A peer at work sent me an email this week that she was leaving early to cry...because her brother had just died.
Among other things, I told her I would pray for her. I didn't then, but the next morning I did.
It is early in the morning and today my 84-year-old mother is having open heart surgery. I visit her knowing the possibility of the same fate as my co-worker's brother. So, I am praying for her this morning. Doing so, leads me to pray for my dad, too. Which brings my brother to mind and how he, too, is impacted by the situation. My prayers then wander to all of our collective children and their relationship with my mother.
I couldn’t bring myself to watch a presidential address to the nation the other night (normally, I force myself to do so, for what I used to think was the greater good of civic responsibility). And, I'm finding that one of my few remaining choices, regarding the anxiety I sometimes feel about the impacts of our current political system, is to pray.
I’m surprised at times how prayer can still feel like a last resort and yet while doing it, one of my best options.
As do many things, including my better desires, I’ve noticed more recently that prayers come more easily for me in the morning (perhaps, the two are not actually different things — one rather simply being the expression of the other). It seems the prayers of an early morning often pull me back out of the rabbit-holes of despair over the environment many days impose on my psyche.
Perhaps this is because our purest prayers help us articulate our desires (even when our desires are not all that good). Prayers can be one of the most raw and authentic things we can do, especially as we discover that their whole essence has very little to do with things like duty after all. Rather, they are the expression of yearning we have for what is good and the acknowledgment that significant portions of our ability to embody the goodness of those things (our desires) is dependent on additional resources beyond what we can provide for ourselves.
Prayers serve to remind us that our desires are not autonomous. There is a latent dependency in what we want. In other words, our desires involve other things, often other beings…like God, or people (or even animals). In both times of peace and calamity, our prayers acknowledge this dependency, our need, our desire for what is good in life. And, in that way, prayers migrate us from the simply transactional nature of asking for things that we want and toward the things that we all want — expanding our desire from self-satisfaction toward collective harmony.
Prayers can also be the catalyst to move us from our contemplation of what is good for ourselves (and others) to the actions that contribute to the realization of this goodness. Something must bridge what we think we want to what we do about it. There are likely many things that can serve this function.
In my experience, prayer is often one of those...particularly the prayers of an early morning.