It starts with the question: what is prayer?
I am defining prayer as communion with an object of worship or devotion. Everything that follows must refer to this definition and push it ever outwards, expand it into infinity, and so on and so forth.
So on and so forth.
Mary Oliver asks: Is prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?1
I go to a poetry reading where a poem is read first in Greek, then in English. In the first reading, I intently watch the reader’s mouth, only his mouth. I watch it wrap around words and sounds I don’t understand. The friend I am with speaks both languages. She tells me that the phrase ‘grey eyes’, spoken in the English poem, is indescribably more beautiful in the Greek. She tells me that, for her, this is the language of her family, of community. She tells me that when she is in a crowded room and someone somewhere speaks Greek, it is suddenly all that she can hear. She wants to be there, close to where those words are being spoken.
This is prayer.
I am commissioned to interview a trio of dancers, to write about a work they were in the process of choreographing. I tell a friend about the piece and in response she sends me old drawings of choreographic charts and maps of the stars, intricate illustrations of the movements celestial bodies make across the skies.
This is prayer.
A friend brings me seaglass when I am heartbroken.
A friend says: I saw [this] and I thought of you.
A friend texts me: I have reunited with my deep deep love - deep blue. Indigo makes me cry.
This is prayer.
I read a line in a poem2
to wake me
and I know this prayer, complete and total.
The time of day tells us how we can perform intimacy.
The time of day tells the light how to fall.
day/dream
heaven/home
every/now
heart/felt
moon/rise
We could find prayer in the refractions of light across the surface of water. From where you stand, ankle-deep and swaying, shards of sun fracture and scatter, becoming smaller and numerous all at once.
And we could call it prayer when a day ends and the heat breaks and the temperature of the light matches the temperature of the air and the world and all its gestures become softer, somehow.
Or prayer as in matters of light as in watching the daylight fade from the passenger seat of a speeding car, racing with two friends across an island to catch the last ferry home, all of us singing with abandon, the last of the day creeping backwards across the sky. How is it possible that the sky changes colour as it does? It is a trick of the light. In this hour, light diffuses and then deepens: a strange succession of effects that seem, by definition, to be in opposition.
to think (someone) hung the moon and stars
to love (someone) to the moon and back
to make (someone) see stars
Sitting front row at a book launch, the writer, whose work can only be described as an exercise in devotion, wears a hair slide adorned with diamantes, arranged in the word HOLY.
from every direction, any direction.
I recover a note I made to myself:
Prayer then, as it relates to love, is a matter of light.
But light has never been an absolute thing – it is something strictly relational. Light and dark are in fact one thing, measured entirely by presence or absence. A crude examination of this idea would tell us that if love is the presence of light, then its absence is pain.
And if they are one in the same, the light and the dark, could pain then be prayer?
I know I must surrender the pure and serene ideas of what prayer could be. And so I’ll let it be painful, for we are often misguided in where we place our devotion, in whom or what it is that we worship.
We have all had our hearts broken by someone unworthy. (But I miss you still, somehow.)
Pain changes you, more than love does.
Rebecca Solnit writes: Pain serves a purpose. Without it you are in danger. What you cannot feel you cannot take care of.3
You can never unlove who you have loved, so I have been told. Devotion to observing someone’s absence is prayer unanswered. An invisible thing cannot be broken and so a prayer is whispered each time we finger the hidden, enduring threads that bind people lost to one another.
And grief, what of that? For grief, the kind which no natural phenomena can match for size or endlessness, is nothing if not communion with an object of worship. Grief is prayer adrift.
On the death of her son Naja Marie Aidt writes:
So strange that you don’t exist, I still feel you
My body still can’t understand that you don’t exist4
A friend tells me: Nothing can be lost.
And I can’t stop thinking about this: that if nothing can be lost, it is searching, longing, that keeps it alive and that that longing could be prayer.
On the need for oblivion, Jacques Lacan says: Death belongs to the realm of faith. You’re right to believe you will die. It sustains you. If you didn’t believe it, could you bear the life you have? If we couldn’t totally rely on the certainty that it will end, how could you bear all this?5
As if life is a constant state of prayer. As if nothing can be lost.
I overhear a conversation between two people, one comforting the other over the enduring grief of losing her life partner. One says to the other that, were it her turn to lose her partner, her companion of more than twenty years, father to her child, what she would miss the most is the continuity of dialogue. This dialogue is communion and to each other they are objects of worship. Here, it is not grief itself, but in its potential where prayer resides.
When asking a friend about their relationship to prayer, they tell me that they believe we all pray
all the time,
all the time.
They tell me that prayer attempts to console something that is inconsolable and that, in the case of death, prayer answers itself: it is a mode of fortifying memory.
...or something like that.
A cut forms on my top lip and I tongue at it, taste the metallic rust of my blood. Pulling my upper lip between my teeth, I bite off the peeling skin. The cut worsens, the blood comes faster.
Prayer then, as a response to pain, is a matter of longevity.
And what of the body, most temporary thing? What of the body as prayer made manifest, of devotion through touch? What of that?
If I slipped an ice cube from my mouth to yours, would that be prayer?
If you ran your tongue the length of my body, would that be prayer? If you traced it, wet and twitching, across my earlobe, my clavicle, my wrist, my elbow, my hip bone, the back of my knee, the soles of my feet, would that be worship? And if I pulled back my skin, showed you the tendons beneath, would that be devotion? If I asked you to push your fingers through my flesh, to crack my ribcage and pull a sigh from my lungs, would that sigh be a prayer?
The body undulates between
stillness and
stirring
without ever speaking.
But it is too simple to think that this, the site of the body when used for sex, is always an answer to prayer. I don’t want to assert that sex equals prayer so strictly, so directly. For some sex is distinctly not prayer.
The body is a tender thing,
is a terrible thing,
is a thing untamed.
Adrienne Rich writes: Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine6
And so I can’t help but think that prayers made with the body (both mine and yours) are ones laid down with no promise of reply, they forever remain as questions. Although when my body throbs and someone enters me, it does feel, for a moment, like all of my prayers have been answered.
Get down on your knees
open your mouth
and
pray.
The ice cube begins to melt as it moves in that hot bed of muscle, saliva and lust, oh holy thing.
There have been times when I have been with someone who fucks me so well that, although my body is the vessel, in those moments I am not of my body, and were it not for my breath, I would have no knowledge of my body at all. I know no finer feeling, no sweeter relief, than to be brought to that animalistic act of panting. Bodily sensation allows release from the body.
On the total abandon of sex, Maggie Nelson asks us to imagine: ...someone you can still see fucking you, in the mirror, always in the mirror, crazy fucking about three feet away, in an apartment lit by blue light, never lit by daylight, this person is always fucking you from behind in blue light and you both always seem good at it, dedicated and lost unto it, as if there is no other activity on God’s given earth your bodies know how to do except fuck and be fucked like this, in this dim blue light, in this mirror. What do you call someone who fucks this way?7
A saint.
The ice cube melts.
Prayer then, as it is expressed through the body, is an act of surrender.
But you can run your hands over for prayer for only so long before they fumble over god and the idea that prayer is his very own tongue, tonguing at a language he’s tried to teach us.
I don’t want writing about prayer to get tied up with writing about God (the formal, the figurative, the fatherly). But I am haunted by the language and rituals of praying to a god I no longer believe in, the god that lived in my parents’ home.
While riding in an Uber pool, I sneezed. The stranger beside me said bless you. We didn’t say anything else.
On the whereabouts of Christ, Simone Weil writes: Christ is our bread. We can only ask to have him now. Actually he is always there at the door of our souls, wanting to enter in, though he does not force our consent [...] Our consent to his presence is the same as his presence. Consent is an act; it can only be actual, that is to say in the present. We have not been given a will that can be applied in the future.8
Which is to say: Christ is always with us, here and now. Only now, only ever now. Look, there! He is just on the other side of the door!
My father tells me that prayer is how the faithful try to control God so I slammed the door shut.
Bad news: God doesn’t exist after all. Yet the door-knocking Bible Bashers say they’re bringing the Good News (they seem to be the only ones).
The infinite, never-ending, unknowable nowhere that used to be God is now the internet because God got boring.
Google vs. God: Ultimate Smackdown
The search engine tells me that people also ask:
What is the real meaning of prayer?
and
What is prayer short answer?*
And so people are saying their prayers in the comment sections of songs on YouTube.
Mazzy Star - Fade Into You - 10/2/1994 - Shoreline Amphitheatre
Lucian_21 says: I swear I thought this song was only a few years old!! I'm a trucker and this song is always coming up right around when the sun is rising. Love her music!! Transcends time!
Stevie Nicks - Wild Heart - Live Demo - 1981
meganthevegan says: This is so comforting to me. My soul can't get enough.
Antony & The Johnsons - Hope There's Someone (Later Archive)
Mango22 says: I put this song on a playlist I made for my wife. Little did i know she would die by my side within 3 months. This song is so powerful to me now. It breaks my heart remembering her departure from life. Now "I" live between life and nowhere.
“transcends time”
“soul”
“between life and nowhere”
Closed caption reads: [Sacred prayer (non-translatable)]
People in the street are advocating for Christ: missionaries on a mission to lead you back from temptation. They’re telling me that, through the power of prayer, I will be delivered from evil into the waiting, open arms of my lord and saviour.
Bless you. No, no… Bless you! Come on now! Say it with your chest for once! Bless you!
God-like
God’s light
God given
God only knows
and
God save us all
(good) God, God alˈmighty, God in heaven, my/oh God
Cross my heart (and hope to die)
Cross my heart (and point to God)
Q: Who died and made you God?
A: God did. I killed him.
Our unholy inheritance in the downfall of God is the belief that we are all a god of our own dominion. The opposition of god and the self is a fallacy. The self is god now. The self is the object, the vessel of devotion to which we pray.
Prayer then, as a mouthpiece of faith, is a matter of distraction.
What then is the almight I see when I look at flowers, their petals like painted pages? No accident was ever so correct.
Mary Oliver writes: But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?9
To know birdsong is to know divinity.
(*This is the short answer.)
Fred again.. - Actual Life 2 Piano Live (20 March 2022) #Livestream
Fred again . . says: jeez isn't the sun quite a thing
like whoever thought of that is a GGGGGG
Faith is a funny thing. I lost God and found faith. Faith as in belief, as in spiritual conviction in something bigger than the sun and the self.
When questioning the self, Walt Whitman asks: Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be ceremonious?10
Sweeping rivers smooth great boulders down to pebbles. A grander ceremony I can’t imagine. I want to be as those boulders: pious, smoothed down by prayer.
Small
sweet
tinge
The sun is setting. The city is quiet. I walk its streets and count my blessings, my burdens. One by one, I throw them over my shoulder and leave them behind. I keep on walking until there is nothing left of either.
It just feels so good to be weightless.
I ask someone I was once in love with to describe prayer and they tell me that prayer is self preservation. For all the circles I have made around the question, for all the prayers I have made, it is this definition that strikes me most. Prayers made for love, for pain, for the body, for God all function to the same end: to fortify the self, the singular and the solitary.
And so everything is prayer? And so nothing is?
There are stars
and there is nothing.
Prayer then is simply a devotion to different ways of saying the same thing, again and again.
One morning, very recently, I woke uncharacteristically early, around 5AM. I lay in my bed in that half-place, the one where your body and mind pull you in different directions, one trying to take you back down into the depths, to drown you (in sleep), and the other trying to pull you up above the surface, to face the burden of breathing (consciousness).
In this place, one phrase, unsummoned, ran through my mind,
over and over,
over and over and over,
over,
over,
and over,
over,
over and over,
over:
Bright devil, dark star. Bright devil, dark star. Bright devil, dark star. Bright devil, dark star. Bright devil, dark star.
Lucifer, translated from the biblical Greek, Latin or Hebrew, means morning star, shining one, light-bringing.
Bright devil, dark star.
This is my prayer.
And it is here that I realise I’ve been finding different ways of saying the same thing, again and again, with every word I’ve dressed prayer with.
All light everywhere
Light and darkness are in fact one thing
An invisible thing cannot be broken
Between life and nowhere
and
Isn’t the sun quite a thing