Prayer as Air

Kathy did something the other day that made me smile.  Without realizing it (we rarely do) I had spiraled down into a really negative space, impatient and resentful.  We were sitting at breakfast with our usual view of our back yard – Kathy’s garden.  Spring had brought me out of my workshop into the things that “needed” to be done in the yard – this yard that we were looking out at while munching our toast and coffee.  My eyes darted from one thing to another, things that I felt the need to get done. 

And Kathy dropped the bomb.  “Do you pray in the morning, when you write?”  I think that there is a little sticker somewhere in the bed that we share, between the sheets.  As we roll around in our sleep, one or the other of us happens to get it stuck to us.  It identifies the “stickee” as the “asker” for that day, the one who watches the other intently and asks the question.  Kathy was it the other day.  She asked the question: “do you pray?”  At other times when I am mid-spiral and still capable of recovery, the question might be “Are you OK?”  It would as a nudge, a deflection, bouncing me back upward.  But this question was the real deal, the whole nine yards, the Full, naked truth, Monty.  A few mornings earlier, I had had the wake-up sticker on me, and Kathy had spiraled down into her negative space, which is decorated different than mine, different dark colors and different hard edges.  And I had asked her that same question.  “Are you praying lately?”  We find, in loving each other and respecting each other’s “space” that if that space is without God, it tends toward the dark and sharp-edged.

This time of year in our particular church, the annual readings from Scripture find us in the time when Jesus, risen from the dead, is showing up from time to time, cheering up the troops, and getting them ready to surge, led not by him, but by this invisible guide, this Spirit.  He breathes it into them.  So we’ve gone from bread and wine and fish cooked over a fire on the seashore, substantial sustenance, to this . . . invisible . . . element, air, air of life, air without which we don’t live, but invisible, invisible air.

Prayer and air.  Can’t see ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.  Please understand me; I believe that each of us defines “prayer”, just as each of us defines “love”, and each of defines “God”. 

Perhaps sometimes, for some of us, prayer is sitting, like Einstein in awe over the order of things and wondering about the source of that order, the missing factor in the equation.

Perhaps sometimes, for some of us, prayer is reflecting on the character of a person who loved and healed and forgave and fed, and even washed our feet.

Perhaps sometimes, for some of us, prayer is simply breathing in the invisible and vital, and pulling out of that spiral down into the dark and sharp-edged space that our gravitas pulls us toward.

I wonder for so many people I know who don’t share bed sheets between which is this wake-up sticker, stuck to a partner whose task it is to ask them if they have taken time to breathe.   Maybe we’re all “stickees”.  Who do you know who’s in a spiral?  What can you ask them that might help them come up for air?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.