The Monkfish Reader
( 1 )
Mirabai Starr
How I pray: like this. I am praying right now. Writing, for me, is prayer. Dipping deep into the wellspring of my own secret heart, reaching and pausing and listening for the voice of the mystery and inviting it to speak through me, stringing together luminous words in hopes of offering something of beauty. Before I write, I light a candle and invoke the saints and prophets, the angels and ancestors, and the great limitless emptiness that is plenitude. In this way, writing writes me, and prayer prays me.
I remember in the mid-1970s, when I was around sixteen and living on my own in northern California, a friend took me to the Bay Area to meet Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a rabbi he had begun studying with. Although I was born Jewish, my family had traded in organized religion for a more organic version of spirituality, and I was suspicious of the God of my ancestors. A small group had coalesced around this man, Reb Zalman, and the ecstatic, inclusive quality of his teachings. I spent the weekend in their company. There was a lot of talk about prayer and a lot of praying in Hebrew, English, even Arabic. I hung back and watched, listened, trying to maintain my skepticism, yet magnetically drawn to the deep quiet I sensed at the heart of all the poetic words and haunting melodies.
On the last night, as I lay in my sleeping bag, I decided to try it. “Um, God?” I whispered. “I don’t know how to do this. Could you please show me?” The response was instantaneous. A state of prayer flooded my being like morning light through flung-open curtains. There was no personified being standing at the foot of my bed poised for conversation. All forms fell away, language melted, concepts dissolved, and I became prayer. “Oh,” I said. “Just this.”
So there is something about stepping lightly aside and allowing the grace of the present moment to fill the empty cup of the heart. This happens when I write about the teachings of the mystics and when I’m chopping vegetables and sliding them into a hot wok. It can happen when I sit on my black cushion in the mornings and count my breaths and when I’m kissing the tear-streaked face of a child. This is prayer. It is non-dual and yet deeply devotional. It is the momentary merging of the lover that I am into the Beloved that God is, so that all that is left is love.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
… People say to me sometimes, “How come my prayer isn’t being answered?” and I tell them, “You hang up the phone too soon.” It’s necessary to sit for a while and to get the action directive, the marching orders for the day.
The best times for prayer are the twilight times, dawn and dusk, because we have the consciousness of day and night. The left brain and right brain are still meeting together in the heart, and that’s a very, very good prayer time. Then we have the prayers that are in the middle of the day, that are rushed between one appointment and the other, and those are the quick arrow prayers that say, “Here, God, I’m busy with all these things; please help me.”
Find a place where you don’t feel that you have to worry about being overheard, and speak so that your ear can hear. If you sit there, and you begin to concentrate on the You, You, You, You, and you begin to speak about what’s real—even just to say, “You, I feel so foolish talking to You because I don’t see anybody here, and yet I know that I wouldn’t be here if You weren’t here, so I’m doing the best I can. I want to thank You for every breath that I can take. I want to thank You for my health”—that is beginning to pray.
Begin prayer with gratefulness, because that’s the easiest one. We have lots to be grateful for—the fact we can see with our eyes, and we can hear, and so on. After you begin with gratitude, then comes the other stuff, the concerns: “I want to share with you my concerns, dear God. These are the people I’m concerned about. A friend of mine had an operation today. I hope she heals well.” To be able to speak about concerns in this way—that will make the difference.
Piety is not just being nice. Piety is real. It’s the kind of intimacy that you want to have with someone whom you love.
I so appreciate having heard, once, Terry Gross interviewing the gay bishop of New Hampshire. And she asked him, “What’s your prayer life like these days?” And he said to her, “The best thing that I can do is just sit there and let God love me.” I was so moved by what he shared, I sent him a fan letter right away. Because that’s true—we all say, “God so loved the world, God loves me, Jesus loves me,” and so on, but we hardly ever sit down and let ourselves be loved. That’s become part of my practice, too.
***
Both excerpts are from:
How Do You Pray? Inspiring Responses from Religious Leaders, Spiritual Guides, Healers, Activists and Other Lovers of Humanity
Edited by Celeste Yacoboni, Monkfish 2014
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