’s free will interferes with God’s answers to prayers. I think God answers prayers through our thoughts, other peoples’ thoughts and actions, the written Word, and many more ways. If people do not respond positively to those intercessions, the answer to that prayer may not happen for them.
Sometimes we ask too much. When I pray for peace in this world I think that is a massive request and that there are too many power hungry people for it to happen without a miracle. However, I also believe that peace may be happening in smaller ways in many places.
Claven: God always has an answer, but he is good father, and doesn’t give me everything I ask for.
Recently, I’d been praying for help to get our clutch fixed and everything fell through. Later, we found out that if we’d just fixed the clutch, it would only hold for a few months because of the other problems in the car. God protected us from a useless investment that we couldn’t afford.
Jim: Some people treat prayer as if it were magic – and magic doesn’t work. Prayer isn’t so much pie-in-the-sky wishing for things that are impractical.
Through prayer, we may be directly able to effect some change in our daily relationships to one another because we ourselves have changed. There are still destructive tornadoes and earthquakes; but through prayer, we ourselves may be changed into more compassionate beings, people who can give aid and comfort to the victims of tornadoes and earthquakes and grieve with the grieving.
Speaker 1: In the poem “The Sun Says His Prayers,” Vachel Lindsay writes:
Speaker 2: “The sun says his prayers,” said the fairy,
Or else he would wither and die.
“The sun says his prayers,” said the fairy,
“For strength to climb up through the sky.
He leans on invisible angels,
And Faith is his prop and his rod.
The sky is his crystal cathedral.
And dawn is his altar to God.”
Speaker 1: Go now in peace.
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