Nearly all religions or philosophies repeat their mantras to invite an openness or healing. To experience Spirit at least in part includes words. If the following words speak to you or for you in some meaningful way of a spiritual practice, I invite you to join me, using the versions most comfortable for you:
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever.
Jesus’ disciples remembered that he spoke it first when they asked him how they might pray. They must have repeated it forever until someone finally wrote it down.
It made sense to me when I prayed it growing up, though now my prayer is mostly “thank you,” and laughter, interspersed with signs or questioning gestures aimed at the heavens or the TV. For me as a child, God was dear like my earthly father but older and too tired to hang out on earth anymore and so he sent down Jesus. I don’t remember not loving the sky where I presumed God lived. As a child I loved the trees, too, but Our Mother who art in Earth, had not been quite as clear–till I saw her, long after I was an adult. Say she was an apparition or a trick of the eye, or maybe a spiritual vision, which is how I think of her now. For she was actually in Earth when I finally saw her, though she’d always been with me, like Alice Walker says in her poem. I just did not know, until I was older. I was on a bit of a pilgrimage with some friends and hiking in a cave when we came to a giant room and decided to switch off our lights and to sit apart in the deep silence, in the darkness beyond any darkness. Human eyes are so in love with light that they cannot bear cave life. In that darkness if you sit there long enough, your eyes create entertainment for themselves, refusing the nothing. Shapes, sparklers, shadows that could not be shadows if there is no light, appear and then float away to the edge of the nothing that is. Later, after prayers and conversation, we left one another again to light a tiny candle each, and it was then that I saw her, the Mother Goddess, peaceful and silent and sitting in a small alcove, just above eye level where I sat perched on a rock. I felt rather than heard her say, “I live in you, too.” The peace of the Earth was as on her face, cragged and calm, shadowed in rock and candle light. Psalm 139 says, “Let only darkness cover me, and the light about me be night, but even the darkness is not dark to thee…:” I’d never known such divine grace was buried deep within.
As I learned the ‘Our Father’ when I was a child. Maybe you did, too, or a table blessing or some other prayer you repeated, even if it was rushed through or irreverent like, “Good bread, good meat, good God, let’s eat!” or another mantra or breathing or practice to quiet the electric firings of the brain sparking out like the flashes of light in a cave. But I believe that no practice contain the whole of the Mystery. No words can. That’s why we have so many paths, stations, and names for the One. The “Our Father” is sometimes called “the Model Prayer,” but though it invites relationship to all that is above, that relationship is one of awe and worship, and does not mention companionship in Earth. It mentions Father as a way to know Spirit, but does not mention Mother or all the ways Spirit is beyond gendered or parental roles or human form. It prays for physical sustenance, (give us our daily bread), but does not mention how deeply we might starve without a compassionate touch. Yet, it is no doubt the prayer I will remember when I lie dying. Maybe you, too, at the last, or some other prayer, or maybe you will breathe or sigh out the OM as you return.
When I was a young associate pastor serving in eastern NC, my senior pastor and I went to visit a lovely church member dying of a brain tumor. We could hear her moaning and calling out as we walked down the hall. We held her hands and talked to her but she seemed incoherent and in terrible pain, when my fellow pastor said, “Nellie, I know you have always loved it, let’s see if the Apostle’s Creed is something you remember. Maybe it will help.” I thought, the woman does not even recognize us, doubtful, but we did not even finish the first phrase: “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and Earth…” before her forehead smoothed and her contorted fingers relaxed and she began to say the words as pretty as you please.
The Lord’s prayer, maybe OM, too, and water falling over rocks will be what I want to hear, along with other oldie-goldie Bible verses, Mary Oliver poems, and hymns like “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” which was my baby girl’s lullaby because I am a church nerd and when I got her, I didn’t know any other songs. Our minds and spirits rehearse what speaks to us of the everlasting, however known, when our own finiteness is most apparent–when we sit in awe in caves or by the sea or hover at the edges of our own existence. I believe that is one of the purposes of Life—Spirit inviting us to experience while we are alive.
And what touches the soul is different for every one of us, what we will see in the dark or be touched by at the last. Or that will speak to us in this worship theme. The Spirit of Life, the Great Awareness, Krishna Consciousness, Allah, YHWH, God-in-us, the hope of glory–all only names for a whispered experience. How do you experience Spirit, the moment of mystery, awareness, the sacredness of life? I try to remind myself that it is so often not the big cave vision that teaches me, but the unspeakable gift of the simplest mundane moment to savor and hold. A chance to be.
We have a fair amount of spiritual diversity here. We are blessed that way. Thankfully, the Mystery is grand enough to embrace us all, believers and atheists, and everybody else around and in between. Spirit sets free those who want to tamp her down and keep him locked up in one place or limit them in any singular religion. Spirit may have been experienced here today, in music and silence and stations and prayers, and Spirit is also dancing around out there and in and through the us and them, healing, inviting, in the Everything Else. Amen.
Psalm 139
9/2/18
Shelly Wilson