Dear Jesus… or God… or Divine,
To be honest, I’m really not sure how prayer works anymore. I’m not sure I believe in a system where I ask for something and, in response, the Divine either a) grants my wish, b) deems it necessary for me to wait [enter some trite saying about patience], or c) that particular something never comes to be. I think that’s just… Life. Sometimes we get what we want. Sometimes (often?) we get something else.
But I do very much believe in expressing our needs and desires, pouring our hearts out when we are troubled, speaking and feeling our wants and needs and gratitudes and awe. I find that being out in nature is the closest I feel to the Divine. I think, like Anne Shirley, from L.M. Montgomery’s beloved series, that one can just “feel a prayer,” one which doesn’t require a certain stance or even words. I value Anne Lamott’s insight that prayers can usually be boiled down to “help” or “thanks” or “wow.” So here are my help(s), thanks(es), and wow(s), in that order. I pray these in faith – faith in a benevolent and beautiful presence that sends light into the darkness to sustain us, and faith in a community, who hears, supports, celebrates, grieves and wonders alongside us.
Help, please. Help our world. Widen our collective consciousness, which seems to be growing narrow and too concerned with those whose lives that are most like our own. Help with Palestine. Help with the Democratic Republic of Congo. With South Sudan. With Myanmar. Deliver the captives. Free the oppressed. Let justice rain down. May we be liberators. May we speak truth to power. May we figure out how to hold all of the awful next to all of the beautiful and somehow continue with our lives. Help us – help me – figure out how to make a difference, be it in my everyday life or as I think about existing as a child of the Divine, surrounded by so many other children of the Divine, citizens of this beautiful, incredible, broken planet. Help us to find peace in the midst of chaos. Help me to find peace as we keep trying for a successful pregnancy. Help us to find work where we are paid enough to save a little, and help me to find ways to give even when finances aren’t enough. Help us to be kind and to show up wherever we are able.
Thank you. Thank you for the ones Mr. Rogers called “the helpers.” For those who knit us together with food and friendship and listening ears. For those whose hearts break, but who keep helping anyways. Thank you for family – for countless memories with loved ones. Thank you for all the people you have sent into my life to take care of me – for shelter, for nourishment, for laughter, for love. For the adults who were rafts and buoys in the rough sea of my teenage years. For the professors who believed in me and celebrated me. For the ever-growing group of women who have been my lifelines in my adult years. Thank you for my educations – formal and informal. Thank you for putting me in a world where I have access to so much knowledge and wisdom and experience. Thank you for a heart that feels deeply and for a brain that I can use to set healthy boundaries to protect that same heart. Thank you for my body – this vessel that houses me and allows me to experience the world. Thank you for everything that my body can do. Thank you for my dear husband – he is someone who loves me fiercely and steadily and his love and protectiveness has taught me to value and protect myself more. Thank you for my kitties – the way they purr and spread their claws wide to knead love into me.
Wow. Wow the way my mom taught us – to exclaim when we saw something cute or beautiful or lovely or unusual: “The mountain is out!” “Cows!” “Look at the tulips!” Wow for yummy food – today for toast and poached eggs and hot cocoa. Tomorrow for ginger beer and tamales and ponche and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and cheese boards and for potatoes, in all their glorious forms. Wow for sunsets and sunrises and cool clean cotton sheets. Wow for mountains and oceans and waterfalls and ponds. Wow for cloud formations, for starry skies, for planets and universes. Wow for seasons and national parks. Wow for poetry – for Rumi and Shakespeare, Whitman and Olds, Keats and Yeats, Dickenson and Oliver, Rilke and Angelour and Neruda and Hughes. Wow for Tolkien and Lewis and Austen and Alcott and for stories that harken back to our deeper needs for love, peace, abundance, justice, understanding, community, and goodness. Wow for historians, for knowing where we come from and how we came to be. Wow for artists, who remind us of the good and the awful and our need to express it all. Wow for the dreamers, working for something better. Wow for rest and the wonders it works on the mind and body. Wow for rain-soaked air and the sound of raindrops on a puddle. Wow for snowflakes and winter wonderlands. Wow for candlelight and music and orchestras and volume-up-windows-down car sing-alongs. Wow for dancing, twirling and holding onto each other. Wow for languages and cultures and traditions and holidays. Wow for people who found each other after all the years. Wow for the people who have been there for decades. Wow for those who have survived so much and still radiate joy. Wow for butterflies and moths and cicadas and dragonflies, for the life cycles that mirror our own. Wow for so many who have waited, who are waiting in darkness, not knowing when the light will come, only that it will come.
May light and life and love come soon, and come abundantly.
Amen.
Marjorie (Jorie) Ellenwood is a teacher, who lives her best life surrounded by books, plants, good food, and soft lighting in a cozy little house with her husband and their cat, Aravis. She sends your cat her best “psspsspss.”