AIF Week Three: Prayer for Today with Zemirah Adionah-Dose

[00:00:01] Hey, this is Josh Reeves. You're listening to the Mile Hi Church Podcast. On Friday, October 23rd, we're thrilled to welcome Lissa Rankin and Jeffrey Rediker. They're going to be speaking on the topic of their new book, Relationsick, and it's about how toxic relationships can affect our health. The next day, Saturday, October 24th, they're going to bring all their great healing wisdom that we've read about in their many books to a workshop from 9am to 12. So you can get tickets to one or to both of these events.

[00:00:31] You can get tickets to one or to both of these events on our website, MileHighChurch.org. We continue our Adventures in Faith series today with a focus on prayer, an ancient tool for our modern lives. And there's a reason why prayer is a spiritual technology that has been present throughout the ages.

[00:00:57] From my Sufi studies, we discussed at length how our souls call and long for communion. And in the Sufi tradition, we believe that this longing draws us ever closer into an experience of the beloved, the divine, should we heed the call.

[00:01:25] We also believe in the Sufi tradition that the heart is the altar place of God. It is that indwelling presence within our own heart that we touch the divine spark that is eternal within us.

[00:01:42] And because our heart is this altar of God, our souls are always moving back into that awareness, calling to enter into that awareness. So we're going to begin this morning with a call to prayer.

[00:02:07] It is a prayer that is going to be sung by Laura in the ancient Aramaic, the conversational language of Jesus. And so I invite you to take a breath with me now. Perhaps even put your hands on your heart if you feel open to it and just invite and receive the call.

[00:04:16] Prayer is designed to, when entered into with reverence, bring us deeper into center. That is why it is a spiritual technology. A call to prayer, as we find throughout faith traditions around the world, is to call back the members of that faith tradition,

[00:04:44] to call them back into that sacred space, and to invite them into the circle of prayer. This call to prayer that Laura just sang was so beautifully shared and written about by Janahara Laura Mangus.

[00:05:10] This previous weekend, a week ago, Saturday, last night, I was walking through Boulder on a date night with my new beloved husband and our furry child, Rosie, and we were walking down Pearl Street, and I got a tap from the divine. It said, enter this bookstore. And when I went to the bottom of the stairs, greeting me was her book, Becoming Honey,

[00:05:36] an Aramaic work and translation of the Hail Mary prayer. I was completely immersed in this book, so much so that I called her, or I sent an email, reached out to this author, a Sufi sister, on Monday morning, and she nearly immediately called me back. And we entered into a dialogue about prayer. Prayer.

[00:06:04] Her call to prayer is actually Elizabeth's response when the archangel Gabriel comes to Mother Mary and says that she is going to give birth to Jesus. This is the response. She says, Mariam, and Mariam is inviting and creating a circle, a container of reverence for the Holy Mother, for the Divine Mother, for the Ultimate Mother.

[00:06:31] And it is followed by that Aramaic word, Baraktou. Baraktou literally means blessing in Aramaic, but it has such a deeper meaning. Janahara writes that Aramaic is a relational language. It has the contextual meaning, of course, but it is relational in that all of the words carry a depth of meaning, and their meaning is determined based on the words

[00:07:00] that they come together in relationship with in utterance. Baraktou literally means, as Janahara writes, a field of magnetic influence, a sphere of sweetness, an ever-flowing movement, the motion of blessing, and a spiritual presence that defies time. That is prayer.

[00:07:29] Prayer is a tool of blessing that brings us into spiritual presence, a sense of the timelessness. The timeless. And that awakens within us this morning a key question, which is, how do we answer the call to prayer? What is your relationship with prayer in your life right now? How are you answering the call to prayer?

[00:07:57] And even a deeper question can be born out of that, and that is, how do we respond to our soul's longing for communion? And how can we do it through prayer? And the first step that I want to bring forward this morning is to pause. The remembering pause. The remembering pause is that, yes, we remember to pause,

[00:08:27] but the remembering is also re-membering, bringing back the different parts of ourselves, and re-membering, collecting them together in this spaciousness, this container of prayer within us. Jackie gave such a spacious silence. Do you notice every single week we begin with a moment of silence because it's in that stillness, that pause,

[00:08:55] that we move into the spaciousness of prayer. So we've remembered a pause, and it's in that pause that the sacred can be felt. Let's circle back to Aramaic for just a moment because there are keys and clues within that ancient language that hold true, that ring true for our present day spirituality.

[00:09:23] That which is relevant and universal doesn't fade over time. It is timeless. And Jesus, who spoke Galilean Aramaic, delivered his instructions for prayer on the Sermon on the Mount that day. He gave us the Lord's Prayer. And when the scholars of Aramaic talk about the meaning of the word prayer in Aramaic,

[00:09:50] they share with us that the word for prayer is shaluta. Shaluta. Shaluta. And it carries layers of meaning. A couple of scholars that I have found such value and depth in their work are Neil Douglas Klotz and Dr. Rocco Errico. And they've both written books that explore these and meanings associated with prayer that include meanings around setting a trap for God

[00:10:15] as well as the meaning that Neil Douglas Klotz brings, which is hollowing ourselves out. And both of those meanings give us clues because to set a trap is to be exquisitely attentive, to quiet our wandering mind so that we may catch those subtle impulses, those taps of the divine presence already within us.

[00:10:44] Prayer then, and then also works to hollow us out so that we create an inner spaciousness to become like a vessel to receive. And then so, in this ancient understanding, prayer, contemplation, and meditation are intimately woven together through the practice of tuning our inner instrument, as Gary so beautifully sang about, our inner instrument toward the divine.

[00:11:14] toward the divine, we become still enough to listen, empty enough to receive, and attentive enough to recognize the presence of God moving through us. You know, when we pause, sometimes when we take those little earbud things out, when we put the phones down, you know, I walk on the hills and I see everyone I meet, we have these little things hanging off our ears. And, and sometimes I don't even hear a dog approaching and, you know, until Rosie alerts me because I have these things. Well, anyway,

[00:11:44] when we put all that down, sometimes what is left over in the stillness is a sense of urgency. What have I forgotten? What ball has rolled away? Is it under the couch? Is the dog eating it? Where are all these balls? What am I supposed to be doing right now? And that sense of urgency can build up within us because we are speeding at the fast pace of life. A few years ago, I don't know if you ever watched that kids classic, but my daughters and I once watched this movie Zootopia. Zootopia.

[00:12:11] And Zootopia have all these animals that are personified within it. And in it, you have officer Judy Hopp. And Judy Hopp is just like her name. She's a rabbit. And she is in the fast pace of life to solve crime and get everything back on track. And Judy, officer Hopp, she hops. She really does. She hops into the Department of Mammal Vehicles one day, the DMV.

[00:12:41] And she needs to run a license plate number for a missing animal that's missing. Anyway, she comes in and she runs into there and she sees that the entire office is staffed by sloths. And she goes to the desk with Flash, the fastest of the sloths. And he waits on her. And Judy introduces herself in her high-speed rabbit energy. She says, Hi, I'm Judy.

[00:13:10] And Flash responds. And she says, Hi, I'm Judy. How are you? And Flash says, I am doing just. And Judy says, Fine! You're doing just fine! She says,

[00:13:33] As well as I can be. And of course, the more Judy tries to hurry, the slower things become. And her frustration is mounting. Can we all relate? Sometimes the world, you know, we get into this speed race with our life. And we want to,

[00:14:03] like Officer Judy, move this train along. In Anamkara, the Book of Celtic Wisdom, Father John O'Donoghue shares a story. It's about a traveler from the West who in the colonial times decides that he is going to visit Africa and travel through the jungle. So he hires himself, some local men who are porters who will carry his luggage for him. And for days, they are moving through the jungle

[00:14:32] at a ceaseless speed. And then one day he wakes up and the porters refuse to move. And he says, Well, let's get on with it. He says, Why aren't we going today? And the porters say to him, We must give time for our spirits to catch up to us. We must give time for our spirits to catch up to us. This is the invitation of shaluta,

[00:15:02] of prayer, to empty ourselves for a little while so that we can receive. And the remembering pause is for us to turn back toward presence. That brings us to our second. Once we have stilled, then we need to bring our attention and intention into focus. We need to focus for our prayer.

[00:15:31] And there are many ancient tools that are available to support and to guide our practice. One of the things I love about exploring the world's spiritual traditions is that humanity across time has found ways, similar ways, remarkably similar ways to harness the wandering mind in order to move into a prayerful space. And one of those ways is through prayer beads.

[00:15:58] We have Buddhist prayer beads that come from the Buddhist tradition. We have prayer beads that come to us from the Islamic tradition, the Tasba. And we have prayer beads that come to us from the Hindu tradition, the Mala beads. And we have prayer beads that come to us from the Christian tradition, the rosary beads. And for myself, this has been a tool that has guided me

[00:16:25] and I use all these various beads in order to guide my prayer practice. And one of my favorite things to do is to go up the road here to Cabrini Shrine. We just celebrated Cabrini, Mother Cabrini Day just a week ago. And it's to go up to Cabrini Shrine because they've built this rosary garden where there's a stone for each bead in the ground. And when I arrive at the rosary garden, I may arrive with my Mala beads.

[00:16:54] I may arrive with my rosary. But what I am there to do, I arrive with my scattered mind. And with each step, I say a prayer. Maybe it's peace, peace, peace. Maybe it is the Hail Mary, which I will say. But whatever it is, Om Namah Shivaya, whatever prayer it is, each bead, a prayer.

[00:17:23] And it guides me into that stillness. About halfway around the garden, there's this beautiful bench and I take another tool, prayer tool with me, which is my journal, and I'll sit on that bench and as I'm sitting there on the bench, I will then write the prayer that is coming through. And then I will close the circle all the way to its completion back out again.

[00:17:51] But in that circle of prayer, I can enter with scattered mind and it'll end with a still lake of calmness. In the science of mind, we teach the tool of affirmative prayer. And it's a brilliant tool for shaping our thoughts and bringing our consciousness back into alignment with all, with God,

[00:18:21] with spirit. There are five steps. Some centers have three. Some centers have seven. But here we teach the five steps of affirmative mind treatment. The first is to recognize the infinite presence of God. The second step is to attune our own awareness to our own unification with God or the unification of that, the person that we are praying with and for. The third is from this space,

[00:18:50] this atmosphere of prayer is to pray affirmatively, stating the realization with one's own awareness that is being prayed prayed for and to declare that prayer is true. As you heard Jackie so beautifully doing the prayer this morning. And finally, we steep into gratitude that is already made manifest and we release it into the universal law which is always at work in our experience. And I invite you to come down front every single Sunday

[00:19:20] we have practitioners here ready to share that prayer with you. Because when we pray with others, not only in community are we joining with someone who can hold the truth of who we are when we may be steeped in circumstance or struggling with circumstances in our life, but also it's that resonance of where two or more are gathered. It's that resonance of being together in prayer that also brings the prayer

[00:19:48] into our embodiment of it. Once we ourselves have stilled in prayer then and really worked with the tools in our practice then we can begin to make our prayer practice individualized and self-defined for I believe there are infinite tools of prayer and prayer is prayer. Prayer is prayer

[00:20:17] because it is defined by the intention to commune and communicate with the divine. That is prayer. So little by little in your practice you begin to stabilize your experience, ground yourself in the experience of the storms of life that swirl all around us all the time. And that brings us to our final part of prayer this morning

[00:20:45] that I want to talk about is devotion. It is the embodiment. It is living prayer in our daily life because prayer lives through us as we embody it. It is the somatic experience of prayer when we hear the call to prayer and you feel it in the vibration of your being the resonance of prayer that is the feeling of devotion. And devotion is cumulative. We come to prayer

[00:21:15] with reverence and we practice prayer daily and we begin to accumulate this energy of prayer within our life within our very own vibration of being. That is prayer as life. And so prayer can become infused seamlessly into our daily life. So this morning I invite you to consider what are the ways with which you bring daily prayer into your daily life.

[00:21:45] And first it starts perhaps as a habit or a routine which means you show up for it every day. A habit or a routine means I show up that I just simply come to prayer. And maybe you put some prayer beads or a stone in your pocket and when you touch that in your pocket it reminds you of coming into cultivating that atmosphere of prayer within yourself. Or perhaps I was reading

[00:22:14] Jean Houston last week she said write it out tape it on a sun-filled window and see your prayer every day. Someone after the last service says you know what I do I sing it I turn it into a song and that's how I move into devotion. Then the words that I've been reciting since I was a child I now can feel and he sang it to me in the line. We feel devotion.

[00:22:45] One of my favorites comes from Teresa of Avila I took one of my favorite prayers of her and you can take any of your mystics your favorite mystics and find a prayer and maybe recite it daily. Hers is let nothing disturb you let nothing upset you easier said than done but it's a prayer that's what we're anchoring in ourselves everything changes she says God alone is unchanging. Meister Eckhart said

[00:23:15] if you only utter the word thank you as your prayer your entire life that is enough. So find an anchor point of prayer and begin to carry it with you every day and then once you have a practice of prayer I invite you to consider the ritual of entering into it. We talked about in our ministerial class just last weekend that a ritual is

[00:23:45] defined that something that has a clear opening or beginning a clear action in the middle and a clear ending or closing in the end and it is all done with intentional spiritual reverence. That is a ritual. So maybe it is you light a candle in your practice. Maybe you unroll your prayer mat. For me it has often been to use a prayer shawl to bring myself inward into

[00:24:15] a cave of prayer. In this way I go into the inner sanctuary of heart of my own heart of the heart within and all external is now so that I can focus my intention with devotion inside. I want to close today with a scene from a recent film I just came upon it a couple days ago

[00:24:45] put it on at night it's called the beautiful fantastic and I just loved it it was filled with wonderment and awe but in it you find Bella who is a young woman and early in her life she is unable to even go outside because she's so afraid of the outside world she can't go into nature so she lives in a place she's a renting a place and the landlord comes and says you have to clean up this garden that you haven't cared for because in your lease it says you will care for this garden so I'll be back in a month

[00:25:14] and she's faced with the task not only of cleaning up the garden but working with all that has gathered within her that keeps her afraid from going out into the garden and in this scene in the movie you see her at one point half what she does begin to slowly move out into the garden but she's laying on the ground she's been working so hard to clear this garden she finds her laying there on the ground and here comes her next door neighbor Alfie who's

[00:25:44] an elder horticulturist and he comes up upon her he kind of nudges her he's like what's going on here and Bella says the garden is taking forever and Alfie replies well everything that matters takes time you can speed read but you can never speed garden and then at that moment he looks over and he notices this little

[00:26:14] wild strawberry plant that's blooming in the place where she's cleared and Bella says I have no idea how that survived under all that rubbish that I cleared away and Alfie simply says isn't life just like that I absolutely love this because I think our prayer life is very much like this garden we accumulate the rush the rubbishes

[00:26:43] of worry of fears of doubts and we are called through our prayers to tend the soil of our consciousness through silence and through the simple act of returning our attention to God we can't speed garden our spiritual lives but we can't tend them every day with devotion

[00:27:13] with tenderness with the willingness to enter in to create space to recognize the light we are now going to move into devotional prayer and so I invite you if you feel comfortable to return to your heart to breathe in and to

[00:27:43] receive this

[00:29:22] devotion into the sanctuary of heart thanks for listening to the Mile High Church podcast this podcast is made possible by the generous contributions from listeners like you to make a donation please visit milehighchurch.org work