How I Pray

Like this...

This is my response to Celeste Yacoboni’s beautiful project in which she asked a range of folks from well-known teachers to ordinary mystics about they pray.

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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.