September 9, 2012

A cooler morning, drier, the sky's thin blue laced with white, long ribbons of sheer cloud.  The sun has swung around to light up the base of the trees, whose leave filter that light, with a bleached green, paler with sun, already a thinner light than at the height of summer.  A constant breeze makes everything move to its fitfulness, branches rubbing against each other making the soft sighing with the whisper of leaves, as many sounds as there are shapes.  A flock of tiny gray-brown birds descends to the water bowl, a sudden flutter of wings and chatter, gone in seconds.   The black cat, like a whiff of jungle, stalks across the short grass, too late to scare the birds, but goes by and peers in the bowl just in case one might be left, sees nothing but ripples, and continues out of sight.  Two blue jays watch from the middle of the maple tree, quiet, their feathers streaked with sun, sky-with-clouds blue.  So much motion with the wind rising, hard to tell from which direction because everything seems to be moving in its own way, bending, side to side, bobbing, flickering, swaying, each leaf its own dance.

Sunday, and here I am blessed again, thinking about prayer and gratitude, thinking about so many different voices, so many different songs, human or not and all the same Creator.

Different Ways to Pray

There was the method of kneeling,
a fine method, if you lived in a country
where stones were smooth.
The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,
hidden corners where knee fit rock.
Their prayers were weathered rib bones,
small calcium words uttered in sequence,
as if this shedding of syllables could somehow
fuse them to the sky.

There were the men who had been shepherds so long
they walked like sheep.
Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—
Hear us! We have pain on earth!
We have so much pain there is no place to store it!
But the olives bobbed peacefully
in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.
At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,
and were happy in spite of the pain,
because there was also happiness.

Some prized the pilgrimage,
wrapping themselves in new white linen
to ride buses across miles of vacant sand.
When they arrived at Mecca
they would circle the holy places,
on foot, many times,
they would bend to kiss the earth
and return, their lean faces housing mystery.

While for certain cousins and grandmothers
the pilgrimage occurred daily,
lugging water from the spring
or balancing the baskets of grapes.
These were the ones present at births,
humming quietly to perspiring mothers.
The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,
forgetting how easily children soil clothes.

There were those who didn’t care about praying.
The young ones. The ones who had been to America.
They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.

      Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.

They prayed for Allah to mend their brains,
for the twig, the round moon,
to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.

And occasionally there would be one
who did none of this,
the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,
who beat everyone at dominoes,
insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,
and was famous for his laugh.

Naomi Shihab Nye

So many ways to pray, so many they are too numerous to count, each person having their own conversation with God, ritual words, rituals themselves, cries of joy or grief, faith in the daily tasks, praying with their lives of service, people praying for those they think do not believe the correct way, or who appear not to believe at all.  And the fool , the fool who talks to God, the same way he talks to goats, and is this not prayer as well?  Who is to judge one man's prayer?  People talk to God all the time, in every holy book, by every name imaginable, and in every circumstance.  If you credit the prayers written down over the centuries with your belief, so the man who talks to God every day, makes God part of his daily life must be allowed his own prayers, which seem to make for him a life full of laughter!  May your prayers bring you that same joy, no matter how you pray!