I was very taken the other day with Krista Tippet’s interview of Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, theologian, and leader of the Corrymeela community in Northern Ireland which has been a place of refuge, reconciliation, and healing “in the years since the violent division that defined that country until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.”

Following the thread of my last reflection on prayer as breathing together with God, I was especially moved by the end of the conversation in which Ó Tuama (O-Tooma) reads a passage on prayer from his book In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World. It is beautiful in its simplicity, sacred in its sheer humanity, earthy yet elegant.

Neither I nor the poets I love found the keys to the kingdom of prayer and we cannot force God to stumble over us where we sit. But I know that it’s a good idea to sit anyway. So every morning I sit, I kneel, waiting, making friends with the habit of listening, hoping that I’m being listened to. There, I greet God in my own disorder. I say hello to my chaos, my unmade decisions, my unmade bed, my desire and my trouble. I say hello to distraction and privilege, I greet the day and I greet my beloved and bewildering Jesus. I recognise and greet my burdens, my luck, my controlled and uncontrollable story. I greet my untold stories, my unfolding story, my unloved body, my own love, my own body. I greet the things I think will happen and I say hello to everything I do not know about the day. I greet my own small world and I hope that I can meet the bigger world that day. I greet my story and hope that I can forget my story during the day, and hope that I can hear some stories, and greet some surprising stories during the long day ahead. I greet God, and I greet the God who is more God than the God I greet. / Hello to you all, I say, as the sun rises above the chimneys of North Belfast. / Hello.

In my previous reflection, I stated that prayer is more than saying prayers or talking to God. But that does not mean that either is not prayer. In this age in which more and more people are genuinely drawn to the contemplative dimension of spirituality, we have to be careful not to be smug or suggest that prayer is something necessarily difficult or complex. Authentic prayer mainly requires honesty, humility, and sincerity. God does the rest. As long as we bring the attention that Simone Weil speaks of so eloquently, nearly anything can become prayer. Which is what I love about Ó Tuama’s words above about prayer — its honesty, lack of pretension, intentionality, and presence before the God who is immediately greetable and always “more God than the God I greet.” Prayer is saying hello to God whose name is unpronounceable. Prayer is saying hello to all. Prayer is making friends with the habit of listening and listening to our lives– the chaos and disorder, the stories we know and everything we do not know– in the presence of God.

Prayer includes the grace and gravitas of what a greeting conveys but that most of us miss. Prayer is the unmade bed and the being-made love of the lives we are co-creating this day with God. Prayer is listening to the bigger world and for the surprising stories in the presence of God. And prayer is a yearning, the honest hope that we are being listened to which makes prayer an interaction, an interplay of life, an exchange of love.

The interview can be found here on the On Being website.