Part I: A Memory
It might have been the candlelight, or the winter periwinkle dusk light slipping down the streets and collecting in the corners of windows and doorways, or my shoulders hunched up around my ears against the wind. Maybe it was the tension of being in my final year of grad school, the words swirling around and knocking into each other inside my skull, or the stacks of student work in my dingy studio apartment I was behind on grading. Maybe it was the magic and the devotion, the prana that had been cultivated in the space. Whatever the case, that yoga studio, crouching halfway down the 5800 North block of Broadway, glowed like a beacon in the dark. I’d been wandering spiritually for almost a year. I’d recently moved out of my neighborhood where my favorite church was located because my roommate moved away, and I couldn’t find a new one in my new neighborhood, nor afford to stay on my own in my old neighborhood. On top of which, surprisingly, church felt too full of words. This isn’t a complaint I make frequently. I love words: I’m a reader, I’m a writer, I was getting a writing degree. But at that time in my life there was just too much talking; I needed quiet. The studio was around the corner from my boyfriend’s place. I’d go to practice on Sunday nights, and then we’d meet at the Thai place across the street (love you Indie Cafe, hope you’re still doin it despite the pandemic xoxo) and eat and talk and giggle at each other like the idiots in love we were.
I was absolutely mad about that man (still am), in love with his warm, handsome smile, and his opinions about art and writing which occasionally bordered on arrogance, with how deeply he listened to me, but my favorite thing about those wintry Sunday nights was the yoga. They were taught by a lithe, elfin woman who would knot her dark hair into a pile on her head and then coach us through the half-primary series of Ashtanga yoga. (If you’re curious, there’s a PDF here. If you’re new to yoga, and click and then your jaw falls open when you see the pics, don’t be impressed. For one thing, I can’t execute perfectly on the majority of those poses in the specific way they’re taught, and besides, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the point of yoga is not the postures. Asana is a means, not an end. For the real deal on Ashtanga, in every way possible, check out this teacher/writer/dope human.) What was so remarkable about it was how quiet it was. There was no music, no sitar or harmonium or djembe, no iPod recording, no Enya or Deva Premal, and definitely nothing pop, hip-hop, or R&B. There was only the sound of the teacher, and the sound of my breath, and the sound our bodies made moving through space. It was silent, it was hard as hell, and made me feel brilliant, literally like I was shining.
I realized after several months of practicing this way that it was filling the space left when I departed my spiritual community, in fact that it was the first time I’d ever felt like I’d embodied prayer. It felt like an act of worship without words, without language. It felt like I was communing with Something and didn’t need the tropes I’d used before to do it. I’d found a spiritual community, and a spiritual practice, inside myself and I was using my body to do it. I was praying on my yoga mat: doctrine, theology, denomination were all irrelevant, it was just me and What Is Greater.
This is one of my favorite depictions of the person who was Jesus, called Maori Jesus by Sofia Minson. I first saw it in a lecture in an Intro to New Testament class, and it still speaks to me. Deep bow, Sophia.
“Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it IS a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.”
photo by Nathan Dumlao via unsplash. Thanks, Nathan.
Part II: Context
I grew up in black evangelical churches that I would call charismatic. In James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Tish talks about Fonny’s mother, “She was saved the moment she entered the church, she was Sanctified holy, and … there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you.” My churches were full of these women: impeccable in the external appearance of their spiritual practice, both approachable and untouchable at the same time. Fallen, but only conceptually. Remember the women in The Bluest Eye, who don’t sway too much when they walk, who don’t apply lipstick to the fullness of their lips and who worry about the edges of their hair? I grew up among these women in the church, tiptoeing around them, trying not to ask too many questions that made them mad, and listening closely to the hushed conversations they had with my mother when they forgot I was around. (Only-children learn invisibility among adults as a superpower early.) These are women who could organize and mobilize, who used phrases like bless your heart, and I’ll pray for you. On their faces, both phrases sound kind and generous, thoughtful even, but if you know what you’re listening for you can hear their scathing edges. I knew what these phrases meant. Bless your heart sometimes meant, “How stupid/clueless/inept are you?” or “That’s what your lazy, triflin’ ass gets,” and even sometimes, “Ha! Better you than me, you selfish cow.” I’ll pray for you was more nefarious. In a community where spiritual communion is encouraged, where prayer is a means of comfort or clarity, a place where the mystical way of knowing God is available and the miraculous is always possible, you’d think a sentence like this would indicate generosity, affirmation of hope and faith. As often as not, though, it means, “I know better than you do about your struggle with me/ with you/ with your situation, and I will talk to God on your behalf and appeal to Him that He do for you what I think he should do. I will go to God and elicit the outcome I desire in your life.”
Let me be honest: I heard folks say this a lot to me as a girl and young woman, and it was often in the midst of having shared with them some venture in my life that they objected to or were concerned about—some relationship, some decision, some obstacle, something that made me vulnerable. It was a phrase that came at the end of a conversation wherein they pursed their eyebrows at me, or nodded slowly, puzzled, or after which they peppered me with questions. It never felt like comfort, it never sounded like, I affirm your desire for this moment in your life, and will put my energy and my thoughts of you in the same direction as you do for yourself. Instead it felt like judgment, it sounded like, well that’s a shit idea, and I can only hope that God will show you the error of your shiftless, moronic ways before you’ve made an irreparable mistake. There were many times when I was insecure about choices I was making, and maybe the kindness of others I only saw as shade. Maybe it’s possible that women who said this to one another had only the best, clearest, and most grounded intentions, and the duplicity that I’m speaking about is just a projection of my own struggles with how organized religion meets my insecurity. I’m sure it is.
And I also know what those women meant when they said I’ll pray for you.
The echo in that sentiment has always been hard for me to receive. Few know what I pray for because I don’t talk much about it, so I seldom trust others to agree with me in prayer. This has only grown richer and more complex as my concept of Divinity has diversified. Sometimes prayer means not in English, or not with words, or not just to the God of Judgment throwing lightening of misfortune, nor the blond-haired, blue-eyed suffering Jesus with diminutive stigmata on the candles and the fans. What if prayer names a different deity, names sacred objects or practices outside of the tradition or in another, what if it involves action or movement? Are the church ladies going able to pray with me when they learn I am praying to an Elephant-headed deity with light, dancing feet and a pot belly who broke off his own tusk so he could use it as an implement to write the Mahabarata, the longest written epic poem known to human civilization? Or will they pray for me, that white Jesus will deliver me from my heathen practice involving (gasp) false gods, breaking the very first commandment?
Nowadays, I get spam messages from folks who want to put me in their prayer tree, from communities I’ve never heard of and don’t seek to join, saying that they’ll pray for me. I imagine that these communities, like the church ladies of my early faith formation, aren’t praying in accordance with my own prayers, but instead are praying that my politics and behaviors might align more with their own. They’re praying for a turn from my ways; for my assimilation; for my erasure.
This phrase, I’ll pray for you, describes a relationship called intercessory prayer. I’m not going to get all lecture-y and obnoxious about this, mainly because I don’t know enough. I’ll only say this: when I hear the word intercessor, I think of words like ally, like advocate. Someone who will go to, go before, who will petition on behalf of another. There’s almost a kind of broad-shouldered quality about it, as if one were taking on the burden of another by going on their behalf.
photo by Rob King via unsplash. Thanks, Rob.
Part III: The Consideration
I have a (mercifully, brilliantly) long break between semesters in school right now, and this year I’m using it to take a J-term class, what some schools call a class in a condensed timeline. Some of them are three weeks long; the class I’m taking, Comparative Monasticisms, taught by my supervisor, colleague, and mentor, HDS Chaplain Kerry Maloney, involves a contemplation of sacred, critical, and academic texts, and a week of intense practice/ritual, wherein we all take a collective temporary vow. Evidently, in seasons past this would happen in a space where we could live in community, as monastics did and do, but you know, COVID and all that. So we’re alone together, in the cells of our homes making vows to one another and to our values and gods of how to spend our time in contemplation, worship, silence. Preparing for this time, I’ve been doing the coursework: we’re reading a lot of Thomas Merton, folks like Rev. angel Kyoto williams, the Rule of St. Benedict, the rule of the Bikkhu Patimokkha, Thich Nat Hanh, and so many others, as well as watching a fair amount of documentary footage of various Cistercian, Carthusian, and Buddhist monastics and communities. It’s fascinating. It’s sometimes deeply frustrating. In one doc I recently heard a contemplative say that those who enter a life like this—and I’d wager, specifically a Christian life, though the point could be argued that that’s not exclusive—do so because they believe that they can serve the world more fully, as well as their god, through a life of strict prayer and contemplation, than they can in a life that requires a level of interaction with the “outside world.” It’s not the only way to lead a contemplative life, but it’s the way that they feel called to lead one, and their work is to spend hours of every day in prayer and communion with God, whether that means in prostration and corporate prayer, alone in their tiny scrap of a bedroom, feeding or milking livestock, digging in the garden, begging for food, or whatever it means to do life. Pray without ceasing. And part of that prayer is for those of us doing life on the outside, someone said so in a film, too. They’re in there praying for us. What are they praying for: that we’d all turn away from practices and choices they view as hateful, spiteful, sinful? That we’d choose the life they’ve chosen, away from family, friends, comfort and society, and move with slowness and humility toward nature and our own mortality on the fringes? Are they praying for our “salvation”? Are they praying for healing? Equity? Justice? Are they praying that we may all be one?
I’ve no idea. So far, none of the monastics who’ve addressed the cameras that move through their spaces, witnessing their lives has disclosed what they pray for. Really, I don’t need to know what these people are praying for, and if their prayers for me are like my own. It’s most likely that their prayers are mostly about the state of their own relationship to/with G_d and I’m just inserting myself into a dynamic that doesn’t involve me.
But what if they are praying for me, and for you? What kind of karma is established between each of us, and the siblings on the hill, behind the wall, tucked in among the mountains, who whisper to G_d about us in the lean early hours of the day and night? (Is it the same karma that exists between each of us, all of us, as beings on this shared planet, in this shared space and time, with perhaps a clearer, brighter line drawn, electrified, between us?) What is being bound, or burned off, between us in that prayer?
I heard once that someone, somewhere, is chanting the Maha Mrtyunjaya mantra all the time, every moment of every day. (You can read about it here and here, though I dislike when folks frame prayers as the magic remedy for “prosperity.” Yuck.) I like believing this, because this mantra has powerful resonance for my own spiritual practice (why is not important, or is for another day), but it’s one of those mantras that you can chant and give away. Sometimes we choose or are given mantra—prayer—that is for ourselves, our hearts, our vessels, and the Maha Mrtyunjaya can be that, but we can also chant it for others: for someone who’s dying, or grieving, who’s in the throes of addiction, illness, fatigue, curse-breaking, burnout, who needs healing. We can chant it for the whole world if we want. Perhaps this is a kind of intercessory prayer—not that we are necessarily asking to take on the addiction/illness/fatigue/curse of another, but that we are witnessing it, and agreeing with them in their need for relief or healing or renewed stamina and fortitude.
Ultimately, this prayer is about letting go of the fear that stands between us and dying. May I, it implores, and we implore when we chant it, be released from death and liberated to immortality by You, and then it looks to a metaphor of our natural world, much like the cucumber is released from the vine in its time. (Please note, I’m not translating, I’m speaking about translations of this mantra that I’ve read, my Sanskrit is nowhere near good enough to do so.) Often when I hear/use the word liberation, I mean it positively: liberation from oppression or addiction or corruption, from poverty into comfort, from violence into peace, from hunger into satiety, these all sound “good.” Is liberation from life into death a “good” thing? (Who told us the spiritual life was supposed to “be good” or “feel good” anyway? This, too, a conversation for a different day.) I’m not saying that I think this mantra is like praying that I or you or any one of us would die. I don’t think that. This mantra is about our fears. What are we afraid of—that we aren’t good enough to do the work, that we will be gunned down by malevolent forces, that what we love will be compromised, that we will be hurt, exposed, made vulnerable, made small, made uncomfortable, made weak. All these things are the case all the time. This prayer is about stripping us of the distractions and lies that we wrap ourselves in so that we forget the temporary and tender nature of our existence, an existence with a one-way trajectory. So if I chant it and give it away, my prayer is that your liberation allows you more easily to have the experience of life, and of death, clarified for you, so that you might not resist or run or fight it, but see it as a welcome and necessary (and frankly inevitable) part of your life on this plane and in this time.
It feels important to say that prayer is not about stuff. Pray that I get a new car, or a girlfriend, or a new job. I don’t know about this. I mean, it’s easy for me to say that prayer isn’t about stuff, because I’ve got a lot of stuff. (This is about privilege, right?) I’m certainly not attempting to say that if you’re suffering or lacking in this life, just pray, and God will reward you in the next, I’m pretty sure I don’t believe it, and my ancestors have suffered too much under that shallow theology and cheap grace.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: I have, at various times, been debilitated by depression. Not new, in good company, yes. I remember coming home to my parents’ house for a time during one of these occasions, and wanting to die, wanting to pull the great curtain of gray over my head and obliterate everything that was and never to return to the world again. My mother, bless her heart, tried so hard to have me pray what I was suffering up off me. She meant well, and she could see that I was suffering with something that she didn’t understand. I was in the clutches of some demon of depression, and if only I would pray (there’s Fonny’s mother again, “I pray and I pray, and I pray…”) to God, sincerely and fervently and devotedly enough, I would be free of it.
I balked at this. I was so unhappy I could barely see; but the idea that my faith and my prayer life would cure me of this feeling were just… awful. I felt it reduced God to some kind of cosmic Santa Claus, or a capricious, demanding entity of power in my life to whom I hadn’t propitiated sufficiently, who was either harming me outright, or failing to show up in the way his people say he did. Where was the rescuer that was promised in the poetry of the Psalms, in the vision of Revelation? Is this all God was? I prayed to him and he fixed it? Turns out my mother was wrong. Part of what lifted that debilitating depression, what caused the flood waters to recede, was the right prescription. Part of it was being healed from harmful theology. Part of it was getting to live life on terms that reflected my values.
I share this to say that if I, if you, if we want to pray to God for stuff, we can certainly do that. But I think that’s not what spiritual life, what spiritual practice, is really about, at least not any practice I’m about. Every time I turn around Jesus was telling folks to get rid of stuff, to sell it and donate the proceeds. He was comparing us to lilies and sparrows, who bloom where they are planted and who are fed and nourished, indeed who live and who die, by the elements. When he taught his students to pray, he offered language about reconciliation and forgiveness, about avoiding what distracts us from closeness with the Divine, and about aligning what we want—job, relationship, sensation, stuff—with the Divine will of Creation. We can debate it. I guess I’m just saying that praying for stuff doesn’t prioritize a relationship with the Divine, and I think prayer does that. Prayer is about nurturing the cosmic relationship, the vertical, and in so doing, it allows us to do better at considering and nurturing the horizontal relationship, the manifest. They’re the same thing.
“In praying for others, we learn really and truly to love them. As we approach God on their behalf, we carry the thought of them into the very being of eternal Love, and we go into the being of him who is eternal Love, we learn to love whatever we take with us there.”
Part IV: The Invitation
This Spring I hope to take a class about Julian of Norwich. Julian was a 14th-century English anchorite and mystic who wrote a text called Revelations of Divine Love (the oldest known book written by a woman in English), based on a vision she had while she was sick with an illness—an illness that she prayed that God would give her so she could have this vision. The idea of this woman, who was quite literally walled into her community church, whom folks would come to visit, bringing food or encouragement to pass to her through a small window, asking for wisdom or prayer; this woman who prayed to get sick, who, while sick, had a mystical experience and then wrote about it… it just knocks me out. I expect I’ll be writing about her for a while longer. Right now I’m just thinking about the nature of having an intercessory prayer on call in your neighborhood. I feel certain that Julian has something to teach me. I’m trying to listen.
Part of the practice of this Comparative Monasticism class is to take a vow, right, I’ve said. So I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll carve out space during my temporary vows for a practice of intercessory prayer. Maybe I will try to name folks I know, or don’t know, and to draw them, to draw us both, into the cone of eternal Love that I imagine, and to consider what happens to me, my vertical relationship, and my horizontal relationships, when I do this. I don’t know what will be; I’m obviously still trying to think this through, to discover what happens, and what I feel about it, through the practice. But if you want to observe with me, or if you just like the idea of someone “praying” for you, try this:
In the form below, put your name and any relevant info. I will gather the seeds I get from this, and take them with me, into this time of retreat, reflection, and contemplation, and likely into my day-to-day later. Think of it less as me advocating to Cosmic Santa that you change some way of being, or that your Coke turns to Pepsi, or you finally get that whoever/whatever. Think of this as an invitation to step together into a Love, a Love I don’t fully clearly understand, but want us both to know better, because I believe in Love’s radical, transformative power.