How to pray?

This week, I'm still working out a bit for myself what it is to enter Lent. I mentioned at our Tuesday supper and Bible study that I find myself looking for a discipline, but that everything seems so trivial; I am saving water with 4 or 5 minute showers, but it feels short of transformative. I could try to eat less or skip dessert more, but then I'd just be focused on losing my pregnancy weight, not the fasting of Christ in the desert. So I am still trying. In general, I'm trying to pay attention more, to move a little more slowly, in spirit if not in practice. And praying.

But how to pray? A while ago I was listening to the radio program Speaking of Faith (http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/), where they interviewed one of my favorite writers, Roberta Bondi. Her books bring together contemporary life and theology with the early monastic desert fathers and mothers. She says,
We often have a kind of notion as part of this highfalutin, noble picture of ourselves as pray-ers that when we pray we need to be completely attentive and we need to be fully engaged and we need to be concentrating and we need to be focused. But the fact is, if prayer is our end of a relationship with God, that's not the way we are with the people we love a large portion of the time. We simply are in their presence. We're going about our lives at the same time in each other's presence, aware and sustained by each other, but not much more than that.

She went on to tell the story of how exhausted and lifeless she felt when she began teaching (she's now retired from Emory University). She said she came home from work and felt totally useless to her family. She was already so tired, and would then be overwhelmed by all the things they needed her for--the washing machine had overflowed, or there was too much homework, or whatever. And she'd just want to run away. What she also knew, though, was that the important thing was that she was there--that part of being a family was showing up for meals. She continued, "However we are, however we think we ought to be in prayer, the fact is we just need to show up and do the best we can do. It's like being in a family."

I certainly know my prayer is like that--I have joked about how the dog's crate in my office had replaced my meditation cushion, but that since the dog died, the meditation cushion is back. For a year, most of my prayer time went to walking in the woods with him. Now, I'm back trying to sit down there in the corner--both examples of a certain kind of holy "showing up"--not always so regular, not always so focused, but doing the best I can.

Here is a line from TS Eliot (I found myself quoting him in my Transfiguration sermon, too).
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
Amen.

Blessings,
Sara+