Too often we turn prayer into well-intentioned patterns of our own making. Too often we assume prayer is primarily about words. Sometimes there’s an almost magical understanding that if we get the words right, if we trust enough, if we believe enough, God will answer. But most of us know that God is not a divine magician and that prayer is much more than our feeble attempts to make God pay attention to what God already knows or to make of God a puppet responding to our tugs on the strings of God’s heart. Prayer is so much more than words.
Several years ago, I was invited to write a monthly column for a denominational magazine. I was at once both honored and terrified. The column’s title, Let Us Pray, conveyed certain assumptions I was not at all sure about—did they think I had prayer all figured out? Did they assume I was a disciplined pray-er, perhaps one of those “prayer warriors” I’d heard about? Did they have any idea how much I struggle with praying, with knowing how to talk to God, listen to God? Did they know of my doubts and skepticism about much of Christian life?
I wanted to write and I wanted to write about all I do not know. The editors said yes and we were off and running. After some years of columns which seemed to resonate with readers, I chose to use the alphabet as a template for the monthly articles. It provided a pattern to follow for twenty-six columns. It fit the allotted months ending appropriately in December almost three years later. And it allowed me to write about an expansive and spacious understanding of prayer, ways of praying that might not include words.
Armed with a large assortment of books on prayer and an especially lovely tome by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, I set out to explore prayer and spiritual practices alphabetically, following many of their suggestions as ways for understanding prayer in everyday life. I also paid attention to the writings of Richard Rohr and his admonition that prayer is not primarily words but a place, an attitude, a stance—and that for Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love, returning to love, and trusting that love is the unceasing stream of reality.1
The prayers I learned as a child were bookmarked by Scripture: daily readings, family devotions, worship. Because I am steeped in the rich biblical traditions of a liturgical church, patterns of biblical prayer are rooted in my psyche. Early on, I found the stories of the Bible to be multilayered, complex, enigmatic—a way of listening to a mysterious God. Over the years, these encounters with Scripture continue to challenge and engage. Listening to God in Scripture is part of my habit, part of my history. But Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer is not meant to be a theological or biblical description of prayer. Holy Ground reflects some non-traditional ways of thinking about the spirit of the living God and how God’s spirit might be heard in ways or places or acts often not associated with prayer. This book reveals my wrestling with a God who makes the ordinary holy. “Cleave the wood and I am there,” says Isaiah in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. “Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”
Those twenty-six columns written for GATHER, revised and rewritten for book format, are the basis of Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer. Readers will find here a collection of reflections about prayer as Attention, Beauty, Compassion, Devotion, Enthusiasm, Faith, Gratitude, Hospitality, Imagination, Joy, Kindness, Listening, Mindfulness, Nurturing, Openness, Play, Questing, Reverence, Stillness, Thanksgiving, Unity, Vision, Wonder, X signifying mystery, Yearning, and Zeal. This alphabet is one way of thinking about the practice of prayer in broader, more inclusive language and practice. It’s meant to help readers experience prayer as the sigh of the shoemaker, too busy to drop his worn shoes and kneel in disciplined prayer but not too busy to recognize and acknowledge God’s presence in the midst of ordinary life. And it’s meant to celebrate prayer in the broadest of ways as together with all of humanity we yearn to know God and to be known by God.
Each reflection begins alphabetically with beautifully formed calligraphic letters. These pages are meant to encourage engagement with that particular word: a place for meditation, reflection, and should it “suit the reader’s fancy”, coloring or embellishing the letters. In this way, readers are invited to practice God’s presence meditatively and perhaps tangibly in the pleasure of coloring or embellishing the designated words for prayer. Following each reflection, readers are encouraged to consider their own ways of praying using a statement and questions for pondering God’s presence: paying attention to daily life, looking for beauty in the commonplace, showing compassion, practicing devotion, celebrating enthusiasm—all the way to discovering wonder, the X as mystery, and the Z as zeal for a God who continues to pursue us in our everyday lives. It is the hope of the author that these simple acts of creating and contemplating will connect readers to the holy ground of everyday prayer—from A to Z.
Julie K. Aageson
1. From Rohr, “Becoming Pure in Heart.” https://cac.org/becoming-pure-heart-2016-05-11/.
Attention
Attention
“Listen up!” I used to say to my students and later on to my daughters. “Let me see your eyes.” I wanted their complete attention, their ears and their eyes. I expected them to stop what they were doing and focus on what was about to be shared. I wanted them to be present and to take notice. Giving one’s attention to something implies courtesy and consideration, perhaps even thoughtfulness and responsiveness. Attention is a way of being present, a form of prayer.
Several years ago I was invited to write a monthly column for a denominational magazine. The invitation was a surprise and I was both honored and a bit frightened at the prospect of writing about a spiritual practice I did not claim to understand or do particularly well. I could recall the faithful prayers of my grandparents, those regular devotional times around the tables of my growing up, prayers said routinely at bedtime and mealtime, and prayers for specific situations and people. But this invitation to the holy ground of prayer required careful and honest attention.
Layered on top of that insecurity were the deeper issues of what prayer is, how prayer is practiced, and an all-too-ubiquitous understanding of prayer as an exchange of ideas or a list of requests or a private means of accessing God. I had always found deep meaning in the prayers of the liturgy and corporate worship. If I could somehow define prayer as paying attention, listening for God’s voice in others and in the ordinary events of daily life, I could write honestly and authentically—even in a monthly magazine with regular deadlines.
As my narrower understanding of prayer became more expansive, I began to pay attention to God’s presence in less linear and carefully defined ways. Perhaps it was related to becoming a mother and finding ways to pray—to be—in the midst of endlessly long days and too many sleepless nights. Or perhaps it was a lifelong awareness of the mystery of God’s presence, inexplicably compelling, irritatingly tenacious, a perpetual mindfulness that demanded attention.
Prayer became for me a way of looking at the world—a place, an attitude, a stance; not so much an action as the living presence of God within us. Possibly that is what it was all along. But the common definitions which seemed to me what others more disciplined and pious called prayer were not often my experience.
Do you remember a children’s television program called Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood? Fred Rogers was a tall, lanky fellow whose soft voice and ways of paying attention to the smallest things were not easily forgotten. In contrast to a lot of children’s programs or to almost everything else that seeks to demand our attention, Mr. Rogers invited children and adults to notice things: a warm sweater he donned at the beginning of each program, a neighbor who needed help, birds that welcomed food in the wintertime, flowers beginning to break through
