My children’s prayers used to be a chat-out-loud. I said, “Let’s check-in with God,” and they mewed and rushed and spilled their news. They said thank you for the color red. They told how they liked the smell of tangerines. They said, “Take care of the tall mountains”
One day, as we were pulling out the driveway to start a long road trip, my “Let’s check in….” was met by utter and total silence. I waited a beat and then turned in my seat to spy two little pre-school heads bowed over two sets of reverently clasped hands.
The week before, they had gone, with our neighbor’s children, to church morning-camp. There they had learned “how” to pray.
I was no longer privy to their ramblings, their meanderings, their moments of treating God like a friend. I told them they didn’t have to pray hunched over and quiet, then asked them what they said in their heads. One began to recite a sing-song poem-prayer he had just learned at camp and the other chimed in.
“In the ears and out the mouth” was my thought; I was wondering if the rote rhyming prayer had gone through the heads or hearts of either of my sons.
They had learned the form and formality of reverence.
At some point we all learn the forms of prayer – be they what they may – in our culture, our religion, our church, our family.
We learn to bow, or kneel, or turn east. We learn to ring a bell, kiss a book, or cross ourselves. We learn to recognize the smell and sound, the starts and stops of worship. We learn church, or temple or mosque. We learn our book – and bow our heads to particular words. These things are all good. They are community; they help us to recognize our cultural kin.
Then we learn what is expected when talking to God.
And that’s the balderdash part – that we think we know, and that we think we can teach what is expected when talking to God.
One week ago today, a young man dropped into a command center airbase in the center of Baghdad for 180 days worth of second deployment. I say, “dropped” because, the Air Force C180 circled the base for over two hours while mortars flew. Finally, the pilot cut the engines and the plane dropped into a world that, with luck, most of us will never experience.
His mother wrote to me. She said she will put a candle in her window each night for her son. She made note of that first day and all the days yet to come by writing:“One day down, 179 to go.”
Sun-fall tonight will bring her to “173-to-go.”
I could ask you now to say a prayer for him. I could write his name. I could write other names, of other children about to leave, just returned, or still far away.
But I don’t know them all by name.
When I drive down Drake Street heading east, I pass a very old tree. I’ve seen it in every season, under every weather condition. Now, in this deep freeze lasting weeks, in this windblown, oddball scratch-your-head cold weather, in this snow-like-sand blowing dry, shoaling and whirling, in this arid, white place slashed with the occasional green of pine trees and black of dirty roadside slush, I drive by the tree and try to think of a satisfactory prayer for all the names I know and don’t know.
And then I imagine the tree in full, pink, St. Francis, bloom.
I decide my best prayer is an image: the tree, amid stark snow, in full bloom – the kind of bloom that hangs on even when the wind bends the tree low, even in early rain turning into solid ice, even in the deep of winter no green in sight. Each branch is heavy with flower, each bloom held tightly by the calyx, the sepals.
Each son and each daughter in a place out of season, unfamiliar, safe and holding on. I bust the tree into bloom in my head and it is each of them alive, well, almost home.
Sometimes we simply don’t have the words. Or the form. God gets it. Fist-pound a table. Light a candle. Imagine a tree alive. Run. Do what you have to do. He’ll hear. He’s all ears.
