As We Wait to Pray
Someone asks for a volunteer to pray. We all look at our Zoom screens (we still don’t know how to avoid eye contact in this new medium). There is silence. Finally I volunteer. This is not something I like to do, and I rarely volunteer to pray, but in this month I chose to think and write about prayer and so it only seems right that I volunteer, if only for the exploration of it.
We all prepare ourselves in all the ways that we have learned. We bow our heads, fold our hands, close our eyes, let the muscles in our neck and back go slack (we have not learned what it means to pray to a computer screen — where do we look? And I want so much to peek, to know what others are doing, but then there is the chance that I will catch someone’s eye and both of us will be caught looking).
I take a breath and let it out. And there is more in that breath and in the silence that follows than I will be able to say in words. There is all the fear and the doubt; about the prayer itself — will it be good enough, have the right words, reach the right people? Will it be honest? Will it dig past the easy desires and into those harder things which we don’t immediately want but know we need? Could it go beyond that even, to voice the things that we do not know we need? Will it speak to the desires of others here with all their complicated politics and quirks and their own skepticisms of prayer, and somehow comfort them, challenge them?
In that short silence there is also the world around me, here in this room. I hear the air, the low drone of it blowing through the vents, a clock ticking (do we even have a clock?), the computer fan blowing softly, the shuffling of others through the speakers, cars driving by in the dark outside. And I know that there is more I might be able to hear if the silence went on and on. There might be an unending amount to discover there.
In that silence there is waiting and tension. Everyone waits for me to speak (though in that silence I don’t see any of their faces on the screen, don’t see their waiting, only feel it.) I am highly aware of this waiting and it urges me to begin with the words. But some confidence in me wins out and I let the silence sit a little longer. If I wait too long they will begin to wonder whether there has been some sort of technical glitch. How long until they raise their heads to look and see if I have started to pray on mute? They will peek up and see that I am silent. They will begin to wonder whether there was some miscommunication. They will wonder whether someone else is supposed to be starting? How long until they begin to cough? How long until someone speaks up, to check what’s going on? How long would the silence have to hold for us all to actually find ourselves in the world, or to lose ourselves from the world, to accept the silence? It seems that the words should never start until that happens.
But I am not this brave and so I let it sit only for the briefest of seconds, which still has allowed me a kind of depth I didn’t expect. And then I begin to use words. The words are easy. I have heard them all before. I know the music of the words of the prayer of this tradition I grew up in, when to pause, when to emphasize a syllable, when to give thanks and when to ask for help. I hear myself invoke God, “father in heaven,” this way I always start prayers, because one time I decided I liked the way it sounded. But as I say it I wonder about whether Jesus will listen too, or the Holy Spirit, who I need right now to bring this prayer many miles through the air or be translated into ones and zeros, whichever is the preferred way to reach all the participants on the other ends of the computer.
I don’t think about the words as I say them, they just come out. That is not to say that it feels mystical to me or like the words are being drawn out of me by something beyond me. More the opposite. The words mean nothing. I could say almost anything. It is history that allows the words to come easily. I have said it all before, heard it all before. Thank you for these things, help us with our work, guide us as we go. Some variation. The words fill the silence for all of us and everyone is comfortable and nothing is different when I end with the standard Amen.
But still there was that silence, which hangs around still, en echo, if there could be such a thing for silence. There are some who say that there is really no such thing as silence, that if we could remove all the layers of sound us, first the obvious noise like the traffic and the computer fan, and then the quieter sounds like the buzz of the electric lines and rustling of the trees outside, there would still be the noise of your own body and underneath that there is the constant churning of the earth, the movement of matter and earth.
I always thought that prayer was a thing made of words. Mostly they are said out loud. Occasionally we do ‘silent prayer’ in which we compose words in our heads. But I think prayer has more to do with silence, which is actually just the movement of the world underneath our feet which we are usually too busy to attend to. And maybe sometimes we do need words, even blank words said over and over again, which said enough times become a different kind of silence, another kind of hum of the world. Is everything prayer? Or is prayer just what happens in the time between when we think we are praying and when we think we are not?
