I’ve learned to anticipate it as a spiritual director. It’s often one of the first comments a new client shares with me, sometimes hesitantly, holding a bit of shame as her voice lowers almost to a whisper. As if what she is about to say mustn’t be overheard, lest God strike her down right then and there.
“I don’t read the Bible anymore.”
“The way I used to connect with God doesn’t seem to work anymore.”
“The things I used to do feel forced and stale now. Obligatory.”
“If I’m honest, I don’t even want to pray or talk to God.”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore. How can I converse with a being I’m not sure even exists?”
I ask her about the when and where she’s felt connection and disconnection from God. I ask her which ordinary moments throughout the day feel sacred. I ask her when she’s felt surprised by the Holy in the mundane.
It is possible, over time, to accept a number of new ideas. That prayer can be the still moments spent watching the wind roll over the tree tops like swells on the sea. Or the instant a fiddle hits the note that reverberates in our chest. When something of eternity in us echoes back what it hears, sees, feels, or senses of the minutia of transcendence that has cracked open in our presence.
We often think of mystery as that which we cannot know, but it may be more expansive to imagine mystery as endless knowability.
What if there are countless ways to experience the Great Mystery?
Or the question I ask my clients: Have you ever considered listening to the birds as type of prayer?
When people have a deep desire to engage in contemplative practices but aren’t quite sure how to engage after enduring the weight of “quiet times” and intense Bible studies, my encouragement is to start small. If we’re alive, we’re inhaling and exhaling all day long, though unless we have a consistent meditation or yoga practice, few of us pay much attention to our breath.
By pairing simple words or phrases with the inhale and exhale, our breath becomes a form of prayer.
Inhale: Creator of life
Exhale: Awaken within me
Many of us learned to separate time spent in connectedness with the Divine from the rest of our days, that silence and listening and receiving from God were only suited for the prayer closet, not the school pick-up line, a child’s soccer game, or the middle of a noisy restaurant. But it’s in the very material nature of life where we see the Incarnate One meet people, inviting them to deeper dimensions of themselves and of life than they’ve yet to imagine. He does this in the backdrop of their ordinary days with a sacred presence in all things.
[Included is a 10-minute audio breath meditation, ending with breath prayer.]
Vanessa Sadler is a trauma-informed Spiritual Director and Enneagram Specialist. Through her company Abide (@abidinginstory), she collaborates with clients who seek deeper abiding and a greater understanding of the ways they relate with God, self and others. Vanessa has Level I and Level II certificates in Narrative Focused Trauma Care from The Allender Center, located within the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and also offers Integrated Story Work to her clients along with a culture identity component.
“Many of us learned to separate time spent in connectedness with the Divine from the rest of our days…”
What a lovely invitation you extend here to learn the Practice of the Presence, Vanessa.
Thank you, too, for the audio breath meditation. Beatutiful.
You are most welcome.. Oh to practice the awareness of being fully engaged in the present moment and open to the experiences unfolding in the here and now. May it be.