Choosing To Pray Without Worrying About the Form

{Photo by Catherine Ekkelboom-White for Scopio}

For many, it has been a hard week. We all must seek deep solace now and for a while to come, and I’m thinking about this most important quest. For my part, I am finding solace in several things—friendship (human and non-human), nature, fiction, late-70s disco, art-making, singer-songwriter tunes, rest. But I’m also finding solace in my tradition. In the stories and scope and prayers that came to us across the eons as people faced precarity and domination in their own lives. So my ears perked up when a columnist I especially like, Tressie McMillan Cottom, who writes for the New York Times, said this on a podcast the day after the election: “[T]his was a moment when people needed church and unfortunately, you know, enough of them don't go to church. They were just looking for, like, some secular … preaching.” (From “What Now with Trevor Noah”, November 6, 2024).

In times of struggle, sometimes we can use a little church. Or synagogue, or mosque, or ashram, or (fill in the blank).

Essentially, we need venues that help us lift our heads and get our minds off of ourselves, onto something much larger and more lasting than our problems—even when our problems are national and geopolitical in scale. More pointedly, we need God—even if one prefers calling the transcendent by a different name. “Something much bigger than us” is the important thing; and the contours of that something are less important, in my view. Some might be surprised to hear me, an ordained clergy person, say that the specifics of that something matter little. But I wholeheartedly believe that.

This past week, I also heard my favorite novelist (or one of a handful of favorites) wax theological, saying essentially the same thing as I said above, but more eloquently. Describing a conversation with a professor at Sarah Lawrence, where she attended as an undergrad, Ann Patchett said:

“I told him my problems, and he said, if you're going looking for something as big as God, just go where you're comfortable. Go with what you know. Doesn't make any difference. You're not going to pick a better religion. You're not going to pick a better set of words. It's not about the words. It's not about the religion. Don't waste your time picking out your luggage. Just go on the trip.”

I am choosing to “go on the trip” even when I have no idea what I’m saying in mass or why, even when I feel like a gasping fish-out-of-religious-water, even when my discomfort with the creed or hierarchy or human bumbling make me want to run, even when I have an off day at church. I do it because I want to be tethered to something older and more solid than the weekly news cycle or the latest outcome of elections. Thanks to algorithms, everything in modern life feels like bluster, feels blustery. And to hold steady, I need the ballast that only a very old religion seems to give me. That’s true even when I find it hard. I want so much to be on the trip that I will not waste my time trying out every piece of luggage on the rack—or more challenging, carrying all that I need with no luggage at all.

This week I happened upon an artist whose song “Plowshare Prayer” is lending a little solace as I listen to it again and again. In Isaiah 2:4, we read: “And [Adonai] shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” The passage tells of a time when the powers of domination will be done and the people will turn from cursing and fighting one another to growing food together. They will beat their swords into plowshares. As I hear it, Spencer LaJoye’s “Plowshare Prayer” song is many things. A blessing, a beseeching, a call to empathy for those who are threatened and hurt and angry, and an effort to turn prayer into something generative, into a plowshare, instead of a weapon used to shame or coerce people, as sometimes happens.

I share the song with you here.

May we all, in this time, find a way to pray that draws us closer to the infinite, and out of the spinning loops of daily discourse and rumination. We need this. Don't waste your time picking out your luggage. Go with what you know; and just take the trip.

Wren, winner of a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal

Winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal for Regional Fiction; Finalist for the 2022 National Indie Excellence Awards. (2021) Paperback publication of Wren , a novel. “Insightful novel tackles questions of parenthood, marriage, and friendship with finesse and empathy … with striking descriptions of Oregon topography.” —Kirkus Reviews (2018) Audiobook publication of Wren.