Falling back

Today is that delicious day we each get once a year when we set our clocks back and get an extra hour of either sleep or daytime activity. I got a little of each.

I expectedly awakened a little earlier than I normally would on a Sunday, and I indulged myself in an extended period of prayer, something I'd been yearning for since mid-summer when I began the chaotic wind down of my old job and transition into what is seeming to be an equally busy new job.

For me, prayer satisfies me most when I do it regularly.  I think of it as being a bit like exercise. When I am doing either every day, I slide into it easily and often get into "the zone"--that enchanting place where time and space cease to exist, and I am mindfully in the present.  However, not unlike being off exercise for a while, when I come back to prayer after time away, I struggle.

Now it isn't as if I haven't prayed for months.  I have.  Yet instead of deep, solace-inducing communion, my prayers have been less two-way communication and deep listening and more pleas for aid, like "Help me know what to do right now," "Show me the way," or "Help me get through this day." More often than not, I heard no answer.  I am sure that the answers were there, but I was either not present enough to receive the answer or overly intellectualizing to figure the answer out myself. Most likely, both.

This morning the need to develop my prayer muscles was clearly apparent.

With that said, I did hear that I should write a blog post, so here I am.  I do often feel that writing becomes a prayer for me, and my listening becomes richer when I allow myself to not know what it is I am going to write but rather just allow it to flow through me.  As I write this post, I understand some of what was missing from my prayers this morning that I couldn't seem to know when I was in them.

Back in the day when I prayed with clients, I used the term "let your prayers pray you."

"God," I said, "would let us know what we should be praying for."  Then we would sit and pray together.  Often what would come up would be things about which my mind would never have thought to pray.  "Thank you for the birds that sing outside my window every morning," or "Thank you for the sun and its warmth on my skin when I walk."  Occasionally, I expressed gratitude for just being still.

The most interesting thing about letting my prayers pray me is that much, maybe most, of my prayers uttered from that space expressed gratitude and, more often than not, they acknowledged the little things in life of which I so often don't even make notice.  I believe that focusing attention on the exquisite order of the world around me diminished whatever might have been on my heart and mind that day to an appropriate proportion.

The practice also reminds me of the non-linear nature of the Universe. For instance, my struggle to pray this morning did send me to computer to write about prayer.  Now I remember what I had forgotten about praying and can go back to prayer again with an open heart and mind.

Soon, I will do that.

As I ponder doing so, however, the thought that nags at me is how I got so far from my prayer practice to have forgotten how to connect.  The answer may go back to the metaphor of exercise.  My actions haven't made either priorities when in my heart I know that I ache for both. Articulated priorities, which aren't acted upon as such, are clearly not the focus of our intention.

In the busyness of a life that seems to be driven by urgencies, like finding a new refrigerator before all my food thaws on a gorgeous fall day when I would prefer to go for a long walk in the woods. Always there seems to be something urgent that cuts into my time. Yet if I want my life to reflect the focus of my intentions, I must act accordingly.

I truly don't have an answer for the refrigerator-versus-the-fall-walk dilemma but somehow I know in my heart that if I spend more time in prayer and exercise, how to bring life to my intentions will become clear to me.  Right now, I am savoring the extra hour to focus on prayer and exercise and feeling comfortable pushing back the urgent for just a little longer.