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Welcome It All

The soul should always stand ajar.

—Emily Dickinson

I’m sitting on the floor in my new shed studio. Elaine bought me this gorgeous fuchsia rug for the cement floor. My grandmother’s garden chair is in here, as is the aqua coffin cabinet that had the dried bougainvillea bloom stowed away from Bahrain.

I’ve made this place into a creative space, and a sacred space too. In that way it has become part of my practice. Like an altar in the world, to borrow a line from Barbara Brown Taylor.

I’m practicing the Welcoming Prayer today, a beautiful prayer that opens your hands and your heart and your body and your mind to the very thing you want to ignore, reject, repress. You literally welcome the feeling you want to avoid and ask God to help you sit with that feeling. The idea is that sitting with it, welcoming it in, helps reduce its power. Of course we always believe the opposite—that ignoring something will help it go away.

Haven’t you noticed with things like longings, let’s say, there’s a persistence to the craving that usually won’t just skulk off when told? We have to bring them closer instead of send them away.

Father Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk who has dedicated his life to contemplative prayer, gives us these words for the welcoming prayer:

Welcome, welcome, welcome. I welcome everything that comes to me today because I know it’s for my healing. I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions. I let go of my desire for power and control. I let go of my desire for affection, esteem, approval and pleasure. I let go of my desire for survival and security. I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person or myself. I open to the love and presence of God and God’s action within. Amen.1

I love these lines, this concept, this practice. The Welcoming Prayer takes us out of our heads and into a space where we stop, even for a very few minutes, our analyzing and figuring. We relinquish our strategies and allow God to work within us, in the place where we are far more malleable than our mind. We are opening ourselves up to a divine encounter, which is never a bad idea.

It’s not just for those uncomfortable feelings either. The Welcoming Prayer is a practice for welcoming in something we want to own or embrace too. Like freedom.

I picture myself dancing on the beach. I welcome the image of myself. I welcome the feelings that come with it. I welcome myself, fully free. I welcome an image of myself walking with God in the lush garden, feeling the spaciousness of that moment, realizing the expanse of his lavishness and creativity.

After these few moments of imagining and welcoming, I blow out the candle and stand up and head back into the house. I am learning to welcome the Crock-Pot and the laundry and the junk mail too. Honoring my everyday skin and honoring my eternal soul, saying to all of it, You’re welcome.

Reflection & Expression

In your next twenty minutes of soul time, practice the Welcoming Prayer.

What do you need to welcome that you don’t want to?

What do you need to welcome that you want more of?

For Your Brazen Board

Find a word or image inspired by your own welcoming prayer. Or take a line from Father Keating’s prayer and add it.