2020.01.19 Prayer Habits

The most important thing I offer about prayer is this: Make it a habit! Some of it will feel useless or tepid, or foolish, or too wise for your own darn good, but do it anyway. It forces you to shift the focus away from your own glorious and ever-needy ego—at least once a day. It humbles you to invest some faith in a mysterious power deeper and greater than yourself, while you are simultaneously investing in your embodied self.

Things about prayer:
    There is no wrong or right way to pray.
    Never pray for something you are not willing also to work for, however you can.
    There are public prayers we all say together when we worship, and there are personal prayers we say inside our hearts, or alone in voice or song. All are equally spiritual. There is absolutely nothing you cannot express to God in prayer.
    You do not have to believe in God to pray.  If you’re worried about that, just pretend you do, or address an image of God you can open up to. God does not care. (It’s humans who do!) Besides, God will pray with and for you—no matter what.
    Prayer may not change things outside you, but it will change you from within. You will get to know yourself better as you pray. What matters most deeply? What are your ideas about God and why? What happens when you pray to Jesus?
    It is as important to ask as it is to receive. BOTH. And for the love of God do remember to say thank you, occasionally.
    It’s important to involve your body when you pray. There are many praying postures.
    Jews daven and murmur prayers. They move their lips and their bodies bow up and down. They pace and pray the psalms when a child is being born—nervous for the labor of childbirth, therefore rote well known prayers are the menu.
    All Psalms are prayer songs to chant.  Shiru l’Adonai shir chadash (Sing to the Lord a new song.)
    Buddhists and yogis and yoginis  make prayer hands as they bow to one another and say Namaste (The divine within me salutes the divine within you.)

    Muslims kneel and bow down five times a day to recite prayers—all the way down to touch the sacred earth and pray. FIVE!
     Pray naked—very revealing. (Don't recommend trying this in church on Sunday, at least until everyone has gone home—or not.)
      Christians pray standing , kneeling, sitting, and making the sign of the cross (head, groin, right side, left side). The Eastern Orthodox cross right to left. I do both. The gesture makes the sign of the cross to remember the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, Christians’ role model to say the very least, and to remind me—and God—to be in my mind, womb, right side, left side. [I cannot resist an old yiddish joke that explains crossing oneself to remember: spectacles, testicles, vallet and vatch.] 

Most prayers address the Divine. ALL prayer is energy that connects divine and earthly, temporal and eternal. Do animals pray? Of course. Look deeply into the eyes of a dog. Relax into the vibrations of a cat’s purr. Shiver to a lion's roar. Or go on a silent retreat and listen to your own breath.

Prayer is a spiritual practice, a habit as essential to life as cleanliness and courtesy. It keeps the soul alive. When you cannot pray, others do it for you.

I have kept a prayer journal at different times in my life. I write letters to God: Dear God, love, Lyn. P.S. Amen and I love you.

2016.04.17 Oceanic Wisdom Of Islam in Easter

“The mercy of Allah is an ocean. Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean. It only has to open its beak.”
        from Minaret, a novel by Leila Aboulela

I love this image of the Divine Being named Allah. It’s in the first small chapter of Aboulela’s novel about Najwa, a Muslim girl from an aristocratic family who has been displaced from Khartoum, Sudan, as was Aboulela, and exiled in the wake of a 1985 military coup. Najwa struggles to adjust to the bustling urbanity of London where she cleans the houses of people who live as she used to live. The minaret in a nearby mosque becomes a symbol of hope and the hijab Najwa had eschewed at home, a garb of pride—and protection.

Minaret is a book about the power of religious symbols and traditional practices to be sturdy steadying anchors—assurances of divine compassion in any storm.

I can identify. When nothing makes sense and I have no sight, I perch, like the pigeon, in a pew, or before my home altar, on the edge of my bed or on a park bench, open my beak, and howl. Aboulela (left) is more quietly passionate.

Some days I feel like the ocean itself—vast and open and also glutted and sated with my own and everyone else’s shipwrecks stored up in my depths. Some days I’m like the pigeon staring into the ocean from a safe perch. I want to call out, assert my presence, but my "beak" is stuck in  mushy lumpiness. That’s what I feel like when I am mired in my own sin: the fear of being too exposed, too intimate, too transparent. The fear disconnects me from trusting goodness—in God, myself and others.

Aboulela’s image of sin as clay reminds me of the gray clay we used in kindergarten—all wet and squishy like mud. Our small fingers plunged deeply into the tough clay. It was like a jihad, which in Islam is the spiritual struggle within oneself against sin. I worked strenuously on my lump of clay to mold it into something that looked like something appealing that I could then put in the kiln to dry and take home to present to my parents. All of my great sculptures looked like turtles with longish legs. My mother adored every one, with a little too much adulation. My father stupidly asked what it was. It was a horse, of course! Whatever its identity, my offering fell graciously into the ocean of mercy.

My primary care physician, a Sufi Muslim named Noor, recommended Aboulela’s novel to me. In between listening to my chest for wheezes, taking my vitals, and recording my list of symptoms, she tells me where to go to enjoy the food she loves and recommends things to read. I return the favor. Noor is as sure of herself medically as she is about ethnic foods, spiritual books, and her absolute trust in Allah. Her trust in the unfailing compassion of Divinity is one-way and absolute. Mine is more two-way, favoring a co-creative process between humanity and divinity. Her husband, she says, would agree with me.

Noor, like Najwa in Aboulela's book, draws strength from her infallible faith in the oceanic Allah. Her trust is unswerving and never breaks, no matter the hardships of life on earth. My faith strengthens me, too, as the mercy of God, my Allah, participates with me, to mold my “clay"—even unto death. 

Either way, we both end up in the ocean where nothing is ever lost. Everything is nicely salted and preserved—forever. That is the most merciful outcome I can imagine.

2015.07.19 Improbable but Perfect Fields for Zeal

This day marks the 167the anniversary of the first women's rights conference in history. Organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, author of The Women's Bible, and Lucretia Mott, the conference took place in 1848 in Seneca Falls, N.Y. Stanton, one of my "sheroes," was dissatisfied with traditional biblical translations, authorized and executed by well-meaning men, who apparently forgot the verse in Genesis in which God created men and women equally in the divine image. But Stanton and other women knew their bible, and they knew, too,  about the dismal status of women in society.
They brought religion and politics together with zeal.

Stanton still inspires me, though much of her bible commentary sails over my head, and I bet I'd be cowed by her formidable presence.

 

Seneca Falls, a small hamlet (2010 population, 6,681) borders New York's Finger Lakes. It was an improbable setting for feminist zeal and the birth of the impossible demand for a woman's right to vote.

 

First-Century Palestine after the crucifixion of Jesus was no more probable a setting for reformist zeal, or resurrection cheer, either. The sweetly naive, Christian song, “They will know we are Christian by our love,” written in 1968 by then-Catholic priest Peter Scholtes, has been recorded and popularized so much that many Christians today consider this an identifying refrain, a musical mantra— despite the fact that its spirituality, “We are one in the spirit,” doesn’t ring true in the face of contemporary Christian rancor and divisiveness.

Well, it didn’t ring true in the first century land some now call “holy” either. What is astounding is that Christianity, the little love-faith, didn’t miscarry completely and wash out to sea like so many other movements of zealous beginnings.

Why? Well, for one thing there wasn’t an ounce of naiveté in the faith of Jesus of Nazareth, any more than there was in Stanton and her women. No cotton candy. The early Christians had love all right, as did the women, and they also had zeal for their God of grace.

I wonder if zeal is what we softened Christians need more of today?

As Jewish insurgents in First-Century Palestine warred for power and position, they were terrified of extinction. Where was their God? Who would be Messiah/King/ Head Honcho? Who would be the King of the Jews? (The inscription the Romans put on Jesus’ s cross, King of the Jews, was not a faith statement; it was mockery because they had crucified another of the Jewish rebels, another zealot, another political annoyance.)

Something new had to happen fast—and zealously. Zeal means great energy or enthusiasm in pursuit of a cause or an objective. It’s close to jihad. The early Jesus followers had to save their people, and they had to save their sense of divine favor. Some of them followed the zeal of one man, Jesus of Nazareth, and they kept that zeal going like a brushfire. 

Do we need more zeal today? Do I, as I write and advocate for the fullness of the image of God, have enough zeal?

Reza Aslan, author of Zealot. The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, gives a stunningly vivid picture of the context of Jesus’s times. I’d studied some of this but never had it explicated in such powerful and complete ways. Both the political and historical context came alive. Context, they say, is everything. Well no, content also counts; in fact, context and content must be inseparable—held together in tension. This book succeeds.

Aslan (just love that leonine name!) is an Iranian American, professor of creative writing at the University of California, a scholar of religions and historian—not a theologian. He was born into  a luke warm Muslim home (Sound familiar, Christians?) Aslan met Jesus at fifteen at an evangelical youth camp in Northern California. He writes: “It was there that I heard a remarkable story that would change my life forever.” 

Many of us Christians hear bits and pieces of this story every Sunday in parish churches. Does it change our lives?  

Aslan’s experience sounds like, but was not, a religious conversion experience. He is married to a Christian woman and remains Muslim. His teenage zeal, however, had a life of its own —enough to fuel his pursuit of the Jesus of history and write about it. His book is not meant to be theology, any more than the Bible is meant to be history, yet the complementarity of the two shapes my spirituality and my religious practice. 

But do I have enough zeal? Can you be zealous about the whole enchilada of history, politics and religion? Zeal sounds extremist. It’s scary. My Godde, I’m an Anglican! I’m not one of the conservative evangelical Christians in the south, or wherever they are supposed to be, possessed by certain social political issues that can get confused with religious ones. They do have zeal, though. Still, the spirituality of zealotry must rise above particularity, even go beyond and deeper than social justice activism. It’s a soul-fire. It's what the women at Seneca Falls had.

The frenzied hotbox of Jesus’s day, held intact only by Roman oppression, made zeal near-inevitable. Something had to explode. This ancient empire has been compared to our American empire—too much wealth and status concentrated in too few people who hold the reins of power. Will there be a revolution, as some young people say, maybe advocate? Revolutions demand change. Collective zeal is their fuel. By 70CE the Romans had burned Jerusalem and the Temple to the ground. Messianic pretenders felt abandoned by God. All was lost.

Aslan writes: “Meanwhile, in triumphant Rome, a short while after the Temple of the Lord had been desecrated, the Jewish nation scattered to the winds, and the religion made a pariah, tradition says a Jew named John Mark took up his quill and composed the first words to the first gospel written about the messiah [sic, one of many] known as Jesus of Nazareth—not in Hebrew, the worship language of Jesus, but Greek, the language of the heathens. The language of the impure. The language of the victors.

This is the beginning of the good news of Jesus the Christ.” (p. 68-69)

This one sentence stunned me. One. One Jewish man remembered and wrote—this in the midst of violence, terror, chaos and grief. Thus began the written biblical memoir known as the New Testament. One.

Was that simple, single act of remembering and writing the real miracle? Was it zealous?
                                                         
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Zeal makes change, for better or worse. It is not to be mocked, and not to be exaggerated. When you force or fake zeal, you desecrate it.  Zeal is born, focused, and expressed in diverse ways: silence, creating art, music, movement, shouting and jumping, praying, preaching, storming, talking and listening into the night. Often zeal comes in childhood, and often it gets eclipsed as we grow. But something mysterious touches you to the core, and you never forget. Never. Forever. What you do with it depends on your context.

I'm haunted on and off by something a wondrous seminary professor of mine referred to more than once: "the routinization of charism."  We, dumbly rapt and determinatively zealous, middler seminarians laughed and clapped, as if we actually knew we were hearing the call to zealotry.

Zealotry was the right spiritual gift to awaken First-Century Palestine to divine grace for all. Zealotry awakened 19th century America to basic rights for all, including women. Is zeal what’s needed for 21st-century America? For 21st-century Christianity?