Prayer

Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times Opinion Page (paper edition) was full of what you would expect two days before this election. I scanned it quickly, opting to avoid the angst I knew would bubble up if I got into it too deeply. But the final piece surprised me: two hands in prayer filling 2/3rds of the page accompanied by an article called “You Might Consider Prayer,” by Sara Sherbill. The incongruity was perfect.

I’m not someone who prays. I can only remember two times in my adult life when I prayed, and both were in moments of desperation when I didn’t know what else to do. My son Forrest was going to die. His cancer had come back with a vengeance, and I was terrified, so lost, that praying to a God I wasn’t sure was there was all I had left. In both cases, I got down on my knees. Once by the side of my bed at Ronald McDonald House, once on the pine needles in the woods behind our house, a place where the sun came through the trees in columns of golden light. I remember thinking the light was alive and listening. I still believe that.

The fact that I don’t pray has nothing to do with failed prayers. Forrest died. No one was to blame, no one could have done anything differently. Cancer is bad luck. An anomaly. Nature is unfair. It broke me. But time and love have put me back together.

Sara Sherbill’s words after too many opinions about how to vote, was a balm:

What can we do when our hearts are breaking? When we are filled with stress and anxiety, when the sadnesses stack up, when hopelessness isn’t irrational but a genuine reflection of daily reality? What can we do when we don’t know what to do?

We can pray.

Prayer requires no formal religious observance. You need not attend a temple or church or synagogue or mosque. Prayer need not be a poem or acrostic or hymn. Prayers can simply bubble up from the deepest place inside of yourself. It can be prayer in your own words. It can be prayer with no words.

Many of us are raised to believe that prayer is about communicating with God. It can be, of course. But prayer can also be a way of communicating with ourselves, a tool of self-inquiry.

And isn’t that what making art is about? It is for me.

I’d never thought about creativity as prayer, that every time I play a note on the piano, open my mouth to sing, sit down to write, or take a picture of a flower in bloom, I’m praying – hoping for more, to see something new, to experience myself, to understand, be moved, to communicate with myself or someone else. It changes me to think of it that way. Deepens it all somehow.

Later in her piece, Sara writes,

Someone will hear your prayer, even if that someone is you.

A powerful sentence.

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Roen Hogg, a Corvallis neighbor and friend, heard one of my new-ish songs over the weekend and took it upon himself to make a video for it with footage he’d taken along the Oregon coast. Prayer heard.

Here’s a link:

Sara Sherbill’s piece is “You Might Consider Praying”. ©2024, Sara Sherbill.