My Prayers Praying Me

When I was growing up, I was taught that prayer was about talking to God: impassioned pleas, begging, bartering, asking for guidance from God by only offering two options, or the metaphorical equivalent of parting the waters for us to get the date we wanted for prom.  Clearly, it was about asking God to help us get what we wanted.  I once heard something (Marianne Williamson?) refer to this kind of prayer as "the carhop in the sky." We tell God what we want, and he/she is supposed to bring it to us.

I have come to believe a few different things about prayer.  First, it is at least as much about listening as talking...maybe much more.  Second, when we ask for guidance, we should do so with open-ended questions so that we really give God room to point us in the right direction, and when we ask for help, we should listen very carefully.  The answers often float in as if on the wings of a butterfly and always without explanation.  Reasoning with Go about why is pure foolishness.  The answer is the answer. 

Third, everything is a gift; no matter how much we don't like or understand the answers when they show up in our lives, if we are open-minded, we will eventually see that they are a gift. 

Finally, God will tell us what to pray, if we will still our minds and listen.

All of these weave together to produce a very different kind of prayer than what I grew up with.  When I started to pray this way, the term that came to me for it was "my prayers praying me."  How this works is that I allow myself to become very still.  Then I express the intention to prayer. Since everything is a gift, I begin by expressing gratitude, but not for stuff  in my life. When I say that God will tell us what to pray, I mean that things will become apparent for which I should thank God.

I don't know if it works exactly the same way for everyone.  Most of the time, I hear what to be grateful for, but occasionally I may see a picture which reminds me of something to be grateful for.  In a recent prayer, I started noticing the buzz of the cicadas in the park behind me.  That reminded me to thank God for having an apartment in a large city that overlooked a national park.  It also reminded me of my home, having a home, and being able to afford my home, all things that I've learned to not take for granted. I was grateful that I had friends who opened their doors for me and that I was never on the streets during my season of homelessness.  Then I remembered how wonderful it was to have a trailhead into the park just feet outside my backdoor. 

After I'd taken time to be very grateful for my apartment and a number of other positives in my life, I started to thank God for things for which others may not take time to express gratitude.  I thanked God for my pain because there was a time when I might have become a quadriplegic and couldn't have felt pain. Then I was grateful that I could wiggle my fingers and toes.

I thanked God for my difficult bosses because I was grateful to have bosses and all the things that went with them--a regular paycheck, benefits, and even paid time off.  I even thanked God for my less-than-wonderful eyesight because before my February surgery, I understood I might lose the sight in one eye.  You get the idea.

I wasn't running a stop watch, but my guess is that I was grateful for at least 20 minutes. Most of what I was thankful for weren't things that normally would have been on my Top 10 of gratitude.  Instead, they were really very meaningful things for me to remember.  When I am thankful for pain, bad eyesight, and even not being on the streets, when I get curve balls in my life, they remind me to look for the gift.

Then, it was time to ask.  Once again, I asked: what should I pray for?  There it was, just like in the wings of a butterfly, "Heal me."  There was a knowing acknowledgement in my throat as my head involuntarily shook to the affirmative.  "Heal me," I said.

Then, there was stillness again.  No drama.  No begging.  No choices.  Just "heal me."  The roots of the word "heal" are "to make whole."  Gratitude, and a request to be made whole.  When my prayers pray me, they are simple and distilled.  What more could I ask for?