A Lenten Reflection ~ 33

3/29/20 NOTE: I am doubling down on this breath theme (i.e. after yesterday’s post. CLICK “<– Previous” above.

There is no season, whether in nature, the liturgical cycle, or the human adventure, which does not know or need the practice and presence of prayer. Yet Lent, in particular, has been a time when prayer has been especially emphasized. In this season it is encouraged as one leg of the tripod of spiritual practices along with fasting and care for those in great need. So, I offer a few thoughts on prayer

Thomas Merton whose life was guided by the monastic rhythm of ora et labora (prayer and work) almost singlehandedly retrieved in our time the contemplative way of life as an anchoring and vivifying expression within the Christian tradition. In so doing he helped persons of interest to understand that prayer was more than merely saying prayers or talking to God. Over time, as he continued to experience ongoing transformation Merton discovered insights that exposed and debunked his own prejudices and presumptions, traces of spiritual elitism or separateness. As a result, toward the end of his life (he was only 57 when he died in a freak accident by electrocution) he did his best to divest persons of their tendency to pedestalize professional religious — priests, nuns, monks — as if the spiritual life were something for a chosen few rarified souls.

For Merton, whose own Christian contemplative path resonated with the profound simplicity of Zen, spirituality was neither some life of theological abstraction nor of pretentious piety for religious sophisticates. Rather, he came to see it as the ongoing awareness and response to the radiance of the natural world, the “divinity of what just is,” the unadorned beauty of the simple act, the small but reverent gesture, the Christic mystery of the seemingly mundane: rain on the roof, fire in the hearth, the night cry of the coyote, the still lake at prayer, the shadows the sun made with the tree outside his hermitage.

Among the many sentences Merton wrote on prayer, one of the most memorable is found in an essay titled “Day of the Stranger.” He wrote it in 1965 soon after moving from the monastic community to his hermitage in the forest. It was written in response to a letter from an inquirer in Latin America who asked the monk-now-hermit how he spent his day. Merton’s essay showed his maturity, wit, and wisdom: The sentence noted above is simply this: “How I pray is breathe.” Here is the full paragraph:

This is not a hermitage, it is a house. (“Who was that hermitage I seen you with last night?”) What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. Who said Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going by, shoot it. Who said “Love?” Love is in the movies. The spiritual life is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it.1

The wind comes through the trees and we breathe. To breathe is to be alive. It is both natural and necessary for human life. Breathing can be conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary. The cessation of breathing is one of the signs of death. While all living human beings breathe, not all human beings know or believe that each breath, each inhalation and exhalation is a prayer. As we know, the word for Spirit in many languages also means breath, air, wind (Latin spiritus, Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma, and Sanskrit prana). The resting respiratory rate for a healthy adult is approximately 16 times a minute, about 960 breaths an hour, and around 23,000 times a day. That’s a lot of praying.

God is as near as our breath. To be a person of faith is to know that to breathe is to pray and to pray is to be the host of the Divine guest, to welcome and bid farewell again and again to the Breath of Life who animates and sustains us throughout the day. To pray is to know that our very existence is dependent upon the enlivening Spirit who flows in and through our bodied-being. Rather than something we do, or something we do under our own power by ourselves, prayer is the immediate and ongoing divine-human conspiracy (com– with + spirare – to breathe). From the human side, to pray is to become aware of the physical and spiritual reality of being alive with the aliveness of God. Prayer then is, firstly, the receptive and attentive cooperation with the Spirit who circulates within us as the gratuity of divine aliveness and the conscious awe of just that.

Secondly, it is to make a practice of being grateful for being a conduit in and through whom the breath of life flows from Source out into the world. Every authentic pray-er is a channel of divine life.

Thirdly, as we extend the metaphor, prayer is the full, conscious, and active participation in whatever truly and responsibly enlivens us or others for the common good and therefore to the glory of God. Yes, prayer is “forgetting ourselves on purpose” and sitting still in the morning before starting the day or at the end of the day before going to bed in the silent presence of the One in whom we live and move and have our breath and being. And then saying thank you for the unfathomable gratuity of living and the opportunity to serve, to sing, to praise.

But prayer is also the man at the park who sits Spring mornings when the cherry blossoms are in bloom and beholds and delights. Just that. Prayer is the mother who packs yet one or two or three more lunches for her children before she drops them off at school and heads to work. Prayer is the teenager who gives the elderly woman his chair in the waiting room outside the doctor’s office. Just that. And the high school teacher who writes one more college recommendation, and the friend who sends a “just because” card through the snail mail, and the grandmother who marches for the sake of justice or the grandfather who writes letters to his Congresswoman to do what she can to insure the earth is thriving seven generations hence. Just that. Prayer is pausing before a meal to re-member ourselves to those who are starving in a world of plenty, and to those whose labor has brought this food to our home and to our plates, and all of them to God. Prayer is making room for the stranger or the lonely or the recently widowed at our table. Prayer is participating in the liturgy of life which is being celebrated all around us if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear, the hands to share or feed or hold, the tongues to taste and savor, and the lungs to breathe. Just that: to breathe with the Spirit and dare to be anonymous saints who make a sacrament of doing little things with love, with kindness, with mercy, with delight, with compassion; to conspire with God for the sake of life and the manifestation of God’s dream for all the earth.

PRACTICE:
While Breathing In: “Your Spirit . . .
While Breathing Out: . . . moving through me.”

NOTES
1 Thomas Merton, “Day of the Stranger”