Sometimes I'll just post a title, because it's where my head is currently. It's been in this place of muddling through War, Plague and Famine all over the world.
I just finished reading a blog from 
From time to time, I get asked, "Why do you pray? What's it good for anyway? People are still suffering."
And from time to time, I wonder myself. It's in those moments that I return to the moment I first learned the Art of Prayer as a child. Sitting in a Catholic Church with my mother in the middle of the afternoon with a multitude of other people, wondering why everyone was so upset. It was 1972 and I'd just gone back to school. I remember that school was let out early, and in second grade, that was a big deal.
I've told this story before, but it was life changing for me, so I repeat it often.
The Olympics had been derailed by the hostage crisis in Munich. The world was standing still, but I was too little to grasp the gravity of it. A woman sat beside us and she noticed that I was fidgeting, not capable of knowing much with the exception my mother was crying quietly as she prayed. Her rosary was moving swiftly through her fingers. My mother never cried.
The woman (she was an older "grandma" so I was comfortable) nudged me softly and whispered, "God will hear your prayers too. There are people in another country who need you to ask for their lives to be spared, they are in the Olympics. You know what that is, yes?"
I nodded, oh yes. That was something I could wrap my head around. I knew what the Olympic Games were! And if simple, small me could help, I was in!
She patted the tussock (the kneeling pad in pews for many churches) and beckoned for me to join her. There we prayed together, and she didn't repeat the "Hail Mary" or "Our Father" as I'd heard all my life. She simply "talked to God" softly while I listened.
"There," she said before she got up, "now you tell God what it is that you're feeling. There are angels here who will send your message so fast that it happens between the blinking of your eye or each breath you take!"
"Is that why we should close our eyes when we pray?" I asked.
She chuckled and said that most people close their eyes so they could concentrate better. That made sense. When I opened my eyes again, she wasn't next to us anymore, but I had my first real lesson in prayer. I always believed she was an angel.
I have spent my life praying.
And while I have studied many religions, no longer adhering to any of them ...there are prayer moments that I will never forget that did not happen in churches, including kneeling in the delivery waiting room at the hospital with the father of my children and our son and daughter while our oldest son was with his girlfriend in the delivery room; mother and child near death. We held hands and I prayed softly, but out loud.
There, in the dim light of pre dawn, other people gathered and many knelt with us, holding hands with strangers, for the light and life of my grandson and his mother to be spared.
They were, and on Halloween nearly 13 years ago, both came through. I chuckle now, because I tell my grandson that the Great Pumpkin helped deliver him to us, but he reminds me that pumpkins can be angels in disguise. Here's another angel in disguise, my sweet cat "Smudgekins".
I was reading this afternoon to find a good and less ecumenical answer for those who ask "Why do you pray? What's it good for?"
One of the reasons that religion wishes to own prayer is because it works. It truly does. Whether or not you believe in one God or many. There is an energy, a frequency and a vibration that happens during prayer that connects us all ...including my sweet kitty who was less than pleased that I got up from my meditation corner to come write about The Art Of Prayer.
Each time you pray, you become an artist on the canvas of reality. So "doodle as you wish" and it will become a masterpiece.
Amen.
Thank you for reading! And as usual, all images are mine (
