Ruth Calder
Prayer@quiet_meeting
Sat with a friend and her new diagnosis this afternoon. No words came, so I held her in the Light for the length of a pot of tea. Sometimes that is the whole prayer.
Rituals, prayers, dreams and encounters from every faith.
Sat with a friend and her new diagnosis this afternoon. No words came, so I held her in the Light for the length of a pot of tea. Sometimes that is the whole prayer.
Grew up with no religion at all. My parents were kind, practical people who thought church was for weddings. Last night I couldn't sleep, and for some reason I just said, out loud, 'Hi. I don't know if anyone's there. Thank you for my sister getting through her surgery.' Then I felt very silly, and also kind of lighter? Is it prayer if you don't know who you're addressing? Do I need to pick someone first? Genuinely asking. Please be gentle, I'm new at all of this.
3:50am at a truck stop outside Moose Jaw, minus four, the engine ticking as it cools. Head covered, phone propped on the dash, I recite Japji Sahib the way my Bapu ji did on the farm in Punjab: slowly, never racing the words. Out here it's just me, the reefer units humming, and frost on the windshield like lace. People think the road is lonely. Not at amrit vela. Waheguru is in the quiet before the diesel starts. Then an Ardas for everyone on the highway today, the ones I'll pass and never meet. Safe roads, sangat.
Sat with a friend in a hospital waiting room today, both of us too tired for words. So I borrowed Julian's: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Said it under my breath until I half believed it.
Vigils at 4:15. Psalm 63: 'my soul thirsts for you.' My soul mostly thirsted for coffee. I offered Him both, and I think He took them.
Evensong tonight, and the Nunc Dimittis: 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.' I've sung it a hundred times. Tonight was the first time I thought of Mum while singing it and still made it to the end. Just.
My sister's boy starts his electrician apprenticeship Monday, and she called and asked me to put a light up for him. First thing she's asked me for since Mama's house. So tonight I dressed a white candle with a little olive oil, set it in a saucer of sand on the kitchen table, and read Psalm 37 over it. 'Fret not thyself.' He frets. He gets that from me. Grandmama taught me you don't pray at the Lord like you're ordering at a drive-through. You pray alongside the work. That boy finished his course at the tech college, passed the aptitude test on the second go, and has his new boots lined up by the door already. My job is the rest of it. Candle's burning down now. I don't leave the room while it's lit, never have. Front porch swept, Florida Water on my hands, and a full heart.
Ardas before a long haul to Winnipeg, ending the way it always ends: Nanak naam chardi kala, tere bhaane sarbat da bhala. In Your will, may all be well with everyone. Including the guy who cut me off at the on-ramp.
Release night. The regression suite failed at 6:47pm with 312 errors, and I am the one who has to explain why. So at 10 I lit the lamp (brass, on a steel plate, nowhere near the curtains; my mother trained me well), sat in front of my little Devi picture, and began the Lalitha Sahasranama. A thousand names takes me about forty minutes. Somewhere around name 400 my shoulders came down from my ears. She is called Shri Mata, the auspicious mother. Tonight she was also the one who reminded me the build is not my whole life. The errors are still there. I'm just not drowning in them anymore. Tomorrow: debug. Tonight: kumkum on my forehead and sleep.
Our calendar has no leap years, so Pappa's anniversary creeps a little earlier through the English calendar every few years. This year it fell yesterday. The proper ceremonies were done for him by a priest at the Zoroastrian Centre in London, and I watched on my phone propped against the bread bin, scarf over my hair. At home I did what I know. Fresh oil in the divo (steel thali, nowhere near the curtains, as ever), a jar of white tuberoses, a cup of tea made the way he took it, far too sweet, and the Ashem Vohu and Yatha Ahu Vairyo for him, slowly, the way he taught me when I was six and fidgeting. He used to say prayers aren't for asking. They're for keeping the line open. So I kept the line open for an hour. Then I drank his tea, because he would have been offended if I'd poured it away.
Meeting for worship this morning: forty minutes of silence, one sentence of ministry, a wasp at the window. It was enough. Holding all of you in the Light this week.
At the Office this morning we had Psalm 88, the darkest one in the whole psalter. It doesn't even end in hope. The last line is 'darkness is my closest friend.' And I felt wonderful. Good sleep, sunny morning, the bread came out well. Singing it felt almost dishonest. Afterward I asked our novice master about it. He said: 'You aren't praying it for yourself today. Somewhere right now someone is living that psalm and can't pray at all. You're lending them your voice.' I've thought about little else since. Every psalm I don't feel is someone else's psalm. I just have to show up and sing it for them.
The school pickup line is twenty-two minutes of idling, so that's where I chant now. Nam Mô A Di Đà Phật, quietly, prayer beads looped over the gearshift. Yesterday the twins climbed in mid-chant and my son asked if I was talking to the car. My daughter, very seriously: 'No, she's calling the Buddha of Infinite Light so he knows where we are.' I couldn't have explained Pure Land practice better myself. She's seven.
People are always surprised when I tell them a ceremony in our house starts with almost an hour of prayer. Catholic prayers first, then the Priyè Ginen in Kreyòl, French and langaj, the long litany that calls the saints, the lwa and the ancestors, everyone in their proper order. My knees know exactly how long it is. Nobody is sticking pins in anything. Mostly we are praying, singing, feeding people, and asking Papa Legba to open the gate so the conversation can begin. Last Saturday my goddaughter led part of the Priyè for the first time. Her voice shook on the first line, and then it didn't. In the corner an old manbo closed her eyes and nodded. That nod is worth more than every movie version of us put together.
Baba is ill in Istanbul, the slow kind of ill that makes a son on another continent feel useless. Last night we were on a video call and he was too tired to talk, so he said, 'Then let's just do dhikr.' So we did. Him in his chair by the window in Kadıköy, me at my kitchen table in Chicago, each with a tesbih of thirty-three beads. La ilaha illallah, over and over, his voice a little behind mine because of the delay. We said nothing else for twenty minutes. I have never felt closer to him. Please keep him in your prayers, whatever shape your prayers take.
At Compline we turn the lights down until there is only the one lamp by the icon of Our Lady. Then the Salve Regina, from memory, because nobody can see the book anyway. Brother Anselm is eighty-three and sings a quarter-tone flat. For my first month I found it maddening. Now I listen for him. If he isn't there, something is wrong. After the last note comes the Great Silence, until morning. No talking in the corridors, just shoes on stone and the bell. I'm learning that the silence is not an absence of prayer. It is where the prayer goes to finish itself.
Gale warning for sea area Plymouth tonight, and three of the harbour boats still out past the Lizard. The whole village does the same thing on nights like this: checks the forecast forty times and pretends not to. I put Gran's old storm lantern in the window (battery-powered now, I'm not daft), set a dish of salt on the sill, and said what she always said: Mother of the deep water, hold them light as gulls, put the wind at their backs and the harbour lights before them, and bring them home before the tide turns twice. Two came in by ten. The third rang in from Newlyn at midnight, safe and sheltering. I slept like a stone.
Went up to the hospital this week to sit with Harold, who sang bass beside me in the choir for thirty years. He's had a hard fall and a harder week. He can't sing right now, so I told him I'd do the praying for both of us. Psalm 121, the one his mother used to say: 'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.' He mouthed along the whole way. When I got to 'the Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in,' he squeezed my hand so hard I thought I'd need a doctor myself. Folks ask how a deacon can also be a rootworker. Same answer every time: it's all the Psalms, it's all the Lord, and it's all love for the people in front of you.
My favorite prayer of the week takes about four minutes. Saturday night, three stars out, the braided candle lit, a cup of wine, the spice box passed around. My study group taught me the old idea that we're given an extra soul on Shabbat, the neshamah yeteirah, and that it leaves us at Havdalah. The spices are there to comfort the soul that stays behind. I think about that every week now, breathing in the cloves like it's a hug. Then we hold our fingers up to the flame to see the light on our nails, douse the candle in the wine with a little hiss, and say shavua tov. A separation between holy and ordinary, and somehow the ordinary week feels holier for it.
Wrote this for my altar as the nights draw in. Sharing in case it's useful to anyone heading toward Samhain: Old Mother of the turning year, keeper of the seed beneath the frost, I give you what is finished. Hold it while it rests. Teach me to be quiet in the dark and to trust the slow return of light. Blessed be.