Rethinking Prayer Practice

Music-Listening as Prayer

{Photo by Andrii Omelnytskyi for Scopio}

In the new year, I am rethinking prayer. By this I don’t mean that I started saying prayers differently. I mean that what prayer is to me completely changed. Really, decades have passed since I “said prayers” unless in a group setting—mainly because, for me, formulating words has tended to get in the way. In lieu of this, I have tried either to tune in to the divine in various ways, or to repeat simple mantras encapsulating what in most true in my heart at that moment.

I tend to understand the experience of prayer as that which stirs something in us—that which stirs connection to the transcendent or the Divine. For me, the things that make me feel most connected or enmeshed with divinity are love and empathy and awe. But so often in my heart and life, love/empathy/awe are buried under worries, plans, and distractions—the way the best ingredients in a soup might sink to the bottom. I cannot get to them unless something stirs the bowl and brings them to the surface where I can spoon them out and savor them. For me, prayer is whatever stirs my pot so that the love, empathy, and awe—so often lost and buried in the day-to-day—rise to the surface.

And I have found that for me, nothing stirs my pot like listening to certain kinds of music; and listening in a certain heart-wide-open way. I have come to see this heartful listening as the closest thing to prayer for me. It is not that listening to such music leads me to pray or puts me in a mind for prayer. No, it is that the experience of listening itself is prayer. Heartful music listening has become my most impactful and meaningful prayer experience. Sometimes I have this experience when I’ve read an amazing poem, but rarely. When listening to my favorite music, I become so filled with love/empathy/awe for my fellow creatures and life itself, and feel so deeply in touch with the divine, that prayer is all I know to call it.

{Photo by Valeria Benítez Fernández for Scopio}

Rethinking Prayer as Encounter

Other experiences I now see as prayer involve something more relational, like a deep, honest encounter with an animal, or something momentarily devastating, like seeing a houseless person in the cold. Either of these experiences (and many others), if I let them work in me, stir up something so painful and tender that too often I bury it, in part out of habit; in part to avoid uncomfortable feelings. But when I let myself feel honestly the stirring experience, it is prayer. Often that stirring makes me physically shutter; it makes me audibly moan a little with grief at vulnerability and suffering. It is so easy to put up blinders in such instances—because being in the world in this open-hearted way is painful.

This year I want to invite more such encounters, and to move more deeply into the pattern of prayer I am discovering. I want to let things stir my pot and put me in touch with God. For me, this practice is so much less ego-addled and empty than praying with words—though I deeply admire people who compose beautifully-articulated prayers, people like the late poet John O’Donohue, for example.

I feel that love, empathy, and awe are harder to come by in my life than at some other periods. There was the year I lived perched over the Pacific Ocean in a tiny town in northwestern Oregon, where I would daily walk on the sand adjacent to the surf, often filled with wonder at my surroundings or the seals who sometimes swam beside me in greeting and accompaniment. But this chapter of life was charmed and rare. Most of my years have been so subsumed with the daily mundane and obligatory that whole weeks pass without so much as a brush of transcendence. During these times, mental or wordy prayer feels to me as empty and dead as a dry carcass.

But I have learned that if I hear certain voices, certain songs (usually by favorite female singer-songwriters—Lori McKenna, Anais Mitchell, Dar Williams, and dozens of others), and really listen, the holy is stirred in me, reawakening everything in me that is eternal, putting me in touch with God in the only way I am able to understand the divine—though the most profound experiences of being human.

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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.