Daily prayer allows me to see the whole of life through a prism of grace and humor. The light filtering through is a rainbow of clarity and precision. Now my spiritual practice revolves around meditation, prayer and harmonium chanting. These are not the foxhole kinds of prayers a soldier, who may never have prayed a day in her life, suddenly begins as bombs come splintering through her platoon. Nor are they prayers to a male or female god, nor are they strictly Christian in nature although Christ and Krishna Consciousness flow through all of them.
Prayer is like meditation. The moment these practices are dropped and we think they are no longer needed, life challenges sweep in to teach that stress brings us faster to our knees than if we were practicing daily as a way to transcend the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Prayer and meditation may bring us to our knees, too, but as an act of gratitude for all the beauty in our lives.
Tomaso and I practiced meditation and prayer together. This is why our bond then and now endures.
Nearly a decade ago, I wrote a prayer a day for 365 days on a now defunct blog. I was reminded then of the Conestoga River that ran by our house. Observing her flow each day was a lesson in how river waters dance from moment to moment. For one thing, she never looks the same because of the light, giving new dimension to her current. Captured light infuses into all five senses, and helps to develop the sixth sense of intuition, as well.
Whereas the writing of 365 prayers was an accomplishment of “doing,” the real gift of those prayers was the aura of “being,”given to anyone who read them. They had at their heart a happiness of non-striving, allowing us to strive for nothing more than to “be” calm, peaceful, serene, loving and kind.
The prayers also had at their core the gift to question our thoughts, letting go of the deep attachment to judgement, criticism and suffering. These thoughts are at best unreliable and inaccurate.
We must not deny them, but transform them.
Today let us surrender to “what is” in a spirit of forgiveness. OM