Learning to Pray from a 6-yr-old (8 now)

Illustration from "Ask Me" by Bernard Waber and illustrated by Suzy Lee

If you know me by now, you know that some of my favorite slices of life are slices that involve my granddaughter, Emerson. And some of those slices have bike rides. We love to go on the Centennial Trail near Snohomish. We've been doing this for three years now, and we now have several "must" stops. We must stop at the picnic tables by the bridge on the way out, so we can have a snack and throw pinwheel seeds off the bridge. We both love to watch them twirl their way to a small stream under the bridge and then watch them as they meander down the stream and out into the world. "There they go," Emerson says, "off into the big wide world now!"

Another favorite spot is a little bench on the way home where there is an old Oak tree (I think it's oak). And it's here that we take off our helmets and lay down under that Oak tree and just look up at the sky. Emerson likes to call this stop our "just thinking" stop. One time as we were looking up to the sky and through that tree, I asked Emerson what we were doing. And she said, "Well, you know how your mind has all sorts of things in it? I mean I learn new things every day, Papa. Well, sometimes I just need to let them sort a bit. I guess this is just kind of sorting time. But it's more than that, I think. After all that sorting, I start thinking about all the things I don't know yet, and I get so excited about it, Pops. I just want to know so much more!"

Now you know why I love my Emerson time!

I've been reading about some of the spiritual practices of St. Francis of Assisi and one that I think is similar this "think time" for Emerson and I, is a practice was one that St. Francis was famous for: sitting on the ground! He loved to do this especially when people wanted to lift him up and elevate his stature. On one particular day, a group of monks had invited him to speak. They had prepared a great banquet in his honor and had a huge chair at the head of the table in his honor! When St. Francis arrived, he refused to sit in the chair and instead sat on the ground and invited all the monks, dressed in all their finery, to join him!

Here's what Jon M. Sweeney writes in his spirituality study on Francis:

"Sitting on the ground was when Francis was by himself, in the midst of a life devoted to knot knowing, bearing witness, and taking action. He was on the ground to identify with what's there, and to refuel. Like raising his arms to the sky, sitting on the ground was an embodied expression of faith. To sit on the ground, like a creature. To be low to the ground as one who is lowly, humble, and poor--like, for instance, the migrant Mary and the infant unwanted Christ in the manger, in Bethlehem."

In a world that seems to think it knows it all, and a world that uses that knowledge as leverage and power to get ahead of everyone else, it's refreshing and radical, I think, to just simply learn to sit on the ground and embrace the "not knowing" of it all. And learning to yearn for what's behind all that "not knowing"!

I end today with a quote by Micah Joseph Berdichevski, trans. Aaron Ofer, in Siddur Sha'ar Zahav, Congregation Sha'ar Zahav, San Francisco. It's called "All Things Pray"

It is not you alone, or we, or those others who pray; all things pray, all things pour forth their souls. The heavens pray, the earth prays, every creature and every living thing prays. In all life, there is longing. Creation is itself but a longing, a kind of prayer to the Almighty. What are the clouds, the rising and setting of the sun, the soft radiance of the moon, and the gentleness of the night? What are the flashes of the human mind and the storms of the human heart? They are all prayers, the outpouring of the boundless longing for God.

As I ponder this quote, my mind floats back to the last time Emerson and I laid on that grass with our eyes to the sky. As I watched Emerson, I saw all of creation...yearning, just like she was, to know God. I saw and experienced prayer.

Your friend and pastor, dedicated to the practice of more sitting on the ground, Brook