The Light in the Window
Pastor Jessie’s weekly thoughts on the life of faith
May 17, 2024
I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.
— Mary Oliver, from “I Happened to be Standing”
Dear Covenant Friends,
I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer this week, after worshipping with my church family on Sunday, and taking part in a book discussion on prayer the following day. It’s a comfort to think about Jesus praying for us, and a privilege that we can pray for each other. Prayer matters in the life of faith, and it is worth practicing, giving time to communion with God through silence, nature, saying the Lord’s Prayer, journaling or reading scripture.
In the past few years, I have become more focused on contemplative prayer, creating space for Christian meditation at the beginning and end of my busy days. Contemplative prayer is less about words, and more about resting in the presence of God. One of my guides in this practice has been the daily meditations I receive via email from the Center for Action and Contemplation. Today’s meditation was on “Prayer and Politics”, in which Father Richard Rohr writes:
It seems to me that a regular practice of contemplation makes it almost inevitable that our politics are going to change. The way we spend our time is going to be called into question. Our snug socioeconomic perspective will be slowly taken away from us. When we practice contemplative prayer consistently, the things that we think of as our necessary ego boundaries fall away, little by little, as unnecessary and even unhelpful…
Contemplation is no fantasy, make-believe, or daydream, but the flowering of patience and steady perseverance. When we look at the world today, we may well ask whether it can be transformed on the global level; but I believe that there is a deep relationship between the inner revolution of prayer and the transformation of social structures and social consciousness. The Book of Wisdom says, “the multitude of the wise is the salvation of the world” (6:24). Our hope is that contemplation really can change us and the society we live in by guiding our actions for compassion and justice in the world.
Read this meditation on cac.org.
Praying with you,
Pastor Jessie