Beyond Within Because

Despite the fact that I resonate with apophatic theology's premise that given our human inability to fully know God, wordless silence is the most faithful response to the presence of God, I continue to seek language that moves me and others toward the One who is ultimate mystery. I believe the ways we talk about God matter. The language we use to name the divine ultimately shapes how we encounter God, and how we approach our lives. Our prayers to God, therefore, have the power to shape everything: our hope, our despair, our ethical mandates, our kindness, our moral compass.

Over the summer of 2019, I spent 100 days writing prayers that were inspired by and knit together by poetry. It is a project that had been churning in my imagination since Mary Oliver's death in January 2019. Her poems became my prayers, and I could not find words to talk about God without consulting her language about the human experience. Ultimately, latching poetry to prayer means the poet's attentiveness to grandmothers, babies, husbands, soldiers, hurricanes, trees, solitude, birdsong, the stuff of life becomes the thing lifted to God.

As my 100 days drew to a close, I wondered about other tangential projects: praying the news (using the news-cycle's breakneck speed and the reporter's blunt language about this week's local or global events as fodder for prayer), praying well-trod thresholds (at the threshold of parenthood, at the threshold of the empty nest, at the threshold of a new decade, at the threshold of death), praying scripture, pairing poetry and hymnody, offering up the gift of prayer to others as a way of being seen. I still wonder which (if any) of these projects will come to life in the coming months and years.

Using 100 poems by 100 poets as a way toward prayer is like jumping into 100 small, deep, clear ponds: each one unique, boundaried, holding it's own intensity and wildlife and insight and experiences. Yet, each poem, each pond, is still somehow connected by written language, the hope to express something singular and shared. And, by that token, each prayer is hoping to find a balance between the personal and the universal, naming who God might be in every particular situation while forever seeking who God is for us now and always.

I believe that whether or not we use words to seek God, we are seeking nonetheless. Besides, whether or not we are attentive to the presence of God, God is seeking us nonetheless. And anyway, in the language of Jerome Barrymore, "the word became a wordless child" and so, in seeking Christ, we stand uneasy between naming the presence of God, and lingering quietly again at the manger: wordless and in awe.