Reaching up and out

Busyness must always make way for prayer and not the other way around. We cannot shoehorn prayer into our day as if it were another thing to cross off the list. For prayer is not something you do, it is something beautiful that happens in your heart, a fluttering burst of coloured wings soaring up to their maker when they hear his voice in the stillness. A flock of songbirds returning to their mother, who is calling them up to higher branches.

Prayer is always a homecoming, a place where desires find their true voice and character and are not what you thought they were. Where desperations are met with tear-brimming eyes full of compassion and mercy.

Prayer is a reaching up and out, a wondering, not-knowing, questioning, angry demand for demonstration sometimes, met with loving hands closing around your tantrumming fist. A wailing and a gnashing of teeth, hell brought before heaven’s throne, looking for answers and finding them.

For no one goes away from my table hungry. Did I not speak? Did I not answer you? Was the air crackling with the un-saidness of my words? Does this silence all around your pain let the naysayers creep in, telling you to ‘curse God and die’, be done with it, admit the non-existence of I AM, or the not-caring of love itself, the lies told by the truth of the Word? This is folly, and child’s talk, the babbling of fools in the marketplace, of gossips at the city gate.

How can the one who created ears not hear? Or the one who gave you sight, not see everything? Nothing is hidden from me. Your words and longings, your heart cries, your situations of need, arise before me tenfold. I know all. The softest unspoken whisper of disappointment rises alongside the loudest birth-pain groaning.

I will respond. I AM response. Relationship is what I do.

-Keren Dibbens-Wyatt, Recital of Love: Sacred Receivings