She comes for me in dawn, light coming up in slipping night, and when her body curls next to mine, morning tendril, her hands reach and she whispers, “I need your face. Turn to me?”
I roll towards her and, always her way, since she first was, her fingertips, they trace my lips, her palm strokes my cheek, and morning seeps in and we lay bare face to bare face.
“Kiss me again?” She sleeps the hope and I brush her lids with lips. Her breath, warm, falls and I breathe in her slumber returning. Her, our wisp of love. We wrap. We are. This is all.
I watch her eyelashes. I wait. She’s still. Now, I’ll slip the covers back soundlessly, now to prayer, now while again she sleeps. My toes hardly find the floor and she knows, stirs, stretches for me.
“I’m coming too, Mama.” I bury my smile in her tangle of sleep. She smells of dreams.
“Mama’s just going to the prayer bench to be with Jesus.” I tickle her ear with the whisper, beckon sleep to come back.
“I’ll come too.”
Yes, of course.
She pads off for her Bible and pencil, prayer books and journal from her Peace Retreat, returns and presses up close. I find the book of Daniel, where I’ve been reading. I do that, read. She sings words. I gather His words, hold them, look out on the orchard. Sweet fruit, I savor Words long. Then, find a pen, a blank page, let His Words change mine. The light finds us bowed.
This is all it is, prayer. An act of communion. I have not always known this. Or perhaps I have, at some cerebral level, but the heart is just learning. Long it has known prayer as only the petitioning, the coming with the lists and the ardent entreaties.
But if that is all prayer is, then why did Jesus pray?
Why would very God pray?
Our pastor asks the question. My breath catches hard.
God need not beg of God. Prayer must be more than asking, supplication; that can’t be why Jesus prayed. To give us an example? Yes, surely. But more.
Could prayer ultimately be about a Son wanting Father? A Son missing intimacy with His Father? A Son longing for the communion of relationship within the Godhead?
A Child coming and pressing close to Father with the prayer, “I need your face. Turn to me.”
This, I am learning, is the simplicity of the prayer of beginners. (Every morning, again, always, I am that, beginner, beginning again.)
First, prayer is to come. Come find Father again. I’ve been thinking about stopping, not coming. I’ve been trying to live it: hard stops. Fixed times of prayer when I stop the task at hand, set aside the idol of self, and pray, exalting God as God.
But the phrase, “hardstops” implies that we must stop the real business of living, and then pray. Yet, prayer, isn’t it the real business of living?
It is not that we need to stop living and then pray. We must come to pray… so we can start living. There is no real life apart from prayer. Isn’t relationship the only reality? Thus prayer, relationship with God, is the ultimate reality. Anything without prayer, anything apart from God, is the false life.
I have thought it hard to stop the flow of my life at fixed times during the day, to pray. But it’s not about stopping. It’s about coming. Coming to God is only hard if we'd rather to come to our own idols.
Time is the currency of love. It's the ultimate gift we can give, the thing of which we have only a vapor. How to spend the time? On the things we love. And if I have no time to spend on undivided, focused communion, do I really love? How can I come to the feet of Jesus, if never cease the running of my own feet? Why do I think my feet more important than His?
Daily, I am learning it’s not that I have to stop the life current and make space to pray. It is more: I need come, come and join again the real current of reality, life with God. And then continue living, living out the communion.
First we come – and that simple act of coming maybe the hardest of all. So child-like, the coming, and yet too often, the first step I can hardly force myself to take. But if we can come, the rest, it comes. For we come to simply converse. This, we can do.
Prayer is not formality but soul conversation. A conversation we come to…. and never want to end, the nakedly frank conversation that lets the hurt and the frustrations and the love hang all out, the talk without ceasing that we have with God while we hang out the laundry, stir the soup, cut the lawn, drive for errands. The conversation with tears, with heart, with eyes, with pen, with ears.
We come to converse because prayer is ultimately the long communion.
After the hard coming, the simple conversing, I am discovering this, the contemplating. To reflect and contemplate His Words of Scripture, His Spirit leading, His wooing in a thousand ways.
I practice being present to the very real presence of God simply by coming out of the chaos of my life and reaching for the real reality of relationship: intimacy with God. Then we converse…. and contemplate each other long. Isn’t this the way of the Lovers?
Each morning, she comes looking for me, to draw close, cup my face, and be.
Each morning, I bend the knee. The beginner’s prayer is perfectly childlike – come, converse, contemplate. Kiss me again.
Wanting to touch His face, this is prayer.
This is all.
"But Jesus called the children to him and said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them..." ~ Luke 18:16
Lord God, prayer is longing for communion.... to come, converse, contemplate. What would keep me from wanting Your face?
Every Wednesday, we Walk with Him, posting a spiritual practice that draws us nearer to His heart.
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Photos: morning tendril asleep, gothic windows throughout our home, wheat heads found in Paris wrapped in communion, that stay on my prayer bench, another story to be told....
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