The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on January 5, 2022 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Most days when I take my contemplative walk, I pause in front of the Marian grotto on the backside of the Abbey, in-between Lake Sagatagan. Before the image of Our Lady, my ritual is to hold out my hands before her, and on one hand offer my commitment to “perfect contentment,” and on the other hand, my pledge to wait upon “expectant abundance.”
How many times have I held that tension, in earnest, before Our Lady! How often has life instructed me through the vacillations between those two opposites—contentment and expectation!
I depend on the ritual of the prayer to form me in helpful habits. On one side, letting go when things don’t go my way. On another side, placing my hope in something bigger than myself, in that mysterious force of Life which, more often than planned, has surprised my expectations with wild abundance.
Each day, I cram more and more life experience into that space between my outstretched hands. Over time, my perspective widens through the lens of these opposites. The tensions that I hold through the ritual of my prayer stretch me more and more into the shape of Wholeness.
