Reflection: Communicating with the Divine: prayer

I grew up to the five-times-a-day Muslim call to prayer—plaintive, haunting and multilayered, as multiple mosques amplified their vocal variations.

Jewish life is similarly embedded in the Shema: Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is One. Perhaps you grew up in a faith tradition of church and family prayers. Of course, tradition’s not the point. Whether faltering or well-rehearsed, from the lips of children or aged saints, published in well-thumbed prayer books or scratched onto prison walls…the audience is the point. And while prayers comprise more literature than any other composition*, most will never be encountered by a living person. They’re intended for God, and that’s what makes them ‘prayer’.

Where man and God meet, don’t imagine just a quiet, meditative sweet-spot.

Where sin and the sacred meet it’s visceral, confronting and costly.

Where prodigal child and father meet, we rehearse shocking grace, we embrace, and we feast.

Traditionally we go there bowed, on our knees. And a vocabulary, even an ambience of aesthetics is almost a given—the whole gamut from wonder, to anguish, to desperation, to gratitude. Sincere prayer might just be like Job’s experience. It might silence you speechless, blind your eyes and deafen your ears!

Then again, who wouldn’t agree with Flannery O’Connor who journalled, “I don’t mean to deny the traditional prayers I’ve said all my life; but I’ve been saying them and not feeling them”.

Prayer:

Oh Lord, teach us to pray.

Teach me to pray.

[in your own words or in ‘the Lord’s prayer’…speak with our Father now].

You might like to watch and listen to Andrea Bocelli’s ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8jImIjg4UY

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* In fact, prayer is the only literary genre where wordlessness can still be called ‘literature’.

Keep in mind: part of the mystery of aesthetics is its subjectivity. “One person’s cacophony is another person’s symphony.” (Magsamen and Ross)