Everyday Portals of Poetry & Prayer

welcome to our new series!

Oct 28, 2024

Friends,

October is coming to an end, and as we head into November, I’m wondering how we are going to enter into it.

While leading a session at the retreat in Northern Ireland, we talked (and sang) about the idea of a doorway, a portal, that when we choose to gather together, whether physically or from far in spaces like this, we are intentionally entering through a doorway. We are declaring that it matters how we hold space with and for one another.

I know things are heavy right now.

Let me say it again:

I know things are heavy right now.

Take a deep breath. Cry and grieve. Weep and wail. Laugh to get it all out sometimes. Take a nap or two. Ask people to please vote. Pray for a world of peace. Tell someone you love them. Tell yourself that you’re loved, and buy some flowers to prove it. Test the love of God, the Sacred, the Great Mystery, and find that at the end of the day, the answer is yes, you are dearly, dearly loved.

I’ve gone back and forth, asking whether I should write a new series right now, with the election coming up, with so many things going on individually and collectively. But then I thought about why I write.

I write to remind us to keep going. I write so that we can heal. I write so we can ask questions together about this thing called life.

So, I want to hold space for words, for poetry, for ideas to emerge and change and take us on a journey.

And I want to explore three things as we do it:

portals

poetry

and prayer.

I ask that you hold space with me here, in this, and remember that portals are expansive, poetry is expansive, and prayer is expansive.

It’s no secret that I bring my own religious trauma into this space, as many of us do. So we hold ourselves tenderly as we ask how our world expands. I can’t wait to do that with you, no matter who becomes the next president of the United States, no matter what’s happening here or around the world.

In all of our humanness, we ask how the everyday portals of poetry and prayer show themselves to us, and when possible, we choose to walk through.

Below are the five parts that we will be exploring together in the coming weeks:

Portals of Childlike Prayer
Are we harmed by prayer or by institutions?
Who are we praying to now?
The comfort of prayer (global prayer)
How prayer brings us home to ourselves and each other

So today, let’s think about the Portals of Childlike Prayer.

One of my favorite Sara Groves songs is called “Maybe There’s a Loving God” about a young girl who doesn’t seem to fit the mold of her family, society, or religion, and finds herself again and again splayed out in the backyard staring up at the sky, pondering the universe and if/how much she is loved.

I don’t listen to a lot of “Christian” music anymore, but this song has always been a tenderly beautiful one for me, a reminder that we can show up to The Sacred in the unique and beautiful ways that we need to, even if our families, communities, or society doesn’t understand.

My favorite lines from the song:

Maybe I was made this way
To think and to reason and to question and to pray
And I have never prayed a lot
But maybe there's a loving God

Maybe this was made for me
For lying on my back in the middle of a field
Maybe that's a selfish thought
Or maybe there's a loving God

This young person thinks they haven’t ever really prayed, and as I sing the song, I want to grab and hold them tightly, and tell them that all of it was prayer, the entire time.

There are portals of prayer all around us, and approaching prayer with childlikeness is one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves and the world around us. As many great mystics of our time approach prayer, we approach it with curiosity, tenderness, and care, with surrender.

Think back—what was prayer like for you as a child, and what shaped your ideas of prayer?

I grew up Southern Baptist, so prayer was strict and mandatory, and left me feeling like I was constantly failing if I didn’t want to pray a certain way, for long enough, or with enough conviction.

So, like much of my spiritual evolution, I am trying to experience prayer as expansive, from the ways I write about prayer in my first book, Glory Happening, like this:

I have discovered you, and I am discovering you.

In the watchful hours of the night, I watch my little one

and you watch me.

In the bright light hours of day, we play, all of us,

and work and toil, back into the waxing moon’s shadow.

And there we quiet down again.

And there we are discovered,

and there we discover.

And later, to the way I write about prayer in Living Resistance, that we breathe in and out prayer all the time, and it is our resistance to a heavy and hurting world.

So, maybe we should lie on our backs in the middle of a field more often than we do.

Maybe we should stop and recognize that tending a garden, writing in a journal, slowly sipping coffee, laughing with our friends, marveling at a spider’s web, are all embodiments of prayer, all portals to the divine.

And if that is prayer, maybe everything is prayer, and the childlike curiosity in us can open up our hearts and accept that.