LITMIR.BIZ

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God (by whatever name). Still others call this life-force Source, or the Absolute, or the Tao. For some the forces that both expand and hold together the universe are simply energy, light, and matter.

      I use the word “prayer” to express the discipline of striving to pay attention to the why and speechless wonder of these forces. But there are plenty of other choices. If you’re not comfortable with prayer, there’s contemplation, concentration, careful observation, or even the call of the heart. For some putting one foot in front of the other can be prayer. Listening deeply is perhaps one of the most profound spiritual disciplines. I would no sooner presume to tell you what words to use when engaging with the eternal than how to do it. If a word gets in your way, translate it into something that has meaning for you and what you take seriously about life. The Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi famously noted there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. The Talmud states that it is permissible to pray in any language that you can understand. “Pray as you can,” one Christian monastic adage councils, “not as you can’t.”

      There is, in fact, a charming story from the Jewish tradition that speaks to this aspect prayer. There was once a young boy who wanted to pray but did not yet know many Hebrew words; all he knew was the letters of the aleph-beth, or “alphabet,” so that became his prayer. One day as he was praying what he knew—his letters—a rabbi heard him and asked why he prayed in that way. The wise little one declared, “The Holy One knows my heart. I give him the letters, and he puts the words together.”

      Eventually, the Benedictine sense of time overflowed the walls of medieval monasteries and the Liturgy of the Hours became a rhythm of life even for some who lived and worked in the distinctly secular villages beyond the religious compounds. Elegantly penned and bound Christian devotional manuscripts known as “Books of Hours” contained an abbreviated form of the Divine Office designed for the average lay person and were widely available and popular by the fifteenth century. The original daily planners, every appointment was with God. Their pages were comprised of a collection of litanies, prayers, psalms, and excerpts from the Gospels, and were considered palm-sized and portable cathedrals. The wide margins surrounding the elegant medieval calligraphy of each page’s sacred text were often elaborately decorated with illustrations—illuminations—of the daily, the mundane, and the ordinary moments of everyday life.

      If the mystics were right, as surely they were, and every creature is a book about God, then each moment is a letter in a sacred alphabet even if we don’t yet understand the whole word. And every one of our hours is a holy chapter in the story of eternity—the story of us.

      A book of ours.

1. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 205.

2. Emerson, The Complete Works, VII: 180.

3. I refer, of course, to Tevye the Dairyman, the central character in an eponymous story originally written by Sholem Aleichem, and the opening scene of its more widely known theatrical and film incarnations, “Fiddler on the Roof.” See Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman; and Norman Jewison et al., Fiddler on the Roof.

4. In Hoeppe, Why the Sky Is Blue, 236.

5. An idea he expressed in a letter to his brother Theo. See “Letter 531” in van Gogh, The Complete Letters, III:26. Perhaps more famously, Vincent expressed in later correspondence his struggle between organized religion and personal worship: “That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.” See “Letter 543” in ibid., III: 56.

6. See, for example, Kardong, Benedict’s Rule, especially chapter 73; and McQuiston, Always We Begin Again.

7 Mother Teresa expressed this sentiment many times and in many ways. See, for example, The Joy in Loving, 43; and throughout Stern, Everything Starts from Prayer.

8. Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 26.

9. His oft-quoted advice to an aspiring poet: “Don’t search for answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” In Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 46.

10. On February 18, 1852 he wrote in his journal: “I have a commonplace book for facts, and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much more poetry and that is their success. They are transmuted from earth to heaven. I see that is my facts were sufficiently vital and significant—perhaps transmuted into the substance of the human mind—I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all.” In Thoreau, The Journal, 114.

      In the Beginning

      Whether the universe began as an enormous explosion of energy or was divinely spoken into existence, nothing we know or experience today was ever extant prior to that absolute flashpoint. Everything that matters—space, us, time—was set in motion as a result of that singular event. The genesis of the cosmos can be summed up in one word:

      After.

      God only knows what came before.

      In the beginning was the word, and the word without a shadow of a doubt was Light. Ever since that primordial before-and-after either physics or grace has been unfolding: the everyday gift of a rising and setting sun. Except each sunset or sunrise is never really a solar event as much as it is a terrestrial one. The universe does not revolve around us, the sun does not rise. We turn toward or away from its light. Sunset would be more appropriately described as earth-spin on our skewed little planet. (Neither do we call it nightrise, even though that’s also more accurate.) Night, after all, is nothing more than the shadow side of a rotating satellite in orbit around an illuminated source.

      Still, watch the last bit of daylight slip over the horizon at any day’s end, and it isn’t difficult to imagine and feel why so many of our ancestors made gods and monsters out of the sun and the night.

      Our very words belie what we fear: we exclaim, “Tempus fugit,” (Time flies) and “Carpe diem,” (Seize the day) whenever we mean to encourage each other to make our day-lit hours count. But when was the last time someone emboldened you to “carpe noctem,” (seize the night)? We look for eternally blue skies in life, not some dark night of the soul. While we declare that daylight rises, night and darkness always seem to fall—they descend. We convince ourselves that the worst things always happen in the dead of night and tell ourselves everything will look better in the light of the day. And when that light arrives we sing ebulliently that morning has broken, as if it were the first day of creation. When night returns we lay our heads to sleep and pray to God our souls to keep.

“It is frightening to think how many things / are made and unmade with words,” the poet Rilke wrote, “they are so far removed from us, / trapped in their eternal imprecision, / indifferent with regard to our most urgent needs.”11 We can say our genesis was etymological, or we can say it was biological—neither explanation ultimately satisfies. All words have a life of their own, abandoning us when we most need them and evading our grasp when we most desperately need something to hold on to. They are made not for us but for each other: a sentence

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