On Prayer

The impossibility of this modern life is to hold onto it. The days just seem to fly. I had started this blog in the hopes of a daily journal as I prepared for Taizé. But in the midst of my plans, life happened. Now I am just 8 days from leaving, and I have barely started.

Since my last post, I have been appointed to a new church, and had to pack up and move in a very short period of time. I had a good long relaxing vacation in the midst of it, though. I had the profound experience of companioning a family as they sat through heart surgery on their 16 month old daughter. And I have been praying.

I have a lovely picture in my head of what prayer for a pastor should look like. I should rise up early, enter the sanctuary in those cool moments before the sun has taken possession of the day. The light would filter through the windows, catching the dust motes (just a few!) and pulling me to the altar rail. There I would lose myself in communion with God, kneeling for an hour that would seem just a minute.

I have not seen this new church's sanctuary at dawn; I scarcely saw the previous one at that time either. In both of them it is not quite so picturesque as they both suffer from a worn out rug. Even if I did make it in, the dust motes would distract me into thinking about the work to be done.

Instead, prayer happens in my car as I am crawling through Brooklyn, it happens before meals or in the shower, during worship or after it, at the side of a casket at my first funeral in my new appointment, and in various rooms in a hospital with a young family. Wherever I am, God is there. Waiting for me to converse, to dialogue. To talk and to listen. It doesn't happen as often as either God or I would like it to happen, but it happens just the way it can right now. I worry about getting it right. I think God simply looks for it to happen.