The Impulse to Pray

Oct 23, 2024

In a text exchange with an old friend, I told her that I would pray for her. I was stunned that I made that suggestion but I felt that the circumstances called for it and it just came out, there on my iPhone. I was even more surprised when she responded positively, indeed graciously, to my offer. I do not come from a praying culture. Most people in synagogue are pronouncing words in Hebrew they don’t understand. If some quieting and softening nonetheless takes place, it’s because certain sounds are familiar, not because the words mean anything to most of the people who are intoning them. Personal beseeching, asking God to hear your prayers, is also deeply unfamiliar to me. I do not relate to an entity “out there” who listens. Prayers of entreaty feel compromised to me, as if there’s a divinity shaking her head in dismay because I only come to her when I need a favor. But prayer can take a variety of forms and I seem to mean something else when I say “I’ll pray for you.” This recent experience caused me to consider what that something else might be and how it might come in handy just now when we are all so worried.

person in blue shorts sitting on beach shore during daytime — Photo by Chelsea Gates on Unsplash

It begins with my foundational belief in the interbeing of all things. I close my eyes and listen. Sometimes, I hear the beating heart of the universe. In the racing back and forth that characterizes so much of life, it’s easy to forget that the earth is one organism, constantly giving birth to itself. This is why it’s so painful to witness war and strife on the other side of the world. The miles evaporate in silent recognition. This could be me. This is me. For many Jews witnessing the war in Gaza, this is me assaulting me. With this awareness, everything else vanishes and only the yearning for an end to suffering remains. Now I see that to be prayerful must mean to quiet down so that this organic connection between me and other beings, between me and my friend, moves up to the foreground of consciousness, leaving all the noise and anguish of separation behind. Separation is loud, chaotic, grasping, sometimes violent. No…this is a lie. It is almost always violent, at least emotionally if not physically. In order to pray for someone, I have to mute the racket of us/them with a soft blanket like a mother comforting a crying child. Then relief washes over me and the person I’m centering on. Right now, the whole world is a crying child calling out for rachamim, one of the names of God. Rachamim, compassion, from the Hebrew word rechem which - consider this - means womb.

I was the daughter of a well-intentioned mother who was impeccable, dignified and, although I didn’t realize this as a child, fairly frosty. I thought everyone’s mother was perfectly dressed from her morning instant coffee to her bedtime glass of milk. I thought everyone’s mother would rather die on the spot than appear in public with crooked stocking seams or lipstick on her front teeth. There were no messy displays of affection in my household. She didn’t carry me in her arms as a small child, or even sit me on her lap. And she didn’t want to hear about it, whatever it was. “It’s just a phase,” she would say whenever I came to her with my little girl concerns. Now I wonder if she was preternaturally wise about impermanence, but in 1953 I just thought she was pooh-poohing my struggles on her way to the hair salon. As to prayer, I had no prior training in speaking and being heard. That avenue of expression would not have occurred to me. But all roads lead to Rome and Jerusalem and Mecca and Dharamsala and Varanasi. The great discovery is that silence is the lingua franca of the traveler.

It’s much more prayerful to hold someone who is in pain in loving silence than to offer half-baked advice or recite traditional formulas that neither of you lives inside of. I learned that in the trenches when I was called to the ER as a novice chaplain. A young couple from Boston had traveled to the Berkshires to ski on a winter weekend of blinding sun and perfect blue skies, but the husband crashed and died on the slopes. I was asked to sit with the wife. I couldn’t say a word and felt completely useless. But you know if you’ve ever walked up and down and up and down with your arms wrapped around your crying infant that it’s not about language. It’s more primitive than that. All the rituals and all the liturgy notwithstanding, prayer is in the heart. Someone once asked me what chaplain’s do. I said, we provide presence, and she said “that’s all?” and I thought, what else is there?

seventysomething

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