PRAYER IS BREATH

Prayer is breath.

 

Prayer is the first breath.

It is how you are born each day,

the breath you take when you stretch

and yawn and blink away the eye-sand

left over from last night’s dreams.

 

Breath is promise.

It is commitment.

Yes, I will live today.

What is it Lord,

that You will have me

see today,

that You will have me

inhabit today,

what space have You

provided for me today,

 

whether it be sun

or whether it be rain,

whether the weather—

and sometimes we must

weather the weather—

when it greets us by lashing

out against the windows,

or hems us in with snow,

creeping up the glass,

each flake dancing

when it falls,

 

or whether it is the sun

itself, warming that same

glass, kissing the panes

with a twitch of butterfly wings,

or the thud of a bird,

who is confused

by its reflection,

and wants only to be

closer to beauty.

 

I wish I were so confused

whenever I looked in the mirror.

 

No matter the day,

I will breathe.

I will take in that breath

and hold it and remind myself

that breath is a gift,

perhaps the only gift

we both give and receive

day after day,

hour after hour,

minute after minute,

after second,

for all our lives,

because to breathe

is to live.

 

Oh, how simple it is to live.

 

Breath is how we communicate

when we don’t have words—

it is our first spoken language,

and the one that every mother

and every father immediately

recognizes from somewhere

deep inside of them—

 

Yes, yes, we spoke this language

once, in the cradle, in the stroller,

in our mother’s arms, in laughs,

and gurgles and the drool bubbles

that spilled from our mouths,

 

and in cries

when we were hungry,

when we were scared,

when we yearned for something,

and didn’t know what but wanted

someone to hold us while

we figured it out.

 

Haven’t we all cried for that

even now, long after we left

the crib and the stroller

and our mother’s arms,

haven’t we cried to be held

while we tried to figure it out,

while we tried to figure life out?

 

When I want to be held,

to feel God wrap Her arms

around me and if “her” makes

you pause then pause and sit

with it because God is more

than Father or Mother.

 

God exists beyond the words

we try and contain-constrain Her in.

 

God is not in these words.

 

Stop for second.

 

Look closely,

or listen carefully.

 

God is not in these words.

 

These words are in God

as you are in God.

 

Take a breath

and realize what it is

that you are breathing in.

 

We call it air.

We call it oxygen.

Sometimes we cough.

Sometimes we sneeze,

sometimes in early fall,

when the wind begins

to flow down from the north

like a tired river who has held

onto summer far too long,

 

we take a breath

and thank God

that the seasons do change,

that nothing lasts forever,

that what we need is

only right there, already

living in the next second,

waiting for us to get there.

 

When I need to be held,

when I need to feel God’s

arms wrapped around me,

 

what I am really saying

is that I need You, Lord,

to hold me still,

 

because life can be

so unsettling sometimes.

 

I am unsettled.

Whenever I walk,

the ground heaves

and pitches and tries

to throw me off.

 

Stop the world,

I want to get off,

someone once said—

apparently many someones

once said.

 

But I say, please God,

can You stop the world

from trying to throw

me off, because I am

here to stay.

 

And so whenever I want to

be held by God,

 

I allow the House Finch

to wake me up in the morning,

when it’s still dark,

when her voice is the only voice

and she is singing outside my window

as she builds her nest,

tends to her nest,

offering to her eggs,

a song I can only

define as love.

 

This is love

to the House Finch.

 

That she will sing

to her darling children,

who sit in darkness,

who cannot hear,

who cannot see,

whose hearts are only

just beginning to beat,

 

but they will know love

through her song

that reaches out to them

connects them, mother to child,

soul to soul for eternity.

 

The House Finch sings,

she breathes

and in that breath

is the spirit of God,

filling every living thing,

 

because sometimes we sit

in darkness and cannot see

and cannot hear anything

but the beat of our own hearts,

 

and then God begins to sing.

 

When I want to be held

by God, I take my camera

and I leave just after the House

Finch has finished her song

and I wander over around

the block to the corner

garden that sits across

from not one, but two churches.

 

One church sings with bells

on the quarter hour,

the half hour,

the whole hour

and I wonder if every

child who lives here,

and hears those bells,

somehow instinctively

knows how to tell time

and do fractions.

 

The other church sits quietly,

the garden sitting across it

on their north side.

 

The side perpetually in shadow

is the side that shows

the most life and abundance

of life, in the pollinators

that swoop in during late

summer and feast on color

and the sweet perfume

of creation.

 

But when I want to be held

by God,

 

I go to the garden.

 

It’s where it all began

and not so closed off

to us as we may think.

 

I go to the garden,

with the sun only

just barely stretching

a fingernail over

the horizon,

 

when there is fog,

when there are low clouds,

when the hawk keens

unseen from deep among

leaves of the massive oak

which shrouds the block,

 

I go to the garden

and look for the bees.

 

Some may be stirring,

those blessed bumblebees,

black and yellow furred,

if you are careful and have

the right flash and the right

lens, you can freeze one in

time and see those angel

wings, those silvery slivers

seemingly created out of nothing

but air and God’s will.

 

But I am not looking

for the flyers,

 

I am looking for the late

sleepers,

 

the ones who have ignored

the alarm clock—

oh it is too cold this morning,

I want to snuggle under

the covers—this is what the bees

do, dig themselves deeper into

the pollen, pull flower petals

over their legs and grow

still again as they sleep

for one more minute, Lord, please.

 

There are times as I walk around

in these early morning hours that

I find I am unable to breathe.

 

The things that take our breath away.

Sudden pain.

Hurt.

Sorrow.

 

But also wonder

and awe

and the feeling

that you are so very small.

 

When I lock eyes with a fawn,

still speckled white,

and eating the leaves

from fallen trees

from last night’s storm,

 

when I see her

and she sees me,

I hold my breath

because I know

that something as small

as my breath can shatter

this moment and I want

this moment to do

the impossible and last

forever, because it’s not

just the deer and me,

standing there.

 

God is there, too,

the great and holy

choreographer,

who maps the dance

of all life.

 

My life.

Your life.

 

When was the last time

you held your breath

in wonder,

 

and let it out again,

conceding that life

is more than just receiving,

right?  It is giving back, too.

 

This is how I communicate

with God, by offering my breath,

by accepting His breath of Life,

that like the water of life

and the bread of life,

is the only thing that

can keep us fulfilled

in this life.

 

This is how I pray.

Through breath.

 

This too is how I pray,

through words,

through poetry,

because all poetry

is prayer.

 

Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

IT'S OKAY TO BOTHER JESUS

Monday morning, I had an appointment with the dentist to put on my permanent crown.  The appointment was for 8 am and because of the distance I had to travel during rush hour traffic, I left early and got to the dentist at 7:40.  I checked in and sat down with a book.  I admit to being a little tense.  I had asked several friends to pray for me.  The tooth that was getting this new crown was very fragile.

Several times, I put down my book and looked up at the large screen TV they had on the wall.  It showed one scene, a mountain scene with a flowing stream.  I wondered if anything else happened or if it was just the same mountain stream flowing endlessly.

It was hypnotic which was probably the point.

Other people came and checked in for their appointments—they were quickly called back.  My appointment time came and went.  I looked at my watch at 8:08 wondering why they were running behind.  Normally they are right on time.  8:15 came along and I thought okay I’ll give them to 8:30 and then I’ll go up and ask them.

At 8:20, my phone rang.  It was the dentist office asking if I planned on coming to my appointment.

Now, I’m going to pause there because if this story sounds familiar to you, there’s a reason for that. 

This is not the first time this has happened to me.  It’s not even the first time it’s happened at the dentist office, though the last time it was a different dentist.

I explained to the woman that I was in fact sitting in their lobby, that I had checked in at 7:40.

If you’re thinking this added to my anxiety or made me cranky—it didn’t.  I was actually laughing about it.  So they took me back and the young woman assigned to take care of my crown fitting, got to work in removing my temporary crown.

Bless her heart, she could not get that crown off.  The irony being that I was only there because my original crown had popped off and a piece of the tooth broke off, so I needed a new crown. 

So she called in another woman who really got into it, to the point where I was starting make some uncomfortable noises and she pulled back and asked me if I would like to be numbed.  “Yes,” I said, “if we’re going to keep doing it this way.  It will probably be easier on you if I’m numbed.”

So then I had to be numbed and back to work she went rocking that crown back and forth, trying to loosen it.  At this point I’m thinking the tooth is not that strong and it may be a race as to which fails first, the crown or the tooth.

Finally, they got the temporary crown off.

And I was laughing.  Because if you know me, you know how much I love a good story.

Every week here at Morning Prayer, we take time for intercessory prayer.  We take time to offer up ourselves, our friends, our families, anyone we love to God in prayer.  But in doing so, we often find ourselves praying for strangers.  And what a beautiful thing that is to pray for strangers, what an amazing act of love to pray for someone not because they mean something to us, not because they mean something to someone else, but to pray for them with a Godly love because we know we are all children of God.

Years ago, at a friend’s church, I met a woman who liked putting puzzles together so much, she turned it into a contemplative activity.  As she put the puzzle together, she would pray for a certain individual.  And when she was done, she would preserve the finished project and frame it and give it to the person she had prayed for when she was making it.

She did that for me, someone she barely knew.

For however long it took her to put that puzzle together, an hour, two hours more, she thought about me.  She lifted me up to God.  For all those minutes, all those hours, she released my name into the cosmos and left God a very long voicemail about me. 

I did not know she was doing this, until after the fact.

And that’s how it generally works for me.  I don’t know that someone has prayed for me until after they have done so.

I’ve told the story before about my priest friend who told me one morning that she had prayed for me for a whole mile on the way to work.

And I wondered to myself if that was a “school-zone” mile or a “highway” mile because one of those means she was praying for me for considerably longer than the other.

But here is something I was thinking about the other day in regards to intercessory prayer—I have asked you here at Morning Prayer to pray for people who have no idea that they are being prayed for. 

Think about that for a second because I am willing to bet (and I don’t gamble) that everyone in this room, everyone reading or listening to these words, has been prayed for and not known.  They have been prayed for unaware.

Sit with that for a second.

Listen.

Listen with your heart, with your soul.  Do you hear it?  Someone has prayed for you.  Someone is praying for you.  Someone’s prayer for you when you were struggling through a rough period twenty years ago is still echoing through the universe.  It’s still good.  Prayers age well.  They don’t go bad, and a prayer said for you decades ago I promise is still working.

Monday morning, before I went to the dentist, I had texted several friends asking them to pray for me.  And you might say, “How did that prayer work out for you, Kendra?”

I mean, they took me back late—I had turned invisible apparently in the waiting room.  I will say that invisibility does seem to be my superpower.  When they finally got me back, they couldn’t the temporary crown off.  When they finally got it off, it took them about a dozen tries to get the new crown filed and polished down enough so that I could close my mouth properly.  At one point I told them, “Hey, with the way I grind my teeth at night, I’m sure I’ll have that crown filed down real quick.”

When they finally got the tooth in place, they sent me back to the woman I had checked in with at the reception desk earlier—the one who had forgotten me and she offered me a $10 gift card as an apology.  I didn’t need the gift card and in the end, I think I wound up taking it just to make her feel better.

And now that I’ve told you the whole story, let me ask you.  Were my friends’ prayers for me that morning ignored?  Were they unanswered?

I went to the dentist for a crown.  I spent the morning laughing and without being given nitrous oxide.  I got a story to tell.  And in that story was a message to give to you about intercessory prayers. 

And one more thought.  Please don’t ever be afraid to ask for prayers for yourself.  Please don’t ever think that your problems aren’t bad enough or serious enough compared to other people.  Look, our reading today was from Job.  He is the poster child for suffering.  But please don’t ever think that you shouldn’t bother God with your problems.

God wants to be bothered.

He wants to hear from you.

I was watching the comedian Kathleen Madigan the other day on Netflix.  She is an American comedian of Irish heritage who went to a Catholic school.

And she said that when she was a kid, she heard from her protestant friends how they all had a personal relationship with Jesus and when she questioned the nuns about this personal relationship with Jesus, they basically said, “Oh, no, don’t go bothering Jesus.  Here’s a list of who you should bother first.  First your guardian angel.  They are there for you.  Second, you can ask the saint who is in charge of your particular problem.  You can also go to Mary, Jesus’ mother and ask her to intercede on your behalf.  But don’t go bothering Jesus.”

And what I would say to you today is this.

It’s okay to bother Jesus.

That is my prayer for you.

Amen.

YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH JESUS

I was at Target the other morning (and if you think a good number of my Morning Prayer reflections seem to begin with a trip to Target—you are right—the life lessons a trip to Target provides).  I had a cart and a list and on that list was hand soap.  Found the aisle, found the shelves and there greeting me was empty shelf after empty shelf after empty shelf.

I stared at it for a minute.  Then I took a picture and sent it to a friend.  “Is there a pandemic going on that I’m not aware of?”

We all remember those first weeks of the Covid lockdown, when people everywhere suddenly realized that hand washing was important, and the shelves were empty.  My local Target brought all the bottled water and whatever Clorox wipes they had to the front of the store so that no one would fall and break their neck trying to outsprint their neighbors to the back of the store.

Those were crazy times.  Toilet paper shortages meant that bidet sales were suddenly through the roof.

As someone who lived in Florida for twenty-five years, I can tell you that the Covid shortages were not unlike the shortages we faced with hurricanes.

Scarcity happens when people are afraid and they hoard whatever they have.

This past Sunday, our gospel reading from Matthew told the story of the Canaanite woman who is desperate for Jesus to heal her daughter who is stricken with a demon. 

As Rev. Greg pointed out in his sermon, first Jesus ignores the woman, then He tells her He’s not there for her and then He says something which should make anyone who loves Jesus feel extremely uncomfortable.  He compares the woman to a dog saying it’s not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.

But the woman is persistent and tells Him that even the dogs are free to eat the crumbs that fall from the table.

At that, Jesus tells the woman He will help her.  “How great is your faith,” He says to her, and instantly her daughter is healed.  You see, when He ignored her, when He rebuffed her, He was purposely echoing what the woman had been told her whole life to set up the contrast with what He was offering.

Rev. Greg’s sermon made me think about scarcity in our world today.  How the idea that something is rare, or exclusive or scarce makes us want to hoard whatever we have and once we’ve done that, race into the world to gather up what we don’t have out of fear of missing out.

We are driven and manipulated by the idea of scarcity.

In today’s reading from John, we see Jesus feeding the five thousand.  Now, people generally view this story in one of two ways.  Either Jesus supernaturally created the food to feed the crowd, or people were motivated to put whatever they had with them in the baskets, and their goodwill and generosity is what fed the people.

I can tell you I am in the camp of this being a supernatural miracle.

But in the end, whatever you believe, the message turns out to be the same.

With Jesus there is abundance.  In John 10:10, Jesus says, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

There is no scarcity with Jesus.

There is no reason to fear, no reason to hoard.  God provides and He provides it abundantly.

With the Canaanite woman, why would Jesus ever withhold His love and grace and healing from anyone?  He’s never going to run out of miracles.  He doesn’t have a limit.  There are no bounced checks with Jesus.  Jesus is the one who pays our debts.  He doesn’t go into debt.

He is the one in Ephesians 3:20 who can provide us with more than we can ever ask for or even imagine.

I keep thinking about my old church, when I made the decision to attend both Sunday services, but asked the pastor if it was okay to get communion twice and her response was, “You can never have too much Jesus.”

She said it again some years later, when a little boy loved the communion bread we used on Christmas Eve so much that he came back around so he could get seconds.

“You can never have too much Jesus,” Pastor Debbie said.

Jesus is abundance.

The first can be made last and the last made first because in the end everyone eats.

The shelves at Target the other day weren’t completely empty.  There were two bottles left.  I needed one, so I took one.  I left the other one there. 

Where in your life can you see God’s abundance?

Where in your life have you been tricked into believing in scarcity?

How might you live your life abundantly in the love of Jesus today?

Amen.

 

TRY NOT TO SNEEZE ON THE ELEVATOR

The other day, I was in the elevator when I noticed a woman hurrying to catch it just as the doors were beginning to close.  Quickly, I hit the open doors button and the woman squeezed in just in time.  She immediately turned to face the door and put her face into her elbow.

“Oh, you’re going to regret that,” she said to me, “because I’m about to sneeze.”

Yesterday I was working on updating the cover to my book Prayers in the Pandemic which I wrote during 2020, during lockdowns and quarantines, during mask-wearing and one-way aisles in the grocery store.  I wrote a prayer a day for many days and posted them on Facebook, hoping they might provide some comfort.

It’s been six years, but Covid and what happened in 2020 have changed our lives forever.  Not just in the self-checkout lanes that are ubiquitous now in every grocery store, not just in our children being attached to a screen everywhere from home to school and everywhere in between. 

Covid changed how we communicate with each other, in good ways and in bad.  In those early days of the lockdown, I shared a virtual lunch with a friend as she and I Facetimed each other and ate our lunches in front of each other.  At church, we took advantage of the beautiful Florida weather and gathered outside for Morning Prayer.  Every Tuesday, I met a friend of mine at her church, and we walked her church’s prayer labyrinth and prayed.  Somedays, I gathered with friends in the front yard of our former pastor’s house for fellowship, for communion, for reminders that God was indeed present everywhere.

But the truth is that Covid enabled the digital world to become the primary method of communication in the world.  Younger generations now date less, hang out with friends less.  They are content to just message each other on their phones.  There’s a certain safety there.

On Monday, I received my very first iron infusion.  It was not a private room.  And shortly after they brought me back and started to get me hooked up, they brought another woman, an older woman back for her infusion.  I don’t know what she was there for.  I’m always hesitant to ask in those situations because your health information should be private.  You shouldn’t feel like you need to share that.

We didn’t speak to each other at first, even after the nurses left us and the only reason we wound up speaking at all was because when the nurse came in to hook me up to my bag of iron, the bag of iron looked like blood.  It looked like I was getting a blood transfusion and so I commented to the nurse about that and when he left, the other patient spoke up commenting on my blood-colored medicine.  And so I wound up sharing a bit of my story.

Since it was my first infusion, she gave me some tips—she told me not to be afraid to tell them you needed to use the restroom.  And I was a little afraid because the way you communicated that you needed help with something was to ring a little bell they gave you, like I was some kind of Downton Abbey dowager summoning the servants.

In today’s reading, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at the well.  It’s a story we are all probably familiar with.  Jesus asks the woman for some water.  She comments on how their two people are not on exactly water-getting terms.  Jesus mentions the living water he can give her.  The woman totally misses the point and scoffs telling Him, “You don’t even have a bucket.”

Here is the interesting thing about the gospels.  Virtually every story is an encounter story.  We see little of Jesus’ interior life, His thoughts, His hopes, His doubts.  We see a little bit of it at Gethsemane.  We are told sometimes that Jesus went off by Himself to pray.  I call Jesus the extroverted introvert.  He loves people, but He needs time to recharge alone.  But most of what happens with Jesus happens in conversation. 

And it’s why His words on the cross, “My God, my God why have You forsaken me?” are so devastating.  He is, in the end, alone, but that’s a sermon for another day given by someone far more knowledgeable about the context and the meaning of those words.

But today’s reading is about encounter.  And it only happens because the Samaritan woman is at the well at the wrong time.  She is there in the heat of the day.  It’s the worst possible time to go get water.  But she chooses that time because she hopes she will be alone.  She is a pariah because of her fluid relationships with men.  And she’s tired of it.  She’s tired of the judgement and gossip and the hate.

So she comes to the well to get water and instead finds there is a Jewish man already there waiting for her.

She might have turned around, but she needed the water.

She did not need conversation, but Jesus spoke anyway.

And note this—He didn’t start by declaring Himself the Messiah and sermonizing.

He began with small talk.  “Could I have some water?”

And that small talk opened a door so wide, that the Samaritan woman abandoned her water, and ran off back to town, back to the people who ridiculed her and became an evangelist.

I personally am horrible at small talk.  When I would visit people in the hospital as a chaplain.  I knew I couldn’t just walk into a stranger’s room and lead with, “So, what shall we pray for today?”  I knew I needed to make small talk, ask them why they were there, who was there with them, who they had at home, what kind of community they could expect to help them. 

It was not easy for me.  My first question was “What brought you to the hospital,” and after multiple people answered with a grin, “the ambulance,” I reworded that question.

It is not necessary for us to have a spiritual epiphany with every stranger we meet on the elevator, but I do think that engaging with people, encountering people in their moment, can open the doors where spiritual epiphanies can happen, not just for the strangers we speak to but for us.  I can’t tell you the number of times God has appeared to me as a stranger.

So this reflection this morning is one for me too.  I’m asking you to do something, but I’m reminding myself that I need to do it more, to engage more, to not be afraid to share the same breath with people even if they have just walked into your elevator and sneezed.

Amen.