prayer

More on Prayer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I have been pondering more about prayer in the last day.

Do you remember the story of the Fisher King?  His land is dying because he is mortally wounded, and no one can save him or his kingdom, until Sir Perceval (on his quest for the Holy Grail) asks him the Necessary Question.  In some mystical versions of the story, Sir Perceval simply asks the Fisher King why he is suffering, or he asks him, “What do you need?”  Being asked the right question is part of the Wounded King’s healing.  So too, perhaps, with prayer.  On Friday, the students who gathered in my room and asked if they could pray for me asked me what I needed them to pray about. There is some incredible power in that intensely human interaction in the moment of asking someone,
“May I pray for you?” or
“How can I pray for you?”
“What do you need?”

There is an ethical question related to informed consent when praying for people.  Not everyone appreciates being prayed for, especially from a particular religious perspective.  Asking the question, simply and with love, gives someone the opportunity to graciously refuse the offer of prayer.

There is someone in my life who believes pretty firmly that I am spiritually misguided.  She has tried many different tactics that feel to me very much like she is trying to pressure and manipulate me into changing my basic belief system.  Would I want her to be praying for me?  Would this feel like a further sort of spiritual manipulation?  Possibly.  Still, I think I would welcome prayer, even from someone in a situation like this.  I don’t think that the Great Mystery is going to change me against my will–and prayer opens a channel, casts a web.  Prayer is as likely to change the one who prays as it is to change the one prayed for.  Perhaps if she and I would pray for each other, we might find ourselves in a circle that could contain us both.  The next time I feel attacked, I think I will suggest that we pray for each other.

And a final word.  I don’t always use the term prayer to mean what I mean.  Like God, I think the idea of prayer is too big to be contained in the box of a single word.  Up there, I called it casting a web.  Opening a channel.  It’s sending energy.  Sending light. Being hopeful on your behalf.  Finding feathers. Holding the bowl.  Holding stones.  Holding.  Always holding.

How may I hold you?

Gratitude List:
1. Catching up
2. Catching new visions
3. Holding and being held
4. Plotting goodness
5. Rain

May we walk in Beauty.  May we hold each other always.

Prayerful

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I do not know what this is–one of the boys took it with a special filter–but I like how it draws me in and centers me.

Yesterday morning as I was doing some last-minute puttering at my desk, a group of students tapped on my door.  “We’re doing a prayer walk,” they told me.  “Can we come in and pray for you?”

So much of my focus when I am at school is on how I can care for and meet the needs of these young people that it threw me for a momentary loop to be on the receiving end.  I didn’t quite know how to be.  It was lovely and powerful and extremely meaningful, here at the stressful end of a semester–with the anxiety and excitement of the semester that is approaching–to simply stand there and receive the gift and the grace of their prayers, like feathers, like stones, like a bowl that held me throughout the whole day and which will carry me into the newness of the coming weeks.

It strikes me that in these days when there are such sharp distinctions being made between religions and denominations and spiritual perspectives, that one thing we can do is to offer each other our prayer.  Or energy.  Or meditation.  Or goodwill.  Whatever we call it.  That reaching out toward each other in spirit, casting the web, carrying and holding each other.

Gratitude List:
1. Spending the morning drawing with my kiddos.
2. Mist in the hollow.
3. Warm coffee on a chilly morning.
4. How resolve settles into the spine.
5. Prayer.

May we walk in Beauty!

Shortest Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

NASA photo

Today is Solstice.  I like to picture us flinging our way through space, held in our ellipse by the flaming star at the center of our dance.  In these days we are out at one of the further points of the oval, and our northern face is turned away, mostly, from the sun.  We get to gaze, for these few moments a year, into darkest space, to sense the comfort of the darkness that enfolds our tiny galaxy, to really feel the presence of the stars.  I feel these Solstice days as a hush or a pause, a breath, before we begin our inward whirl again, back into light, back into slightly closer proximity with the sun.

The twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany are often spoken of as high holy days, days in the Christian calendar when people reflect on the darkness and the light, on our place in the cosmos, on the past year and the coming year.  I like to begin those days of deep reflection at the Solstice, to watch my dreams, to see what images and visions come to me, what words become important.  Perhaps what comes is purely random flotsam from the unconscious, or perhaps it’s messages from the Spirit.  Either way, what appears provides me with visual and linguistic hooks on which to hang some of my meditative practice for the coming year.

May your dreams comfort and disturb you in this season.

Gratitude List:
1. The quietly enfolding darkness
2. Dreams.  Quiet.  Waiting.
3. Good counsel.  I am not alone.
4. Prayer.  Praying.  Inter-cession: being “yielded between.”
5. Looking backward.  Looking forward.  Looking inward and outward.  Up and down.  How many ways can I examine the space around me?

May we walk in the light of the stars.

Heart

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Barn

Gratitude List:
1. This is what I signed up for.  I don’t know quite how else to say it.  It doesn’t sound quite like a gratitude, perhaps.  More a statement of intention.  The gratitude comes from knowing where the priorities lie, I think.  It’s not about being comfortable or happy or at peace.  It’s not about fulfilling the needs of the ego.  It’s about doing the work that I am here to do.  That’s when it feels right.  That’s when it clicks, when I know I am in the right place. I am grateful for that, even if it challenges the equilibrium.
2. Heart Prayers
3. Green
4. The renewed courage and fortitude that dawn brings.
5. Humans of New York.  When I get overwhelmed by the viciousness and bombast of the political rhetoric, I scuttle over to Humans of New York and read the comment threads.  These days they are full of people’s open-hearted offers of help and connection and friendship to people who are in dire need.

As salamu alaykum.  Peace be unto you.

Golden

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Reach out your hand
like the quivering leaf.
Someone is there to grasp it:
wind, rain, a tiny green spider
wandering, crab-like, across its surface.

Lay your arms upon the air
like the oak branches that are held
in the grasp of the autumn sun.

Somewhere the invisible ones
are listening for the moment
when you offer your story to the breezes.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The fact that I have a lot more sense about how I dress in the daytime than I do in those crazy dreams.
2. Having wild and crazy dreams means I was sleeping last night.  I can feel the restfulness seeping into me.
3. Watching healing take place.  Friendship and kindnesses can begin to draw a person back toward wholeness.  May the healing continue.
4. Students beginning class by asking if we can pray for an injured classmate.
5. Golden.  I came out of school yesterday afternoon, and everything was Golden.

May we walk in Beauty!

Burning Through

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Sometimes a new thing catches me on fire, and I just have to let it burn through me, so I can see the trail it leaves, follow the glowing embers.  This poem by Mary Oliver–“Gratitude“–has taken hold of me.  First, I had to copy it, using her questions, and then I had to create my own, while still adding my own regular 5-point gratitude list at the end.  Tonight, more of my own questions.

And I am lifting my nose to sniff the air–there’s an aroma there of something lodged in my memory.  Here it is: I have been feeling compelled to call this emerging process an Examen.  I have been looking it up, and I think that perhaps it isn’t so far from the Examen of St. Ignatius.  His process, according to the Loyola Press website, is to:

1. Become aware of the presence of God.  (I like to call God the Mystery, or Love, or the Source, or Mama.)
2. Review the day with gratitude.  (That’s the part I have been working on for the past three or four years.  It has been transformative in ways I could not have predicted.)
3. Pay attention to your emotions.  (Sometimes I stop at the second step.  This is a good reminder.  Also, I think I would add, Check in with your energy, because that is part of my practice, too.)
4. Choose one feature of the day and pray from it.  (For me, the noticing is prayer, the gratitude is prayer.  Still, I get what this is about: take one thing deeper.  Oh, I do like that.)
5. Look toward tomorrow.  (Bring the past and the present and the future together in this moment.  How does the past [the work of #2] inform the present [#1, #3, #4]?  And how can the past-imbued present inform the future [#5]?)

How is the Mystery present to you?
In silence.  In the space between my breaths.  In the night sounds of crickets and peepers.

What visions brought your spirit awake?
Three crows flying above the fields into morning.
A white heron flying over the city in the afternoon heat.
The hard work of preparing an essay.
What words awakened you?
“Prophetic listening,” transformation, kairos, dialectical hermeneutics
What awakened your senses?
Rice and peas, garlic, squash, long thin green beans, broccoli, and fat slices of pink tomato with coarse salt.

What does your heart say?
There is anxiety here for friends who are suffering.
Contentment, which is sometimes better than wild joy.
I am tired.
Anticipation.
New ideas flitting through the rooms of my brain excite and exhaust me.

What goes deeper?
I am one spider on this humming web,
surveying the movement from strand to strand.
We all weave and spin together,
no longer simply waiting for the Morai
to measure and cut, but being ourselves the spiders,
tending the web, minding the movement.

Where does this go tomorrow?
Tomorrow is a clearing day–
get things accomplished.

May we walk in Beauty!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Prayer for Kyla in tanka

breathing in patience
breathing out worry and fear
breathing in silence
breathing healing, breathing hope
breathing light, breathing courage

Gratitude List:
1. This morning while we were packing up the Lancaster shares, two teeny tiny toads hopped across my toes.  At first I thought they were some of the mud clods that I was sweeping from the pick-up bed, and I am really happy that I did not try to kick them out of the way.
2. Living prayerfully.  Summer affords a chance to step into that contemplative space.  I wish that all my contemplation could be on joy and beauty, but it is also on the needs and suffering of some people I love, but I am grateful to be part of the web.
3. Letterboxing with the kiddos again today.  We found four more stamps today and we hiked and hiked and hiked.  At one point, we stopped to take a break on a really long uphill climb.  “Hey Joss,” said Ellis, “can you let Mama sit on that step?  She’s not as. . .not as. . .not as athletic as you are.”   Moments later, “Hey Ellis!  Could you just wait here a little longer?  I don’t think Mama is quite done resting yet.”  I am not so young as I once was.
4. And then when we got home, Joss and I went berry-picking by the pond, and hundreds and hundreds of teeny tiny frogs went skipping over the lily pads.
5. Pie!  We made a many-berry pie with the berries we picked: blackberries, wineberries, a few token black raspberries, and red and white mulberries.  And because the crust recipe makes two crusts, I found a recipe for applesauce pie and made that as well.

May we walk in Beauty!  May we find healing.

Moss and Magic

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Gratitude List:
1. Science: The boys watched Bill Nye the Science Guy today.  They learned about mixing moss and milk or yogurt and then painting it on a surface, so we did that tonight.
2. Magic: Ellis used his moss mix to make a carpet for the faerie house under the sycamore tree.  Then they both ran inside asking to fill sea shells with milk and honey as a gift for the faeries.
3. Prayer: I am so sad and disheartened by the continuing medical struggles of a beautiful, wild, and gentle soul that I know.  I feel so hopeless and helpless, and prayer is a line that I hold onto.  Thin sometimes that line is, but real.  And strong.
4. Dreams: Last night’s dream was unsettling.  Still, I think it had a message which I will take to heart, a message for which I am grateful.
5. Poetry: During tonight’s class, three of us read papers on poems we’d read–William Stafford, Madeleine L’Engle, and Mary Oliver.

May we walk in Beauty!

After Prayer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

More a reflection than a poem, this somehow still wanted appear in poetic form:

Prayer is the raw material,
the stuff
the starting point.

Where shall I take it then?

When the quiet,
the intention,
have built
into a swirling ball of light.

When the web hums
with prayer,
like orb-weaver’s web
when she shakes it
in the morning sun.

The time comes
when prayer must be shaped,
molded into form and action.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Watching my children sleep, curled like seeds or sprawled on their backs, one leg cocked like they are about to leap off in the dance or a fencing match.  Or half curled, like they’re mid-stride in a marathon.  One is still in the exact same position I left him in last night.  The other has been moving about in his sleep.
2. The current roadside triumvirate of day lily, Queen Anne’s lace, and chicory peeking like a blue eye among them.
3. Those who care for the children.  People who foster children in need of loving homes, who take that belief that they are all our children into loving action.
4. Gathering, harvesting, filing, preparing–all these ideas for the coming work of the fall.
5. “Song of Peace,” the words set to the tune of Finlandia.

May we walk in Beauty!

Make it all a Prayer

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

(tanka)

make it all a prayer
each motion, each thought, each step
feel the connection
that silver strand that pulls you
to the heart of another

Gratitude List:
1. Those planets snuggled up to the moon at dusk yesterday.  Any of my star-folk friends know who they were?
2. Making art with my RVRGRL and my Animalboy.  In the time of the beginning, there was a cave. . .
3. Yesterday someone I love anointed my head with oil.  We were thinking more of protecting the crown chakra than of the 23rd Psalm, but I think it was kind of the same thing.  I was tenderly shepherded.
4. Reading about reading.  To say that preparing for teaching in the fall is a stimulating experience is an understatement of vast proportions.  I love to feel The Teacher re-waking within me.
5. How have I not yet had a gratitude dedicated to tomatoes?  Summertime tomatoes!  Red ones!  Pink ones!  Stripey ones!  Golden sunshiny yellow ones!  Deep purple and indigo ones!  Wintry grocery store tomatoes taste like styrofoam and sawdust and the people who pick them are not given fair wages or healthy living conditions–don’t eat them; please, don’t eat them.  Summertime tomatoes are luscious and wonderful, and they’re usually harvested by your local adorable farmer.

May we walk in Beauty!