Your Life is Your Prayer

Earlier this fall, I spent ten days in Turkey & Greece. I saw layers upon layers upon layers of empires - civilizations built literally on top of civilizations. It’s so recent in human history that we’ve begun in earnest to look closely at who we’ve been so far as a species. What have we done, and why? What have we learned? What do we wish to preserve, what do we wish to further develop, and what might we hope to never repeat?

I felt like a member of a perpetually childish race when I visited these ancient places. I saw blithe delight, self-indulgent posturing, and rich traditions passed down person to person for thousands of years in the form of food, architecture, music, language . . . and prayer.

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Prayer: an earnest hope or wish, from the Latin precarius, meaning ‘obtained by entreaty.’

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Are you praying by rote, or are you paying attention? It’s hard to pay attention, I know. It’s hard for me too. That’s why I write and talk about it all the time, why I exchange reflections with other meditators every day. Connecting with you helps me to pay attention, and to notice when I’m on auto pilot or looking one more time for an easier, softer way.

Also, I don’t like the alternative. 

Paying attention feels right, clean, fulfilling, no matter what is going on around me. Even when something is painful or scary or I’m resistant, it feels better to me to be with those experiences in real time than it does to avoid them.

Papering over what’s uncomfortable, and let’s face it - unwanted, never feels like ease. It feels like an itch I can’t reach or a blind spot I can’t check that stays perpetually in my awareness like static that prevents me from getting a clear signal on any channel. 

There is no real peace in avoidance, and there is freedom and ease in turning toward, yet we gravitate toward the former and avoid the latter for good reason.

Most of us have experienced turning toward something challenging when we didn’t have the personal clarity or support from others that’s necessary to skillfully learn from our experience. Instead, it’s more normal to imprint a reaction of fear or pain from early attempts to face our shadows, never contemplating that the initial reaction was never a sign we were on the wrong track - it was an invitation to look more closely, perhaps with more support.

Fear and emotional pain can feel like suffering, but they are also doors to clarity.

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For several days after returning home from Turkey and Greece, I went through an integration process as disorienting and transformative as those I experience after intensive meditation training periods. My mood was joyful and light, punctuated by bouts of unprompted irritability. My thoughts persistently oriented themselves toward contemplations on time, the way community mores can seem almost arbitrary, and the inevitable crumbling of civilizations.

All night, for several nights, my mind returned to the mosques and ruins, and a phrase wove itself through the cobblestone streets of the part of me that is only humanity, nothing more or less or separate:

Your life is your prayer.

I felt the phrase like a knowing that isn’t in the mind or even in the body, but is simply there - eternal and obvious. In my sleep, there was no wondering, no thinking, even while turning the phrase over and over. I was the instrument it played, it was space itself, it and me the illusory parts of a whole that human beings obsessively pursue and can never attain.

Once in the waking world, and even more as the days became weeks, conceptualizing wriggled its fingers into the phrase. Now I have words, for better or worse.

On my way to the November training period at the temple, I prayed for a more sincere heart. I prayed to practice more for others and less for myself. At one point, I noticed with not a small stab of pain that I was turning away from my oldest child. I kept breathing, and turned toward.

This is practice. That’s all.

I’ve been trying so hard for so long to get somewhere. I’ve prayed with words, not noticing that I have been praying all along without them. My earliest memories are woven through with the silent, earnest entreaty. The more explicit prayers I make now and then are not more valid than the prayer of my life. If anything, they are just the tiniest motes of evidence of the prayer that is eternal, infallible . . . and incomprehensible.

You can’t pray wrong - the prayers you make intentionally are only dust motes moved by the larger prayer of your life.