credo: a rewriting of the Apostles' Creed on Good Friday 2022

If you know me, you know my spiritual practice is not a quiet one. Literally: in church, on my mat, on the cushion, in community with others, I make noise. Whether a grunt or moan of affirmation, an “Amen!” of encouragement, the sound of OM, or a hymn taught to me by my teacher with shruti box accompaniment, my spiritual practice is vibrational. I make sounds. So when I was gifted a box containing mala and rosary, specifically, I was curious about the practice of this Catholic prayer. Can I chant it? What happens if I do? Does it feel similar or different to my regular mantra practice?

Now. I am not a Catholic. I say that not to differentiate myself in any forceful, dismissive way, and to attempt to respect deeply the liturgical and contemplative practices of Catholicism. (The ecumenical part of me, which is sizeable, is disappointed, even wounded at times, by the way that the institution conducts itself in relationship to others who profess and practice Christianity, but it has been such an institution of such power for so long that I couldn’t pick a meaningful fight with the Catholic church even if I wanted to.) So I wonder about the practice of picking up this prayer tool, and reciting—mentally or orally—these prayers, some of which are a part of my daily life, some of which are entirely new to me.

I can definitely pray the rosary and not be Catholic, someone told me. Of course you can, my friend told me, feel free to say whatever prayers you’re comfortable with. So I found some print-out instructions and sat down.

But right away, the Apostles’ Creed stunned me between the eyes. This may be in part because I am a a part of a Protestant denomination that self-identifies as non-credal (though we do have a statement of faith, many of us don’t chant it regularly, or at all, as an act of worship). Historically, the people of the UCC doesn’t like folks “in charge” telling us what to believe: it’s a flat denomination with discernment and self-determination that comes from and is rooted in the local church, not a bishopric or papacy. (I like that about us, but it doesn’t make anything simpler.) So maybe my UCC Spidey-sense went off. It wasn’t a matter of theology; it was a matter of language. Despite the fact that it has been relevant in the Christian history and practice for the last fifteen hundred years, I needed to make it more flexible. I mean no disrespect, but I needed to be able to see myself in it, to believe what I was saying when I said ‘I believe.’

So I rewrote it.

I’m not the first, I won’t be the last, and it’s not even that good. But here is the thing I can say when I sit down and cross myself, and pull out that rosary that my boss gave me to contemplate the relationship between a mother, her child, the Creator of the universe, and me.

I believe in God, the One beyond all separation, Creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, God’s Beloved Child, my Savior, Teacher, and Sibling who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born to the Virgin Mary, lived, suffered, and ministered under Roman occupation, was executed by crucifixion, died, and was buried; Jesus descended into the hell that is total alienation and distance from God; on the third day He rose from the dead; He has been reunited in Oneness, and is complete with the One; from this Oneness he will come to reconcile all in love. I believe in the presence, mystery, and workings of the Holy Spirit, the flawed-but-in process Church universal, the communion of saints known and unknown, the forgiveness of sins, and oneness in Love by Love in the fullness of time. Amen

Yes, it’s longer. This is unsurprising if you know me. It would be hella impressive if I could write it in Latin, eh? Maybe someday. Today, I’m gonna keep reading Toni Morrison and handle this rosary and think about my Friend who was killed.

the d-word

Another sleepless night—just me? anyone else?—has me thinking about death. I laugh out loud writing that sentence, but it’s true. I’m writing a thesis right now about Julian of Norwich, my favorite medieval mystic who prayed for illness that would convince herself and everyone around her that she was dying, so that she might understand the suffering of Jesus Christ. Through this suffering she was given a series of visions that transformed her understanding of God.

It seems sacrilegious to write about a woman who wanted to fall ill in the midst of a pandemic like the one we’re living and dying through. But tonight I’m thinking about how hard it is for us to understand what death is, how much we struggle to talk about death.

I was with a fair amount of people who were dying and who died while serving as a chaplain intern this summer. Most of them I never got to know until they were close to death, through their friends, family, or spouses, because they couldn’t communicate with me in words. They were young and old, local and from out of town, Covid patients and people who were dying because their bodies couldn’t work anymore.

I remember one guy I met named Marshall (obviously not his real name) who was dying. He had my birthdate. Literally, we two came into the world on the same date. Different parts of the country, different parents, different lives, Marshall wound up in the situation that despite having an only slightly worn 41-year-old body, his brain was not functional. He had no chance—no chance—of regaining consciousness. His mother, sister, and girlfriend, after wrestling with this information for days and talking repeatedly with his doctors, decided to change his course of treatment from attempting to (unsuccessfully) extend his life, to care that would allow him to die peacefully and painlessly.

We’ve all seen the movie, right? A nurse or two makes a couple of efficient moves and then leaves the room silently; a loved one tearfully holds the hand of the dying, bedside; the rhythmic pulse of the heart monitor suddenly becomes more prominent in the sound design—beep… Beep… Beep…BEEP…BEEP…—then that monotonous tone erupts—BEEEEEEEEEE!!!!—and the softly weeping protagonist breaks down into sobs. Cue the orchestra swell.

That’s not how it happens. That’s not how this happened.

Days went by. Marshall didn’t die. Despite his history, I learned from some of his care providers, he was a person with a strong body. His organs weren’t just going to snap off like flipping a light switch. Death happens on its own schedule. Meantime, Marshall’s body was going to continue to have certain kinds of responses: movements, eye twitches, even sounds occasionally. His family was racked with guilt and uncertainty. Had they made the right choice? Maybe Marsh was trying to tell them something. Did you see that? See that, he moved! Maybe he’s still in there!

The care team paged Spiritual Care, and I was the one holding the hot potato (I was likely one of only two people from Spiritual Care in the thousand-bed hospital at the time), so I went down and spent some time with his family. I think I sat and talked with them for close to an hour, maybe more. I remember I said the words die, dying, died, death, dead more in that hour of care than I think I had so far that summer. It didn’t feel like the word was violent or jarring or out of place. It felt like the necessary word to describe what Marshall and his family were experiencing. Marshall was dying; his family was waiting for him to die.

We talked about who Marshall was to them. We talked about how confused and frightened they were. We talked about how hard the care team had worked to care for him, and how they, Marshall’s loved ones, could rest assured that they’d gotten the best medical advice possible about Marshall’s situation. And we told God how pissed off we were.

I pray like this a lot to God on my own. I don’t use thee or thou, I don’t get poetic or prolific in my language, and I don’t use Latin; I blend genders, I ask sometimes what are you doing, and I say, I’m scared. I’m angry. I’m hurting. I’m lonely. I don’t understand. I appreciate praying this way. It feels like the most honest and vulnerable way that I can talk to God. No bullshit, no ceremony, the sacred in the profane. Here I am, on my face, or standing in the rain shaking my fist at the lightning.

We’d rather use metaphors or euphemisms for death than just say that we die, you’re dying, they’re dead. Gone…, is one I hear, with a pregnant ellipsis that’s supposed to indicate that it’s not gone fishing or gone to the store. “No longer with us”, like a break up of which we just can’t name the scope and permanence. Then there are the Hallmark-y quasi-Heavenly ones—she’s gone Home, or is in a better place. I feel like I choke on that one. It’s all so sanitized.

We’re dying. People are dying. I said it in the pulpit two days ago. Saying it in a pulpit doesn’t make it more true or less true. It was always true. Covid has forced us all to reckon with our own mortality, with our fear, with the reality of our own death and the death of everything we love, everything we hate, everything we know. I don’t think we’re very good at it, and here’s a hard truth: I’m not sure how much our religion helps. So many fellow followers of Christ cling to the practice of our faith because of the promise it can make of us never having to confront death. It’s not the radical love of Christ that we want to emulate or the devotion to the poor and justice that Jesus modeled that we practice; we worship because we are afraid that if we don’t death will be final, and that we’ll suffer forever.

I’m not super interested in arguing this point, frankly. Maybe I should be, but what happens to me when I die is just… I am more interested in living like Christ than striking a deal with him to avoid death. When this argument starts to circle in my head (usually in a voice that is part-charismatic male preacher and part-my mother), James Baldwin quotes start to kick in: “If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.”

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps that is the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

— James Baldwin

Marshall’s family seemed to appreciate praying this way, just telling God the truth about how hard confronting this death was for them. One of his relatives even said so. I’ve never prayed like that before… it felt good, I feel better. Think of that: naming death, and the struggle that these folks had coming to grips with Marshall’s death was helpful, rather than trying to cling to some pain to that would be made right after death, or in the end of time. Do we have to demand that our faith make us these promises in order for it to have value in our lives?

I remember learning last summer that the chaplain is sometimes the only person who says the word die to family of a patient who’s died, and that sometimes it can be a kind of relief for them. A valve opens, they can sink into the reality against which they’ve been braced. Finally, someone’s just being tenderly honest with them. I don’t know if that’s a universal truth of spiritual care or not. I suppose only time and experience will tell.

I’m dying. You’re dying. Because we are both dying sooner or faster than we think, let us think deeply about how we want to live, how we want to treat ourselves, treat one another. Let us “earn [our] death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.” (That’s Baldwin, too.) Let’s breathe deeply together while we can, and treat each other like the sacred beings we are. Let’s spend our energy and attention on things we value. Let us love one another, deeply, thoroughly, humbly and tenderly, with our words, our actions, our resources.

Darkness: An Advent Reflection

I’ve been working the last few months at Old South Church in Boston. It’s been a fascinating experience to serve a community this way, and I’m working hard and learning a lot. Every now and then I’m given the opportunity to offer reflection, and I thought I’d share my most recent reflection in this space. In this time of winter, of mounting waves of illness, of trauma and fear and grief, darkness feels in high supply. This reflection offers a vision for how we might work cooperatively with darkness. The whole service is lovely, and my words start at around 22:00 in.

For Now: or, This'll all be over soon.

Wow, has it been a long time since I posted anything. I’m not sure my lungs are strong enough to blow the dust off this space. If there are still faithful and interested readers out there, bless you. Thank you. Still, I value this space, and so I want to continue to nourish and nurture it, and anyone who is still reading with me, thinking with me, practicing with me, praying with me.

Image Description: the nub of a candle in the palm of a brown-skinned hand, alit, almost burning out. Image by Eyasu Etsub via Unsplash

This summer was amazing. Impossible. Incredible. One of the hardest things I’ve done in recent memory: a unit of clinical pastoral education, which is to say deep personal work masquerading as hospital chaplaincy. I am still learning about what it is doing in me, but it’s changing a lot. One of the greatest gifts it is giving me is a growing comfort with death. I’m going to die. So are you. So is everyone you have ever known. Not in an abstract way, we’re going to get sick or old, or make bad decisions, or be in accidents, and the vibrant, delightful, hurtful, infuriating, confusing both/and that we are is going to end. It’s still scary, but it’s less strange now. One of the writing exercises we did was called an Ethical Will. It feels closest to something. Here’s some of it.

An Open Letter to my Loved Ones after my death:

If we were all at a cocktail party, I’d probably be working the room, trying to connect you all, the various circles of my life. But it’s not a cocktail party; instead you are reading this in the wake of my death. Take a deep breath together, Beloveds. There I am, with you in your breath. 

I’m sorry that I hurt you. When I hurt you, I was likely hurting or afraid. It’s not an excuse, just an explanation. I was hurting and afraid a lot, and that made me careless and anxious, even when I wanted to be deliberate. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. It doesn’t hurt anymore, so I hope you can let yourself off the hook. 

Many of you told me I was brave when I was alive, and so to all of you I leave you my bravery. Do your best to listen to the voice inside you that is incessant about taking a step or making a change or doing what scares you. Interrogate it. Trust it. Listen to it. It’s okay to be afraid as you do the thing, but the fear doesn’t need to stop you from doing the thing. Recognize the fear of a hard thing and do what will move you closer to others and closer to yourself, even if it is hard. 

Work a little less. Laugh a lot more. Say yes as often as you can, and say no whenever you need to, because a yes without a no is meaningless, and a no without a yes is cruel. Look for what is Sacred in what is Mundane. Acknowledge and play in paradox. Join the ends of the line and make a circle. Be changed. Pay attention to the small part of yourself and listen to what they are asking for or saying. They’re smarter than the part of you that runs the show. 

Besties: thank you for being such excellent best friends. You teach me so much about how to live in community with the people who matter most to me and with the parts of myself that I value. You have taught me to be deliberate and careful, and so I leave to you my attention to detail, my capacity for listening, and my practice of looking without flinching at feelings. These are skills and lessons you already have, so I’m just fortifying your own stock. You know how to listen and when to surrender. If there is anything that I have that I can give you, it is a fire that moves us forward, so I leave you that as well. God knows there is enough to go around. May the fire burn off what is useful, clarify what is good and pure, and move you closer to the center of yourselves.

Teachers, I leave you my attention. I am so grateful to have been able to sit at your feet and listen to your words and surrender to your efforts. Thank you for the container you created for me. Thank you for letting me keep asking questions. Thank you for pushing me to do things I didn’t think I could do. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for changing the trajectory of my life. I listened to you so deeply, could you feel that? I hung on your every word, even when I thought it was crap! I am grateful for the moments when you saw me and made me feel seen; I am grateful for the moments we were able to step outside the one-up/one-down paradigm so prevalent in learning spaces in our world and just be people together. I am grateful that you didn’t laugh at me to my face when I was ridiculous, because we both know I was. I paid you attention. I was watching. I leave you that attention. May you continue to encounter students and people who listen to you so deeply that it makes you more deliberate and attentive with your words; and may you pay close and unwavering attention to those things and people you encounter as teachers, so that your learning, our learning, continues.

Fellow Writers and Artists, I leave you my voice. You don’t need it, but here it is anyway. A thing I have learned is that sometimes my voice is as powerful when it’s silent as it is speaking. You have such marvelous voices, and you are continuing to seek and share stories that need to be told. Listen even more. Be careful with your voice: make sure that the light and power you lend to a story is building and constructive of what is good, what our world needs. Do not tell a story that you don’t need to tell. Tell the story that won’t release you until it is told, and whenever possible, ask if it is your story, or if someone else needs the center of it, needs the voice. May you use the power of your own voice to amplify others. I don’t know if I did this with my voice, but I always wanted to. I do know my voice was loud, so use it as a microphone to lift up what has been silent too long. 

Cousins, you are always in my heart, even when we are far away from each other. I’m sorry I didn’t know you better. I’m sorry you didn’t know me better. I love you like the brothers and sisters that you are to each other. I love your families. My life is less different from yours than we think; we have more in common than we know. K, I see you. Your life has value. To all of you I leave a longing to connect that moves you closer to those you have yet to connect with. May that longing be a thread that draws you closer to the folks that need you, toward the folks you need, and may your love make your family circle ever wider, ever stronger.

Sorors, thank you for teaching me of the power of the love of black women. Thank you for teaching me about a bond that transcends time and place, thank you for teaching me the shared values of sisterhood, volunteerism, movement, and joy. I love you. I love your power and your determination and your connection. I leave you my desire for belonging. Ship, I leave you all of the connection that we shared for so many years. You are the best. You are my twin who shares my soul. I want you to be happy. Take the connection that we shared and fashion it into a connection that you can build with the person who makes you happy, my dear friend and sister. 

Husband. Ai-ren. Favorite. Loving you has been the greatest work of my life. I am so grateful to God for giving you to me, my greatest spiritual teacher. This isn’t how I wanted this. I wanted you to go first. I’m sorry. Do you feel alone? Are you scared? Are you sad? It’s okay, sweetheart. Take a year, don’t make any big decisions, let yourself feel the feels. Teach your brothers how to be with their feelings by being with your feelings. Smell my clothes and read my James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison and Sylvia Plath, and giggle whenever someone uses words like ontological or epistemological, and talk to me because I can still hear you. You have my heart, my life, my deepest and most abiding love. Do you remember the day you kissed me, standing in front of that Starbucks on Wilson avenue? And dinner at Le Colonial? And seeing each other on our wedding day? Do you remember when they wheeled me away for surgery, and when I left you at O’Hare to board a plane to India? Do you remember our fights, and me asking you, sweetheart, what do you want, and you never letting me quit or walk out? I look back and even our fights seem sweet now. All I remember is how much you made me laugh; the sound of your voice so calming it put me to sleep; watching you learn to tell me what you needed. I remember all the live music we heard together--Sade, and John Legend, and India.Arie, and EWF, and the hours and hours and hours of Kurt Elling, and making love, and all of the hours we wasted playing video games and watching mediocre TV. Thank you for teaching me to play, for reading me your writing, and for giving me feedback on my writing even when I was too stubborn or defensive to hear how smart it was. Thank you for holding me. Thank you for asking me to share your life with you. To you I leave this community of amazing people. Can you see my face when you look at them, can you hear my voice when they call your name? Let them take care of you. There is no separation between us, Bear, it is simply not possible to be apart; you take me with you wherever you go. If I know what love is, it is because of you.

I’m not ready to go. But it isn’t up to me. Thank you for everything you all have taught me. Use your phones less. Look around. Soften. Exhale. Finish writing your book. Have dinner together. Look beneath the anger. Drink your water. Get on your mat. And lead with vulnerability. 

I wish we were both here,

jess

Want me to do it for you?

Part I: A Memory

It might have been the candlelight, or the winter periwinkle dusk light slipping down the streets and collecting in the corners of windows and doorways, or my shoulders hunched up around my ears against the wind. Maybe it was the tension of being in my final year of grad school, the words swirling around and knocking into each other inside my skull, or the stacks of student work in my dingy studio apartment I was behind on grading. Maybe it was the magic and the devotion, the prana that had been cultivated in the space. Whatever the case, that yoga studio, crouching halfway down the 5800 North block of Broadway, glowed like a beacon in the dark. I’d been wandering spiritually for almost a year. I’d recently moved out of my neighborhood where my favorite church was located because my roommate moved away, and I couldn’t find a new one in my new neighborhood, nor afford to stay on my own in my old neighborhood. On top of which, surprisingly, church felt too full of words. This isn’t a complaint I make frequently. I love words: I’m a reader, I’m a writer, I was getting a writing degree. But at that time in my life there was just too much talking; I needed quiet. The studio was around the corner from my boyfriend’s place. I’d go to practice on Sunday nights, and then we’d meet at the Thai place across the street (love you Indie Cafe, hope you’re still doin it despite the pandemic xoxo) and eat and talk and giggle at each other like the idiots in love we were.

I was absolutely mad about that man (still am), in love with his warm, handsome smile, and his opinions about art and writing which occasionally bordered on arrogance, with how deeply he listened to me, but my favorite thing about those wintry Sunday nights was the yoga. They were taught by a lithe, elfin woman who would knot her dark hair into a pile on her head and then coach us through the half-primary series of Ashtanga yoga. (If you’re curious, there’s a PDF here. If you’re new to yoga, and click and then your jaw falls open when you see the pics, don’t be impressed. For one thing, I can’t execute perfectly on the majority of those poses in the specific way they’re taught, and besides, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the point of yoga is not the postures. Asana is a means, not an end. For the real deal on Ashtanga, in every way possible, check out this teacher/writer/dope human.) What was so remarkable about it was how quiet it was. There was no music, no sitar or harmonium or djembe, no iPod recording, no Enya or Deva Premal, and definitely nothing pop, hip-hop, or R&B. There was only the sound of the teacher, and the sound of my breath, and the sound our bodies made moving through space. It was silent, it was hard as hell, and made me feel brilliant, literally like I was shining.

I realized after several months of practicing this way that it was filling the space left when I departed my spiritual community, in fact that it was the first time I’d ever felt like I’d embodied prayer. It felt like an act of worship without words, without language. It felt like I was communing with Something and didn’t need the tropes I’d used before to do it. I’d found a spiritual community, and a spiritual practice, inside myself and I was using my body to do it. I was praying on my yoga mat: doctrine, theology, denomination were all irrelevant, it was just me and What Is Greater.

This is one of my favorite depictions of the person who was Jesus, called Maori Jesus by Sofia Minson. I first saw it in a lecture in an Intro to New Testament class, and it still speaks to me. Deep bow, Sophia.

“Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it IS a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.”

— "Waiting for God", Simone Weil

photo by Nathan Dumlao via unsplash. Thanks, Nathan.

Part II: Context

I grew up in black evangelical churches that I would call charismatic. In James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Tish talks about Fonny’s mother, “She was saved the moment she entered the church, she was Sanctified holy, and … there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you.” My churches were full of these women: impeccable in the external appearance of their spiritual practice, both approachable and untouchable at the same time. Fallen, but only conceptually. Remember the women in The Bluest Eye, who don’t sway too much when they walk, who don’t apply lipstick to the fullness of their lips and who worry about the edges of their hair? I grew up among these women in the church, tiptoeing around them, trying not to ask too many questions that made them mad, and listening closely to the hushed conversations they had with my mother when they forgot I was around. (Only-children learn invisibility among adults as a superpower early.) These are women who could organize and mobilize, who used phrases like bless your heart, and I’ll pray for you. On their faces, both phrases sound kind and generous, thoughtful even, but if you know what you’re listening for you can hear their scathing edges. I knew what these phrases meant. Bless your heart sometimes meant, “How stupid/clueless/inept are you?” or “That’s what your lazy, triflin’ ass gets,” and even sometimes, “Ha! Better you than me, you selfish cow.” I’ll pray for you was more nefarious. In a community where spiritual communion is encouraged, where prayer is a means of comfort or clarity, a place where the mystical way of knowing God is available and the miraculous is always possible, you’d think a sentence like this would indicate generosity, affirmation of hope and faith. As often as not, though, it means, “I know better than you do about your struggle with me/ with you/ with your situation, and I will talk to God on your behalf and appeal to Him that He do for you what I think he should do. I will go to God and elicit the outcome I desire in your life.”

Let me be honest: I heard folks say this a lot to me as a girl and young woman, and it was often in the midst of having shared with them some venture in my life that they objected to or were concerned about—some relationship, some decision, some obstacle, something that made me vulnerable. It was a phrase that came at the end of a conversation wherein they pursed their eyebrows at me, or nodded slowly, puzzled, or after which they peppered me with questions. It never felt like comfort, it never sounded like, I affirm your desire for this moment in your life, and will put my energy and my thoughts of you in the same direction as you do for yourself. Instead it felt like judgment, it sounded like, well that’s a shit idea, and I can only hope that God will show you the error of your shiftless, moronic ways before you’ve made an irreparable mistake. There were many times when I was insecure about choices I was making, and maybe the kindness of others I only saw as shade. Maybe it’s possible that women who said this to one another had only the best, clearest, and most grounded intentions, and the duplicity that I’m speaking about is just a projection of my own struggles with how organized religion meets my insecurity. I’m sure it is.

And I also know what those women meant when they said I’ll pray for you.

The echo in that sentiment has always been hard for me to receive. Few know what I pray for because I don’t talk much about it, so I seldom trust others to agree with me in prayer. This has only grown richer and more complex as my concept of Divinity has diversified. Sometimes prayer means not in English, or not with words, or not just to the God of Judgment throwing lightening of misfortune, nor the blond-haired, blue-eyed suffering Jesus with diminutive stigmata on the candles and the fans. What if prayer names a different deity, names sacred objects or practices outside of the tradition or in another, what if it involves action or movement? Are the church ladies going able to pray with me when they learn I am praying to an Elephant-headed deity with light, dancing feet and a pot belly who broke off his own tusk so he could use it as an implement to write the Mahabarata, the longest written epic poem known to human civilization? Or will they pray for me, that white Jesus will deliver me from my heathen practice involving (gasp) false gods, breaking the very first commandment?

Nowadays, I get spam messages from folks who want to put me in their prayer tree, from communities I’ve never heard of and don’t seek to join, saying that they’ll pray for me. I imagine that these communities, like the church ladies of my early faith formation, aren’t praying in accordance with my own prayers, but instead are praying that my politics and behaviors might align more with their own. They’re praying for a turn from my ways; for my assimilation; for my erasure.

This phrase, I’ll pray for you, describes a relationship called intercessory prayer. I’m not going to get all lecture-y and obnoxious about this, mainly because I don’t know enough. I’ll only say this: when I hear the word intercessor, I think of words like ally, like advocate. Someone who will go to, go before, who will petition on behalf of another. There’s almost a kind of broad-shouldered quality about it, as if one were taking on the burden of another by going on their behalf.

photo by Rob King via unsplash. Thanks, Rob.

Part III: The Consideration

I have a (mercifully, brilliantly) long break between semesters in school right now, and this year I’m using it to take a J-term class, what some schools call a class in a condensed timeline. Some of them are three weeks long; the class I’m taking, Comparative Monasticisms, taught by my supervisor, colleague, and mentor, HDS Chaplain Kerry Maloney, involves a contemplation of sacred, critical, and academic texts, and a week of intense practice/ritual, wherein we all take a collective temporary vow. Evidently, in seasons past this would happen in a space where we could live in community, as monastics did and do, but you know, COVID and all that. So we’re alone together, in the cells of our homes making vows to one another and to our values and gods of how to spend our time in contemplation, worship, silence. Preparing for this time, I’ve been doing the coursework: we’re reading a lot of Thomas Merton, folks like Rev. angel Kyoto williams, the Rule of St. Benedict, the rule of the Bikkhu Patimokkha, Thich Nat Hanh, and so many others, as well as watching a fair amount of documentary footage of various Cistercian, Carthusian, and Buddhist monastics and communities. It’s fascinating. It’s sometimes deeply frustrating. In one doc I recently heard a contemplative say that those who enter a life like this—and I’d wager, specifically a Christian life, though the point could be argued that that’s not exclusive—do so because they believe that they can serve the world more fully, as well as their god, through a life of strict prayer and contemplation, than they can in a life that requires a level of interaction with the “outside world.” It’s not the only way to lead a contemplative life, but it’s the way that they feel called to lead one, and their work is to spend hours of every day in prayer and communion with God, whether that means in prostration and corporate prayer, alone in their tiny scrap of a bedroom, feeding or milking livestock, digging in the garden, begging for food, or whatever it means to do life. Pray without ceasing. And part of that prayer is for those of us doing life on the outside, someone said so in a film, too. They’re in there praying for us. What are they praying for: that we’d all turn away from practices and choices they view as hateful, spiteful, sinful? That we’d choose the life they’ve chosen, away from family, friends, comfort and society, and move with slowness and humility toward nature and our own mortality on the fringes? Are they praying for our “salvation”? Are they praying for healing? Equity? Justice? Are they praying that we may all be one?

I’ve no idea. So far, none of the monastics who’ve addressed the cameras that move through their spaces, witnessing their lives has disclosed what they pray for. Really, I don’t need to know what these people are praying for, and if their prayers for me are like my own. It’s most likely that their prayers are mostly about the state of their own relationship to/with G_d and I’m just inserting myself into a dynamic that doesn’t involve me.

But what if they are praying for me, and for you? What kind of karma is established between each of us, and the siblings on the hill, behind the wall, tucked in among the mountains, who whisper to G_d about us in the lean early hours of the day and night? (Is it the same karma that exists between each of us, all of us, as beings on this shared planet, in this shared space and time, with perhaps a clearer, brighter line drawn, electrified, between us?) What is being bound, or burned off, between us in that prayer?

I heard once that someone, somewhere, is chanting the Maha Mrtyunjaya mantra all the time, every moment of every day. (You can read about it here and here, though I dislike when folks frame prayers as the magic remedy for “prosperity.” Yuck.) I like believing this, because this mantra has powerful resonance for my own spiritual practice (why is not important, or is for another day), but it’s one of those mantras that you can chant and give away. Sometimes we choose or are given mantra—prayer—that is for ourselves, our hearts, our vessels, and the Maha Mrtyunjaya can be that, but we can also chant it for others: for someone who’s dying, or grieving, who’s in the throes of addiction, illness, fatigue, curse-breaking, burnout, who needs healing. We can chant it for the whole world if we want. Perhaps this is a kind of intercessory prayer—not that we are necessarily asking to take on the addiction/illness/fatigue/curse of another, but that we are witnessing it, and agreeing with them in their need for relief or healing or renewed stamina and fortitude.

Ultimately, this prayer is about letting go of the fear that stands between us and dying. May I, it implores, and we implore when we chant it, be released from death and liberated to immortality by You, and then it looks to a metaphor of our natural world, much like the cucumber is released from the vine in its time. (Please note, I’m not translating, I’m speaking about translations of this mantra that I’ve read, my Sanskrit is nowhere near good enough to do so.) Often when I hear/use the word liberation, I mean it positively: liberation from oppression or addiction or corruption, from poverty into comfort, from violence into peace, from hunger into satiety, these all sound “good.” Is liberation from life into death a “good” thing? (Who told us the spiritual life was supposed to “be good” or “feel good” anyway? This, too, a conversation for a different day.) I’m not saying that I think this mantra is like praying that I or you or any one of us would die. I don’t think that. This mantra is about our fears. What are we afraid of—that we aren’t good enough to do the work, that we will be gunned down by malevolent forces, that what we love will be compromised, that we will be hurt, exposed, made vulnerable, made small, made uncomfortable, made weak. All these things are the case all the time. This prayer is about stripping us of the distractions and lies that we wrap ourselves in so that we forget the temporary and tender nature of our existence, an existence with a one-way trajectory. So if I chant it and give it away, my prayer is that your liberation allows you more easily to have the experience of life, and of death, clarified for you, so that you might not resist or run or fight it, but see it as a welcome and necessary (and frankly inevitable) part of your life on this plane and in this time.

It feels important to say that prayer is not about stuff. Pray that I get a new car, or a girlfriend, or a new job. I don’t know about this. I mean, it’s easy for me to say that prayer isn’t about stuff, because I’ve got a lot of stuff. (This is about privilege, right?) I’m certainly not attempting to say that if you’re suffering or lacking in this life, just pray, and God will reward you in the next, I’m pretty sure I don’t believe it, and my ancestors have suffered too much under that shallow theology and cheap grace.

Here’s what I’m trying to say: I have, at various times, been debilitated by depression. Not new, in good company, yes. I remember coming home to my parents’ house for a time during one of these occasions, and wanting to die, wanting to pull the great curtain of gray over my head and obliterate everything that was and never to return to the world again. My mother, bless her heart, tried so hard to have me pray what I was suffering up off me. She meant well, and she could see that I was suffering with something that she didn’t understand. I was in the clutches of some demon of depression, and if only I would pray (there’s Fonny’s mother again, “I pray and I pray, and I pray…”) to God, sincerely and fervently and devotedly enough, I would be free of it.

I balked at this. I was so unhappy I could barely see; but the idea that my faith and my prayer life would cure me of this feeling were just… awful. I felt it reduced God to some kind of cosmic Santa Claus, or a capricious, demanding entity of power in my life to whom I hadn’t propitiated sufficiently, who was either harming me outright, or failing to show up in the way his people say he did. Where was the rescuer that was promised in the poetry of the Psalms, in the vision of Revelation? Is this all God was? I prayed to him and he fixed it? Turns out my mother was wrong. Part of what lifted that debilitating depression, what caused the flood waters to recede, was the right prescription. Part of it was being healed from harmful theology. Part of it was getting to live life on terms that reflected my values.

I share this to say that if I, if you, if we want to pray to God for stuff, we can certainly do that. But I think that’s not what spiritual life, what spiritual practice, is really about, at least not any practice I’m about. Every time I turn around Jesus was telling folks to get rid of stuff, to sell it and donate the proceeds. He was comparing us to lilies and sparrows, who bloom where they are planted and who are fed and nourished, indeed who live and who die, by the elements. When he taught his students to pray, he offered language about reconciliation and forgiveness, about avoiding what distracts us from closeness with the Divine, and about aligning what we want—job, relationship, sensation, stuff—with the Divine will of Creation. We can debate it. I guess I’m just saying that praying for stuff doesn’t prioritize a relationship with the Divine, and I think prayer does that. Prayer is about nurturing the cosmic relationship, the vertical, and in so doing, it allows us to do better at considering and nurturing the horizontal relationship, the manifest. They’re the same thing.

“In praying for others, we learn really and truly to love them. As we approach God on their behalf, we carry the thought of them into the very being of eternal Love, and we go into the being of him who is eternal Love, we learn to love whatever we take with us there.”

— Richard Meux Benson, Society of Saint John the Evangelist

Part IV: The Invitation

This Spring I hope to take a class about Julian of Norwich. Julian was a 14th-century English anchorite and mystic who wrote a text called Revelations of Divine Love (the oldest known book written by a woman in English), based on a vision she had while she was sick with an illness—an illness that she prayed that God would give her so she could have this vision. The idea of this woman, who was quite literally walled into her community church, whom folks would come to visit, bringing food or encouragement to pass to her through a small window, asking for wisdom or prayer; this woman who prayed to get sick, who, while sick, had a mystical experience and then wrote about it… it just knocks me out. I expect I’ll be writing about her for a while longer. Right now I’m just thinking about the nature of having an intercessory prayer on call in your neighborhood. I feel certain that Julian has something to teach me. I’m trying to listen.

Part of the practice of this Comparative Monasticism class is to take a vow, right, I’ve said. So I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll carve out space during my temporary vows for a practice of intercessory prayer. Maybe I will try to name folks I know, or don’t know, and to draw them, to draw us both, into the cone of eternal Love that I imagine, and to consider what happens to me, my vertical relationship, and my horizontal relationships, when I do this. I don’t know what will be; I’m obviously still trying to think this through, to discover what happens, and what I feel about it, through the practice. But if you want to observe with me, or if you just like the idea of someone “praying” for you, try this:

In the form below, put your name and any relevant info. I will gather the seeds I get from this, and take them with me, into this time of retreat, reflection, and contemplation, and likely into my day-to-day later. Think of it less as me advocating to Cosmic Santa that you change some way of being, or that your Coke turns to Pepsi, or you finally get that whoever/whatever. Think of this as an invitation to step together into a Love, a Love I don’t fully clearly understand, but want us both to know better, because I believe in Love’s radical, transformative power.