Prayer Pattern
a heart-on-the-sleeve kinda letter
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This letter lets you know that…Resonant Resources: a compilation of all things that resonate with beauty and meaning. This is where I share music, readings, links, recipes, products, practices, and on and on…
This letter is coming early because it's timely, and I have an uncomfortable ask for your own resonant resources about something personal (tl;dr prayer).
I’m deeply privileged to do heart-based work as my vocation and as my j-o-b. Far from easy, but always an area to practice integrity. And I want to let you know that these letters, videos, podcast episodes (etc.) will continue more regularly, just as my work with private clients and course participants has resumed while witnessing incomprehensible tragedy.
I hope you understand and I hope that you don't see it as a masquerade of normalcy but instead as a devotion to LIFE and to what my expertise and craft can offer to the collective, even in the most minuscule way.
When you share your own gifts and care, especially when it takes courage and years of invisible work, I can feel your devotion to life, too.
As I write this, over 2,000 children have been killed and more will soon be killed by those who have made their genocidal intent explicit for years. 300 children in the last 24 hours, maybe more now that the hospital is out of power.
October 30 edit: more than 420 children per day according to UNICEF.
February 9 edit: more than 27,000 people killed according to UNICEF’s ongoing Humanitarian Escalation reports – most of them women and children (approximately 10,000 children). 17,000 unaccompanied children. If you have a problem with my use of the word genocide, don’t take it up with me.
Red Cross, UNICEF, Oxfam, WHO, Amnesty International, HRW, Center for Constitutional Rights, the ICC, UNRWA, and more have been sounding every alarm.
Hundreds upon hundreds of orphaned, anonymous babies each labeled with a number. Entire lineages erased. Unjustifiable beyond reasoning.
I'm sharing this because I know that many of you are also feeling desperate, all-consuming grief and... what is the word even? Misanthropy? Loss of faith in humanity? Fear. Forever changed.
And I can't believe I'm going to write this but hey, it's my publication so here we go!! I write to make sense of things and then publish it in hopes that it speaks to something in you. So that's what's about to happen, and that's also why I'm speaking personally here in this letter of grief, as clunky as it feels.
Here’s what I’ve seen: the depth of faith amid massacre is astounding.
The more severe and rampant the loss, the deeper the roots of faith. In the pleas of Palestinian people, I hear conviction that God stands with the brutalized and the oppressed. That God is the merciful, the compassionate. That God is never forgetful.
Before the first session of Growing a Writing Practice, I read the prayer of St. Francis out loud to myself.... never done that before. It was strange to feel compelled to do so. I'm at the point of desperation for prayer.
I know that prayer isn't 'action' in a certain sense, or more accurately, it has been used at times in place of necessary community action.
Sometimes prayer is expressed as an action.
And: I've seen Palestinians in Gaza urge 'please pray for us' more than I can count. When people are asking, ‘what more can I do?’, I see ‘PRAY’.
So, I'd love to hear from you with a question I never thought I'd ask:
How do you pray?
I guess what I'm asking more broadly is how does one enter prayer when it feels distant and unknown?
Is it presence with a tree or laying on the floor until the weeping comes?
Do you have a practice that would be meaningful to share for others who might also be at a loss when it comes to expansive notions of prayer?
Onto the Resonant Resources…