LITMIR.BIZ

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unit of time known as sha’ah zmanit, a proportional hour that takes into account one’s location and the seasonal length of any day. Ultimately, saying there are only a certain amount of minutes in every hour is as deceptive as saying there is a calculable number of how many moments make a life.

      Uncommon: Prayer

      Something happens to time when it is routinely pierced by prayer. The earliest Christian monks knew this. The ancient Hebrews knew this. The ascetics and mystics of the Eastern traditions knew this. Which, for many of us, begs the question: why is it so darn difficult to incorporate routine prayer into our lives? Ironically, the answer we offer most often is time itself—or, more precisely, the lack thereof. We’re just too busy, there’s too much going on, and we have too many demands on our precious little time already. But if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s not only that we’re just too busy to pray; we’re also too occupied with what else might be going on. (We wouldn’t want to miss out on anything, after all.) And let’s face it, prayer isn’t always thrilling. We too often think, hope, or expect that we will hear trumpets and cymbals sound when we pray, or even hear God speaking personally to us. But more often than not prayer is remarkably uneventful. We may have as an iconic image a romantic notion of medieval monks with quills in hand tirelessly scribing sacred scrolls with exotic colored inks and elegantly gilded illuminations. But the three Rs of the monastery were never reading, writing, nor ‘rithmetic; they were regular, routine, and repeat.

      Like the daily motions of the earth, the everyday rising and setting of the sun.

      For the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, prayer meant breathing in and out the one constant breath of the universe. The twentieth-century French philosopher Simone Weil considered our absolute attention the same thing as prayer. Meister Eckhart said that if the only prayer we ever whispered was “thank-you,” that would be enough. Kierkegaard likened laughter to a form of prayer. Ignatius of Loyola taught that anything turned in the direction of God is prayer. Indeed, an entire library would be required to contain our various definitions of prayer over time.

      The simplest prayer I know is “Yes.” Another one: “Trust.”

      Or the two Greek words at the very root of all Christian prayer: Kyrie, eleison.

      “Lord, have mercy.”

In the beginning has always been prayer. Because, as Mother Teresa clarified, “everything begins with prayer.”7

      As basic and imperative as that sounds, common prayer is still all too uncommon. If anything it seems to be becoming ever rarer. For some it is, perhaps, the word itself that gets in the way: The word “prayer” can evoke both positive as well as negative associations depending on one’s experience of, and relationship to it. The same can be said of its alternatives, like mindfulness or meditation. Still, “prayer” seems most accurate at its roots; it comes from the Latin precari, meaning to ask earnestly. And in fact we more often than not tend to ask for something—a specific outcome ranging anywhere from good health and comfortable wealth to world peace—in our prayers. We naturally pray for the best outcome and relief from the alternative. And inevitably we never get all we really want. The result: prayer—not to mention God—can seem inconsistent and arbitrary at best.

      But what if the truest form of intercession isn’t praying to or for, but with? This can of course take the form of recitation, but there is also the Jewish notion of mitzvah, of “a good work.” We can “do” as well as “say” our prayers. Muslims practice ṣalāt, an Arabic word that is often interchanged with its closest English equivalent: “prayer.” But ṣalāt implies not only the stillness commonly associated with prayer but also supplication, a devotional integration of spiritual surrender with physical motion. “Pray without ceasing,” Saint Francis of Assisi is supposed to have said, “if necessary, use words.”

Ultimately, whatever form it takes, prayer does not necessarily alter the circumstances as much as it changes the perspective of the one who prays. We each and all would do well if our only prayer was the ceaseless question curious young children ask: “Why?”—and then lived out our precarious lives as provocatively as that ultimately unanswerable question. “We will not perish from lack of information,” Rabbi Heschel wrote, “but only for want of appreciation: What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”8

      Wondering why and knowing how are two very different postures, though. As children we naturally expressed our insatiable curiosity about the world and our place in it by constantly asking the seemingly simple, yet wonder-filled question: “Why?” Eventually—sadly—too many of us lose that holy curiosity and stop wondering altogether. Why are there stars in the sky? Why don’t we see them during the day? Why is the night dark? If the stars are always shining then why isn’t the night light? Always appearing to be about things we should all know, the innocent why’s children ask are more often than not profound and probing questions that reveal ever more complex subtleties and seldom have definitive answers. The more we consider the question, the more we realize we don’t have a clue what the answer is. So we fall back on the old standard: “Because.”

      This inevitably leads to the child’s second most favorite question: “Because why?”

      “Because that’s the way things are,” we say with as much authority as we can muster. “The night is dark because that’s what night is.”

      And, of course this might work once or twice, until the curious expanding little mind catches on. So, we transpose the why into the more answerable how and explain the science or physics of something. But that still hasn’t answered the question. We can always figure out how. It’s the why that always leaves us wondering. I can study and come to understand, for example, the fascinating science and optics of how twilight interacts with the rods and cones of our eyes. But that doesn’t come anywhere near answering what I think is the more interesting question of why the dawn or dusk stirs the soul or imagination so. That’s something else entirely.

All our human nature ever really wants is a final answer. But the fact is any search for understanding is most productive when every question leads not to a succinct answer but to yet another even more interesting question. The most profound truths always feel more like beginnings than endings. All of this isn’t to say that how cannot be a helpful question—it can be. Especially when asked in the context of such inquiries as “how do we know what we know?” or “how do we know something is real?” Or, “how can we be certain of a certain thing—of anything?” But then the answers to these questions probably have more to do with squirrely belief than actual proof. Further, they are about the difference between believing that something is or happened, versus believing in something as truth. Or as the poet Rilke famously suggested, about not seeking or finding the answers, so much as living out the questions themselves.9

Perhaps best known for his contributions to physics and mathematics, Sir Isaac Newton produced far more written materials on biblical interpretation. While he acknowledged the clutch of gravity and its role in the universe—the motions of the planets—he ultimately found (and admitted) it could not explain who or what first set the planets in motion. Henry David Thoreau tried to keep two journals, one for recording “just the facts,” and the other for more poetical musings. But he ultimately found the world full of poetry.10 Science and religion operate in the same arena. They simply speak different languages: one a dialect of fact, the other a poetry of faith; one of knowing, the other of believing.

      Truth is never singular.

      There are forces in the universe which we do not, and cannot understand, despite our endless inquiry—forces that are not diminishing but expanding. Forces that bind atom to atom across time and space; forces like gravity that bring us into each other’s orbit; forces that catch us when we fall and lift us up; forces that propel light through darkness faster than we can ever imagine. Some refer to the dynamic forces that

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