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 August 7, 2024 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Indeed, prayer can get pretty lofty. Our initial reaction to a sense of lofty prayer might provoke images of fancy windows and ornate clothing and literally high places. Surely, those places and forms of prayer do exist. However, when I claim prayer as both lofty and wispy, it is a reference to one of my favorite symbols of God—incense.
Especially in the Oratory at the House of Prayer in Collegeville, since our prayer space is circular and intimate, when we light incense, we experience a particularly pungent sense of the Holy One as Presence. (Pardon to all those who are sensitive to incense burning!) As the rocks burn on the charcoal and the smoke appears, it always goes up, and then out.
As the incense smoke rises in its vortex of a spiral, it brings our gaze up, in a lofty sort of way. Yet if we linger in our looking, our gaze will also see that after the initial ascent, the smoke spreads out in wide circles and permeates everything, everywhere. In this dispersed state, is when we catch the glimpses of smoke as subtle wisps moving in the air.
That is very much how the actions of the Holy One, through a sense of Presence, seem to work on us. Initially, the Holy One wakes us up to the “more,” to the place of the lofty within our Being, by startling or catching us in something extra-ordinary, just like the initial movement of incense smoke when it rises. Then, as Presence continues to work on us, the actions of the Holy One draw us right back into the ordinary and slip into the crevices of everything, everywhere, just as the wisps of incense do when they permeate a room. Both sets of actions work on us in Wisdom ways.
May we become more and more responsive to the lofty and wispy work of the Holy One!
