Encountering Prayer

I remember the time I first really encountered prayer. Actually, I think prayer encountered me because the first prayer was born of an unplanned moment. When, almost organically, words began to feed themselves to me, and there seemed to be no other choice but to speak them. In fact, it did not feel like choice at all. My hunch is that this is not so unusual.

I recall I was lying on my bathroom floor wrapped in a towel. I had just finished taking a shower.  I remember feeling that the act of taking a shower had seemed to take the very last bit of energy that I had, and  I could not take one more step. So I just lay down right there on the bathmat and I cried. That moment was utterly painful and scary, no terrifying.

At the time I did not know that I had postpartum depression. I had just had my first child only weeks before and I was in that tailspin of confusion and anxiety that is inherent in first-time parenthood.  I only wish now I could go back to that younger version of me lying on the floor of the bathroom crying to reassure her. I would pick her up, hold her, and tell her with confidence and tenderness that everything will be okay.  I would say, “I know you cannot imagine this now, but you will get through this.”

According to Barbara Brown Taylor, who is a former Christian minister and now full-time writer and professor of theology, the beginning of my prayer life stemming from a moment of the most painful vulnerability I have ever experienced is no surprise. In her book An Altar in the World she says:

Pain is provocative. Pain pushes people to the edge...Pain strips away all the illusions required to maintain the status quo. Pain begs for change, and when those in its grip find no release on earth, plenty of them look to heaven-including some whose formal belief systems preclude such wishful thinking.

Yup, that was me in April, 2009.  And I would say, this includes an utterly secularbelief system.

The interesting thing is, that first prayer was spoken without any hesitancy or self-consciousness.  This was arguably because desperation and major hormonal imbalances were at play, but nonetheless noteworthy because when I tried to recreate that moment (the engagement in prayer, not the pain) it was comically awkward and uncomfortable.  In fact, it took years for me to begin to settle in to a prayer life that resembled anything like comfort or familiarity.  

And it took effort. In the beginning I couldn’t come up with my own words without feeling like what I was saying was trite, corny or just plain inauthentic. So I turned to others for guidance.

I tried reading books on prayer like Kate Braestrupp’s Beginners Grace: Bringing prayer to life. I printed out song lyrics and poems off the internet that I thought sounded like prayer-like but still using words that were more “me.” I read other people’s prayers by paging through books by Marianne Williamson and the like in the morning or before bed.  I went to my local library’s annual used book sale fundraiser to find all three of the Conversations with God trilogy by Neale Donald Walsch plus Friendship with God: An uncommon dialogue.  I even went back to my mind to my old AL-ANON days to try to remember what folks had said in meetings about prayer being a means of talking to my higher power and meditation being a practice of listening to her/him/it.

It took quite some time to get passed the judgments that what I was doing and saying sounded goofy or weird.  Which, if you are reading this and you come from a long lineage of prayerful people, this may make little or no sense to you.  But I can tell you from experience, that if you didn’t like me, and you are not in one of those throwing-your-hands-up-in-the-air-I-will-try-anything moments like I was that day in April, it takes quite a bit of time before you can embody your prayer because all those inner dialogues about what prayer “should” look like or sound like or be like persist.  It can be so hard in fact, that, without the experience I had of hitting a rock bottom on my bathroom floor, I don’t know that I have would have ever begun to pray.

I think that is the possibility of pain though. Maybe even the function of pain.  Barbara Brown Taylor says “pain makes theologians of us all. If you have spent even one night in real physical [emotional] pain, then you know what that can do to your faith in God, not to mention your faith in your own ability to manage your life.” I couldn’t agree more. And I can tell you, I manage my life far differently now than I did 6 years ago.  But isn’t that the hope for us all? That we gain wisdom and insight as we grow and awaken, and have compassionate space for our younger selves who were doing the best they could with the information they had at that moment in time?

What helps me to remember that compassion is to hold the image of a road in mind as the spiritual path.  Sometimes we are on a Rt. 1 driving up the Pacific Coast on a road so windy that we cannot see what is next.  No way to know how the difficulty we are going through now will flesh out in the straight ahead that will follow. And just having to trust, have faith, that all will be revealed in time.  For now though, we have all we need including the episodic pain and suffering that can, as Taylor says, “pop your clutch and shoot you into the next gear.”

On my desk at work I have a bookmark given to me by a former patient of mine.  It says “Every moment has something to offer us. Every single moment.” That’s it’s own prayer right there, and a good reminder to hold during those painful rock bottoms.

What about you? How did you begin to pray? What pain in your life prompted the beginning of a spiritual practice?