March 30, 2012
Let me hear of your loving-kindness in the morning,
for I put my trust in you;
show me the road that I must walk,
for I lift up my soul to you. Psalm 143:8
“Did you remember to pray about it?” my friend asks.
My expression answers the question--I don’t even have to voice the word “no.” How is it that I forget?
I went to bed with worries last night and they kept me good company, still there to greet me on my waking. I tried to set them aside, to ignore them, to slog my way through. But I didn’t think to pray.
“Do you reaffirm your promise to give yourself to prayer and study?” my Bishop asked me and my sister and brother clergy just yesterday as we stood in our Cathedral to renew our ordination vows.
Give myself to prayer. Offer myself. Surrender. Time and time again I try to walk the path alone when God has promised me, shown me, that this is not the way.
“Praying is a slow dying,” my friend Suzanne Guthrie writes. “In prayer you give up something of yourself and appropriate something of the sphere of the Divine in a continuous cycle of dying and resurrection. In prayer the growing soul leans toward the Light as a seedling leans toward the sun’s path.”
I begin again. I give myself to prayer. Listen for loving-kindness. Lift up my soul to God.
Suzanne Guthrie's quote comes from her meditation for Lent 5 at www.edgeofenclosure.org
copyright © Anne E. Kitch 2012
