We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, "Hello? Is athere anyone there?" We can pray, "Am I too far gone, or can you help me get out of my isolated self-obsession?" We can say anything to God. It's all prayer.
Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy--all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toard something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.
Was my prayers answered? Yes, although I didn't get what I'd hoped and prayed for, what I'd selected from the menu. p. 30
There are a lot of prayers in the world, some of them better known than others. The serenity prayer is one of the most famous institutionalized prayers of the world, a greatest hits of prayer. The best known version says: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference...A sober friend once said that the three things I cannot change are the past, the truth, and you. I hate this insight so much. p. 31
Hi, God.
I am just a mess.
It is all hopeless.
What else is new?
I would be sick of me, if I were You, but miraculously You are not.
I know I have no control over other people's lives, and I hate this. Yet I believe that if I acept this and surrender, You will meet me wherever I am.
Wow. Can this be true? If so, how is this afternoon--say two-ish?
Thank You in advacnce for Your company and blessings.
You have never once let me down.
Amen.
p. 34
It is easy to thank God for life when things are going well. But life is much bigger than we give it credit for, and much of the time it's harder than we would like. It's a package deal, though...
We and life are spectacularly flawed and complex. Often we do not get our way, which I hate, hate, hate. But in my saner moments I remember that if we did, usually we would shortchange ourselves... p. 45
Most of us figure out by a certain age--some of us later than others--that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair. You don't have to like it, and you are always welcome to file a brief with the complaints department. But if you've been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.
I admit, sometimes this position of gratitude can be a bit of a stretch. So many bad things happen in each of our lives. Who knew? ...We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It's all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens and it's all part of the big picture. p. 50-51
Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides. It means you are willing to stop being such a jerk. When you are aware of all that has been given to you, in your lifetime and in the past few days, it is hard not to be humbled, and pleased to give back.
Most humbling of all is to comprehend the lifesaving gift your pit crew of people has been for you, and all the experiences you have shared, the journeys together, the collaborations, births and deaths, divorces, rehab, and vacations, the solidarity you have shown one another. Every so often you realize that without all of them, your life would be barren and pathetic. It would be Death of a Salesman, though with e-mail and texting.
The marvel is only partly that somehow you lured them into your web twenty years ago, forty years ago, and they totally stuck with you. The more astonishing thing is that these greatest of all possible people feel the same way about you--horrible, grim, self-obsessed you. They say--or maybe I said--that a good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks that he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our bosom friendships. You could almost flush with appreciation. What a great scam, to have gotten people of such extreme quality and loyalty to think you are stuck with them. Oh my God. Thank you. p. 56-58
"Thanks" is a huge min-shift, from thinking that God wants our happy chatter and a public demonstration and is deeply interestedin our opinions of the people we hate, to feeling quiet gratitude, humnbly and amazingly, without shame at having been so blessed.
You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out, too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can bear someone who is unbearable.... p. 60
....Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth...
We can't will ourselves to be more generous and accepting. Most of us are more like the townspeople of Shirley Jackson's "the Lottery" than we are like the Dalai Lama. I know I am. And this is what hell is like.
It obviously behooves me to practice being receptive, open for the business of gratitude.
A nun I know once told me she kept begging God to take her character defects away from her. After years of this prayer, God finally got back to her: I'm not going to take anything away from you, you have to give it to Me.
I have found that I even have to pray for the willingness to give up the stuff I hate most about myself. I have to ask for help, and sometimes beg. That's the human condition. I just love my own guck so much. Help. then I try to be a good person, a better person than I was yesterday, or an hour ago. In general, the 10 Commandments are not a bad place to start, nor is the Golden Rule. We try not to lie so much or kill anyone that day. We do the footwork, which comes down mostly to paying attention and trying not to be such a jerk. We try not to feel and act so entitled. We let others go first. p. 62-64
The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace. Maybe you won't always get from being a brat to noticing that it is an e.e. cummings morning out the window. But some days you will. p. 65
What can we say beyond Wow, in the presence of glorious art, in music so magnificent that it can't have originated solely on this side of things? Wonder takes our breath away, and makes room for new breath. That's why they call it breathtaking. p. 81
Gorgeous, amazing things things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible... p. 85
God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back. My friend Tom says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense. God doesn't say "I have HAD it this time. You have taken this course four times and you flunked again. What a joke." We get to keep starting over. Lives change, sometiems quickly, but usually slowly. p. 85-86
The tide comes in and sweeps out our children's castles, and it hurts so much, and a wave knocks our father over, and he injures his back; he'll never be the same. We pray to be of solace, and to find the courage to let people have their feelings. We breathe and pray to stay silent while people find their own way through. (Well, we try.) We pray to stay calm when the earth shakes and explodes. The universe is always having spasms and eruptions. it's labor. that's how things get born. We rush in to help.
I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overract and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense of humor back. That we and those we love have lightened up over the years is one of the most astonishing sights we will ever witness. p. 95
"Late Fragment"
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Raymond Carver
"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God. It changes me." C. S. Lewis p. 100
More than anything, prayer helps me get my sense of humor back. It brings me back to my heart, from the treacherous swamp of my mind. It brings me back to the now, to the holy moment... p. 100
You've heard it said that when all else fails, follow instructions. So we breathe, try to slow down and pay attention, try to love and help God's other children, and--hardest of all, at least to me--learn to love our depressing, hilarious, mostly decent selves. We get thirsty people water, read to teh very young and old, and listen to the sad. We pick up litter and try to leave the world a slightly better place for our stay here.
Those are the basic instructions, to which I can add only: Amen.
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