I had to write a paper in Prayer, Practice, and Presence about how I had experienced prayer in new ways during the semester, using the book Beyond Words: 15 Ways of Doing Prayer by Kristen Ingram as a reference. I ended up having to write the paper in a crunch (about 3 hours, to be exact), but I loved the book so much and have gotten so much from the class that the paper practically wrote itself. This class, mostly because of Ingram’s book, has been incredibly transformative for me. As I started reading Beyond Words I literally cried my way through the first chapter. Someone was telling me that the unorthodox ways that I was expressing my spirituality were actually pleasing to God. Someone wrote an entire book about prayer that encompassed nearly all of the non-traditional ways that I have been communicating with God over the last two years. It was so refreshing! And I am so grateful.
The professor talked to me about my paper today. He said that it was great and asked for my permission to send it to Kristen. He knows her, and for reasons that I won’t recount here, he felt like my paper would be a good thing for her to read right now. I am so honored to share part of myself with her, and I can only hope that my words will be as much of a blessing to her as her words have been to me.
Here are a few excerpts from my paper that I wanted to share. Enjoy!
Leaning Into Prayer: A Journey of Discovering the Transcendent God of the Universe and the Immanent God of My Feet
As I share my journey of prayer in this class, I would like to begin with some of the opening words of Kristen Johnson Ingram in her book, Beyond Words. She writes, “…but if you want more you’ll finally have to hurl yourself at the center–at the place where God is most God, and where you are most yourself. And then you transform your life into prayer. With abandon. As you do prayer you can become prayer… and you can then invite God to pray you” (p.1).
Taking this class was a choice to hurl myself at the center, allowing myself to be who I am and trusting that God’s character is open to receiving me however I may come. Though many of the practices that we have explored are not entirely new to me, I have come to an acceptance of my already natural ways of expressing myself to God, dispelling the myth that I have somehow landed outside the realm of acceptable spirituality. And it has been a beautiful journey far beyond what I could have hoped for.
When I decided to stop praying two years ago, there was a big part of me that wondered if I could still call myself a Christian. As much as I wanted to believe that God could handle my silence, the deeply ingrained theology of my upbringing maintained its critical and questioning presence in my life, making me feel isolated and delinquent.
As I read Ingram’s words, I was flooded with a sense of God’s blessing. I was overwhelmed with the sense that God is not confined to a church building, and more importantly, that God wasn’t confined to language. The beauty that she gave me is the realization that I actually spend most of my life in prayer, even though I rarely use words, and I don’t close my eyes, and I like my sleep. Her words somehow gave me permission to see all of those ordinary moments of transcendence–the moments where I walk under a yellow-leafed tree, basking in the light that penetrates through it’s golden canopy, feeling the swelling in my chest that whispers of the presence of God–as prayer.
Gratefully, Ingram’s book has introduced me to some very new ways to pray that involve activities that I already love to do. The three that stand out the most are walking as prayer, seeing as prayer, and listening as prayer. There is almost nothing that I love more than to go on a long walk through the woods or a beautiful Seattle neighborhood. Throughout my life, I have spent hours upon hours meandering through the forests of North Carolina, literally getting lost as I follow my curiosity and indulge my adventurous spirit. Something happens to me when I go on that kind of a walk. My mind and my spirit grow silent in a way that I cannot achieve by any other means. It is a silence that is unbelievably life-giving and restorative, and the calm that comes over me cannot be described as anything less than holy. I had always thought of a walk as a good time to pray, but the idea of thinking about walking as prayer is a whole new concept to me, one that I love! Not having a car in Seattle, I tend to walk a lot. I have found myself walking in my neighborhood on truly beautiful days recently, with Ingram’s words in my head, “To tramp the tree-covered hills searching for God, to skip down a city street reveling in the presence of angels and angels and angels, to caress a country lane with careful feet, to find your inside by going outside: all these are acts of prayer, honored in heaven and worthy in God’s sight” (p. 12). Even as I read them now, tears of uncontainable excitement fill my eyes. How beautiful! How absolutely wonderful that such a simple act can connect me to the transcendent God of the universe and the immanent God of my feet! I truly cannot contain my gratitude at receiving such an unlikely and unexpected gift.
While in her chapter on the prayer of the eye, I wanted to reach through the book and give Ingram a great big bear hug when I read the heading “Can Television Become Prayer?” Television and movies were a central part of my family drama growing up, a drama that has been filled with a lot of pain and heartache. But I also experience a lot of beauty and healing through certain television shows and movies. To hear her actually discuss the possibility of watching television as prayer, as a holy activity, is an incredibly redemptive idea for me.
I have also had several experiences in the last few weeks of experimenting with hearing as prayer. I love the way that, for Ingram, every aspect of our human existence can be offered up as prayer. In the rush of the day, as I race to catch a bus or get to class on time, I have tried to calm myself and listen to the sounds around me. I have heard the sound of my feet hitting the pavement, the birds singing in the trees, children shrieking with delight on the playground, cars driving through day-old puddles, the gentle humming of hushed conversations flowing from the open doors of coffee shops, and the sound of my breathing as I walk through all of this life.
