Prayer | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

My friend Kat sent me the sweetest little book, The Prayer Tree by Micheal Leunig. In the intro, the author says,

Might not prayer then be our most accessible means to inner reconciliation; a natural healing function in response to the pain of the divided self and the divided world? Might not prayerfulness be part of our survival instinct belonging more to the wilderness than to the church?

One of my favorite books is Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers by Anne Lamott. In it, she describes prayer this way,

Let’s just say prayer is communication from our hearts to the great mystery, or Goodness, or Howard; to the animating energy of love we are sometimes bold enough to believe in; to something unimaginably big, and not us… Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy — all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.

Which leads me directly to Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day, in which she says,

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

May all beings be safe.
May all beings be happy.
May all beings be healthy.
May all beings live with ease.
Including you, kind and gentle reader.
Including me.
So be it. Yes. Amen.

I just finished reading Anne Lamott’s new book, Help Thanks Wow: Three Essential Prayers. Anne Lamott is one of my favorite writers, one of the best teachers, someone I adore because she shows up, as she is, and tells the truth. Honestly, I don’t always like what she has to say. It can make me uncomfortable and sad, but I know it’s the truth. She doesn’t try to make it pretty, she’s not attempting to craft a fussy literary moment, she’s not showing off, but simply is telling you how it is. This is the kind of writer, the kind of person I aspire to be.

In the section about “Thanks,” she says:

I admit, sometimes this position of gratitude can be a bit of a stretch. So many bad things happen in each of our lives. Who knew? When my son, Sam, was seven and discovered that he and I would probably not die at exactly the same moment, he began to weep and said, “If I had known that, I wouldn’t have agreed to be born.” This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb…We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part the big picture.

In the face of everything, we slowly come through. We manage to make new constructs and baskets to hold what remains, and what has newly appeared. We come to know–to reconnect with–something rich and okay about ourselves. And at some point, we cast our eyes to the beautiful skies, above all the crap we’re wallowing in, and we whisper, “Thank you.”