Prayer Thread

I confess, on days that feel burdened by too much to do, especially when that “one more thing” drops and throws another wrench in the day, I am more inclined, out of desperation, to whine, “what now?!” Often, unfortunately, I have thrown that phrase, or at least its attitude, out toward my young child when they’ve broken one more thing or to a coworker who has come to ask for one more thing. The stance of “what now!?” easily creeps in upon and around us when we feel burdened by obligation and fragmented in our sense of meaning and purpose.

As a youth, I ran long distances. Often, especially in competition, when the wind blew up, much like running uphill, it made the race more difficult. Many runners would get psyched out by the wind and fall behind the pack. By contrast, the gusts, or even the gentle breezes, passing over my flesh, felt to me like an invitation. From somewhere, “more,” though I couldn’t see the messenger, issued an invitation: to face the challenge of working harder and surge forward more fully, into the power of the strength of my legs and the potency of my lungs. We can’t see the wind, but we know it exists by the impact of its activity. Youthful runner taps potential. A prayer on the wind.

A few years back, I read a line of teaching from a Sufi teacher, Kabir Helminski, that took my breath away in excitement. He referred to latent human faculties that all of us have, but that many of us are unaware of. He suggested that as we wake up in our awareness of these latent human faculties, our entire being may vibrate from the power of remembering these capacities within and directing them toward goodness and love. In reading the words of his teaching, I remembered my own longing to become fully alive.

If you ask “almighty Google” about the difference between symbol and metaphor, AI summarizes that “a symbol represents a complex idea with a single object or image, while a metaphor is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things.”

One of my favorite images to represent the Presence of the Holy One in the natural world is incense. When you first light a stick or charcoal circle or triangle stump of incense, the smoke rises and swirls and twirls. If you observe the movement of incense particles closely as they move through the air, they follow patterns of circles and spirals, at first tightly wound, and then opening up and dissipating broadly. I can’t help but delight in the images of activity.