Last night's topic was prayer. I am not going to say much about the session because in Wellspring, we create circles of trust, and I will invoke that for myself as much as for my fellow Wellspring travelers. I'll say this much: I arrived at the session with a full and somewhat heavy heart, grateful that prayer was the topic.
I pray daily, never kneeling, sometimes with my eyes closed, but more often with them wide open in wonder. And because I spend so much of my life working with words, for me, words in prayer are often beside the point.
So it was harder than I'd have expected when we were asked to take a few minutes and write a prayer during our session. Still, because "I am who I am," I wrote three. The first:
I pray because
I pray because it helps me find the stillness
I pray because I am too much with myself
I pray because I am thankful
I pray because I want to pay attention
I pray for strength
I pray for peace
I pray because
Looking at that, the poet in me liked the repetition, but the editor in me thought, "too many I's."
My next one:
Spirit of life
give me stillness
give me strength
give me reason
give me love
Then my editor went back and changed the gives to grants. You see how it can be terribly difficult to be an editor, to continually be getting in my own way ... even in prayer, for god's sake.
Here's what I finally came up with:
Prayer is something
when words fail me
when I finally get out of
my head and into
my heart.
It's an experience
of gratitude ... and longing
and love.
Sometimes it's my senses
working overtime.
Sometimes it's me sitting still.
It is marvelous.
It is essential.
It is enough.
We took turns reading our prayers. One of the prayers was sung. One had exactly one word.
Wow.
Exactly.
Amen.
UU Wellspring
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Beautiful.
ReplyDeleteThank you!
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