Laughter Is a Holy Thing
Laughter is a holy thing. It is as sacred as music and silence and solemnity, maybe more sacred. Laughter is like a prayer, like a bridge over which creatures tiptoe to meet each other. Laughter is like mercy; it heals. When you can laugh at yourself, you are free."
— Tracks in the Straw
Put Your Heart In Your Mouth
For me, the simplest definition of prayer is putting your heart in your mouth. From deep within, some plea or question or gladness geysers up to address a presence or power beyond our human limitations. There is an unadorned urgency, honesty, and immediacy about it. It puts your heart in your mouth."
— My Heart in My Mouth
Imagination and Prayer
But I would say that imagination is a key to discernment, and so to prayer, even to faith. Noble laureate physicist Richard Feynman wrote something that clarifies the point: 'Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which really are there.' That is precisely what I think discernment and faith are about: imagining and trying to comprehend, to interpret things that really are there but which somehow we have been intimidated into avoiding or denying for fear of being labeled naive or unsophisticated. It seems the quantum physicists and cosmologists are rediscovering the mystery and wonder, or, if you will, the shocking and amazing things going on in our universe and in our world, while too often we 'religious types' are off picking blackberries and flat-lining our lives. Among other things, perhaps foremost among other things, prayer is about imagining things that really are there in our experiences and helping us imagine them, trust them, engage them as the gracious mysteries they are."
— My Heart in My Mouth
Mystery In Our Lives
Surely mystery is an essential ingredient, if not the essential of our common life and this earth in which we are all rooted. By mystery I do not mean the vast oceans of knowledge in which we have not swum or not yet mapped. By mystery I mean the infinite depths of being that we can never plumb, never know, never exhaust, given the limits of our mortality, our finitude, our creatureliness.
"Our inherent sense of mystery is in our irrepressible longing for something we cannot name but intensely miss. We are afflicted, or blessed, with a kind of insistent, cosmic homesickness. It comes in moments of awe and wonder at starlight or twilight, or a child's birth and unfolding, or the quiet peacefulness in an old woman's face, the surprising lift of music, a pause of self-recognition in Shakespeare, or the opening of the world in a line of poetry."
— The Haunt of Grace
Grace
Grace is the sole property of God. It distinguishes the quality of God's love from human love. But then, how does grace become operative in the world? What is the process? Admittedly, those are large and complicated questions about which volumes have and will be written. . .
"Still, one simple answer, and wondrous, is that God's grace operates in the world quite independently of us. Prayer is one way of attempting to focus on grace, to pay attention to it, to praise it. The French mystic Simone Weil is right in saying, 'Perfect attention is prayer.' Surely it is true that any attempts to be attentive, however imperfect, are also prayers. Imagination is crucial to paying attention, for attention is far more than observation. Imagination involves penetrating something, or being open to being penetrated by something, in order to sense its meaning, its possibilities, its depths, its 'story.'
"Another simple answer, and equally wondrous, is that praying itself is part of the process by which grace becomes operative in the world. The prayer becomes a participating point of entry and expansion of grace, so that Augustine is also right in saying, 'Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not.' "
— Guerrillas of Grace
In The Silence Name Me
Holy One,
untamed
by the names
I give you,
in the silence
name me,
that I may know
who I am,
hear the truth
you have put into me,
trust the love
you have for me,
which you call me to live out
with my sisters and brothers
in your human family.
— Guerrillas of Grace
The Final Word
God doesn't control everything. We're free to make choices and, so, to make terrible mistakes. But the key is in the resurrection — or resurrections. History suggests there's a resurrection to the Inquisition, if only because the final word isn't the Inquisition. The final word isn't Hiroshima; the final word isn't the Holocaust; the final word isn't Pearl Harbor or September 11th or the Iraq war.Yes, all those are real, painful, terrible and evil. But none of the 'bad stuff' — or, for that matter, none of the 'good stuff' — is the end of God's world and work in it. It's the witness of the gospel that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's as much of a creed as I need. How about you?"
— Loaves, Fishes, and Leftovers
