I Say a Little Prayer

Recently, I have felt a bit like a spool of thread being unraveled. Everything I read and hear in the new seems to fill me with a sense of dread and an anger so sharp I can almost taste it. I can feel my thread loosening and escaping so that I can’t sense the end anymore and I’m not quite in control. It’s blowing in the wind, it catches on a corner, it pulls me in different directions.

When I try and re-spool it all, it doesn’t quite all fit back the way it was. It’s lumpy and a little uncomfortable, never as neat and as even as it started. Always quicker and easier to start coming undone.

A few things help manage this feeling.

One is simply acknowledging it and taking deep breaths.

Another is writing about what is troubling me.

Another is prayer.

Specifically praying for that which has brought up this uncertainty and fear in me. Or, more accurately, the person or persons, linked with the dark and scary things.

It has become so easy to savor my anger, to let it morph into disdain, to allow it to dehumanize those with whom I am angry.

So, I pray.

Below is an illustration of some of my prayer recently.

I’ll use the person who stole the “Black Lives Matter” sign from the front of my house as my subject. This seems like both a sufficiently concrete and yet vague example.

I start by praying for the person (it could have been more than one person for all I know but for my purposes I have been imagining an individual) who took the sign.

“God, be with them. As the rains start in Camp Meeker, keep them warm. Let them know they are loved. Bring them joy.”

Sometimes I choke a bit at the beginning because often, what I want to say is “Show that jerk what a jerk they are! Make their jerk selves know how petty and racist and jerky they are and make them stop being such bullies!”

The thing is, all that particular kind of prayer does for me is fuel my own self-righteous indignation. In the end, I am not more loving or compassionate.

So, I try hard not to go there. At least not all the time.

Next, “I assume they took the sign because it was so offensive to them they couldn’t even have it displayed in their neighborhood. And, perhaps, they were hoping to communicate to me how backwards they think I am. Soften their heart, God. Bring a new understanding to them. One of compassion, and generosity.”

This is all fine and good and safe.

I’ve tried to be respectful and nonjudgmental – even though, who am I kidding? God’s probably rolling God’s big, all knowing eyes at me.

So yeah, maybe what I really want to pray is something more like, “God, could you please just show them how wrong they are? Send them back to my house to apologize for being so wrong and for being such a jerk. Then I can be all forgiving AND right, which is really just the BEST!”

Friends, all of this is practice. I am trying. I am learning.

The last part is by far the hardest.

Finally, in my mind’s meekest voice, “God, be with me. Help me to know that I am loved. Help me to be more joyful. Make me more loving, more compassionate. Help me to see you in the people I disagree with, to respect and care for their humanity. Make me more generous towards them. Forgive me for being quick to judge and to dismiss, for basking in anger and fear. Take the burden – and the satisfaction – of this anger and fear from me.”

This is the hardest because it makes me vulnerable. It asks that I be changed, that I be made better. It is humbling when I would prefer to be righteous, it forces my hands and heart to be open when I would prefer to stay closed and guarded. It acknowledges my humanity and that of my “enemy” when I would rather just keep seeing them as other and less than.

This. This is what begins to smooth my edges, what puts me back together when I am frayed and knotted.

It’s not that our differences do not matter. They do. Very much. It’s that they do not matter to the point of not seeing one another’s dignity, of not seeing the Divine reflected in them.