In prayer, as in so many other areas of life, we “learn by going where we have to go.” Many of us took our first steps on the path of prayer as children with lines we recited at bedtime or mealtime, or with innocent prayer lists that included blessings for guinea pigs and dolls. We may have come to prayer through crisis or loss, or through those who, when we didn’t even realize what we most needed, offered to pray for us.
Those of us who make a practice of prayer probably share an appetite to deepen or open or broaden that practice from time to time. We may want to reach beyond our denominational traditions and learn from those who pray more formally, or less; from those who pray the lectionary, or don’t; from those whose prayers are anchored in the liturgical year, or from those whose prayers are freshly called forth like morning dew in the moment. “Teach us to pray” is a prayer to keep praying.
Those who teach us are not always parents or priests or pastors. Sometimes we learn from strangers on street corners whose words stay with us. Sometimes we learn from children, who know how to ask in trust that what they need will be given. Sometimes we learn from poets. Poets have enriched my prayer life by giving me lines that lift up my heart, or words for lament, or images that widen my awareness—of the grandeur of God flaming out “like shining from shook foil,” or of a “beauteous evening, calm and free” when “the holy time is quiet as a nun / breathless with adoration.”
Poetry and prayer are closely related. Even poems that make no pretense of broaching the sacred invite us to look closely and listen to words, to notice how they trigger associations and invite the mind to play with meaning, how they summon feelings that take us by surprise. Poets slow us down. They teach us to stop and go in before we go on. They play at the edges of mystery, holding a tension between line and sentence, between sense and reason, between the epiphanic and the deeply, comfortingly familiar. Not every poem is a prayer, but I have come to believe that poetry, even for the angry and the disenchanted, takes its inspiration and energy from the Spirit who teaches us to pray.
In the poems and reflections that follow, I take “prayer” to include a range of ways that poets and their readers enter into divine presence. But of course prayer covers a wide range of practices that includes not only words, read or spoken or remembered, recited in a pew or cried out by a deathbed, but also wordless meditation, body work that opens spiritual pathways, the small breath prayers and sudden remembrances that see us through busy days. In the course of those days, words from hymns and Psalms and poems from which only fragments remain in our memories may cross our minds like little comets across the night sky.
The Bible is a rich, essential, and sufficient resource for learning to pray. But it’s not a rule book; it is a living word to a living people who are also meant to keep learning from one another in the midst of the long conversation between faith and culture. From those able to articulate current concerns deeply, we learn how to meet the urgencies of our own generation, how to translate, adapt, apply, and live into ancient texts, and how to find words like new wineskins for what the Spirit has done and is doing among us. The fourth-century hymn “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” moves me to awe. Lines from a Berkeley poet, wrestling with a life-changing diagnosis in the late twentieth century, do the same: “Let me bless and cherish every moment . . . to arm myself with consciousness / that every earthly darkness / has given way to light, thus far.” Another poet wrote, “All love shepherds us.” And in their various and beautiful ways, all those who love words shepherd us as well, directing us toward the Word who was in the beginning.
I wrote this book in gratitude. The reflections I offer in the following chapters are my way of giving thanks not only for the poems included, but for many others that have given me phrases, lines, and words that, like little seeds of the Spirit, have taken root and grown and nourished me. I am also grateful, having taught poetry courses over the past three decades, for the ways poets have awakened many who have had no inclination to pray, who find themselves doing something very like praying as something in a turn of phrase turns their hearts in a new direction. Some of the poems I include here are from known poets, others from not-so-known, but each has something to teach us, I think, about how to pray. I have added one of my own poems, not because I think I belong among their ranks, but because I have found myself, on occasion, drawn to pray by means of poems.
I hope that the prayers these poets wrote in quiet moments reclaimed in the midst of their own messy lives may serve contemporary readers in new ways. They redirect us to biblical stories, to images and language in ways that awaken fresh attention. They offer words for situations not unlike those we face, separated though we are from some of them by several hundred years.
All are poets from the “Western tradition,” though those of us who inhabit that tradition also have much to learn from the rich spirituality of Asia, Africa, India, and South America, and from tribal cultures everywhere. These poems represent only one lineage among many, but it is one to receive with due regard.
The readings I share here are contemplative exercises, not scholarly analyses. As such, they are meant more as invitation than instruction. My hope is to share gifts I have received from poets who pray, or who reflect on prayer, confident that they have other gifts to deliver to readers who seek in them the spiritual companionship one pilgrim can offer another along the way.