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July 23, 2021Lately I’ve been praying with the app Lectio 365, from the people who brought us The Prayer Course. It’s really good, and I always find some inspiring nugget in the prayers, but I start out with each one doing it a bit wrong.
One of the first things the narrator says every morning is this:
“As I enter prayer now, I pause to be still; to breathe slowly; to re-center my scattered senses upon the presence of God.”
Stillness doesn’t come naturally to me, and it’s a struggle to follow those simple instructions every morning. In fact this year, I’ve been working on stillness and contemplation, and… it has not gone well.
Last weekend if you were here for the 8:30 Mass at St. James you might have heard the mockingbirds screaming all morning, at a hawk who had settled on one of the chimneys of the old St. James school building. We who were greeting people in the parking lot that morning marveled at how the birds would scream, fly at, bump into, and harass the hawk… but the hawk was unperturbed. It was an amazing thing to see. Tom, our wonderful parking lot volunteer, gazed up at the whole thing and sighed. “Be the hawk,” he said, like a sage wisdom source. We all nodded and said “beee the hawwwwk.”
But if I’m honest, in prayer, I’m more like the mockingbird; wiggly, annoying, and noisy. But after all this time trying to be contemplative, I’m starting to give myself a break. I pray now when I’m ironing, or walking, or showering, or what-have-you. As lovely as stillness sounds, I don’t think God requires it of me; God knows me, and loves my whole fidgety self.
Thank you for your prayer for me, for Fr. Murray and Steven, for our whole parish. Join us in praying for the healing of the broken and broken-hearted, for the new neighbors moving into our city, for our longtime parishioners, for our Alpha participants, our wedding couples, our newly baptized babies and their families, for those in need in our city and beyond. There’s so much to pray for at MQOA, and your prayers matter here, whether they are prayed in a chapel or over a kitchen sink.
