Reflection on Prayer

Mirror, Mirror On The Wall...

It has been 415 days since I retired. Keep that number in mind please, because we will return to it in a moment.

One of the tasks I set myself to when Nummi closed and I found I had lots of time on my hands was to establish for myself a daily prayer routine. I never had one. In fact prayer was one of those areas of my spiritual life that I had pretty much relegated entirely to the Church.  I prayed when I went to Mass on Sunday (to which I was faithful)  and on Holy Days  (which ones I didn't forget and for which I could get time off). After some contemplation and experimentation, I have indeed developed a daily prayer routine that feels good to me. It is substantive enough to look and sound like real prayer, and it is comfortable enough to feel genuine. If you account for the time for development, a couple of disruptions from life events that necessitated trips back East, and of course the effects of my own inertia, I have employed my daily prayer routine somewhere between 250 and 300 times over the past 415 days. Compared to my previous track record, it is a remarkable accomplishment.

Yet, we must put this in perspective. One of the sage bits of inscrutable Oriental Wisdom that Toyota imparted to us at Nummi was that you must perform an operation one thousand times in order to become proficient. Thus a couple's love making becomes established in the first year, and any novelty introduced after children arrive remains just that, a novelty, as there is no longer an opportunity to achieve proficiency. Of course that's a plus or minus kind of number -- at Nummi, some people could pick things up almost immediately, and others, like Fred, were on schedule to achieve proficiency in a thousand years. Interestingly, a thousand repetitions was a good estimate of how long it would take for elements of the job to begin to become second nature. By this measure, I am somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way to point where my daily prayer routine becomes proficient.

I raise these issues because yesterday I had one of those epiphanous moments that make you stop in your tracks and squawk. My eight year old granddaughter was talking to her mother in the living room. From her vantage point, she had a clear view of mirror on the wall directly behind her mother. Being eight and naturally vain, she watched herself in the mirror as she spoke to her mother.

"Wait, wait, wait,"  her mother said. "Who are you talking to?"

"You," my granddaughter said.

"Then why are you not looking at me?"

I am pleased with where I've come with prayer this past year, but if I am honest, I have to admit that I am still a bit preoccupied with whether or not I look good praying. I am watching the words come out of me, posturing a bit to see if I look holier.

At Nummi, every time you trained on new job, you knew there was going to be that period of time when you felt awkward. When you were a new hire, it was very daunting and even discouraging. Later on, you got to recognizing it for what it was. You knew you had a thousand repetitions between you and competence, and while there was no shortening the process, you knew that little by little your body would respond.

In another 700 repetitions of my daily prayer, in a little less than two years if I can discipline myself, I am pretty sure that I will be able to stop looking in the mirror when I pray.

"...when these things have been repeated to us and in us a thousand times over, we begin to learn to trust simply to the word and power of God, beyond and against appearances ..."
                                                                -- from The Letters of John Newton

Paul and Bernie Listen to Bill and God

Pencil Drawing on Bar Napkin, circa 1598

           Every time I attend a play, especially something like Shakespeare, I spend the first twenty minutes or so trying to adjust my hearing. Initially, it is very difficult to hear anything but the sound of incomprehensible voices. Eventually, with whatever adjustment is necessary, words begin to pop out, then phrases, and pretty soon, I am hearing what they are saying. With Shakespeare (whose image appears to the left), I think that part of the issue is that we come to expect a certain order to the language we hear. We expect the speaker to choose from a familiar palette of phrases and sentence structures, something like “it is raining cats and dogs.” Shakespeare, however, is playful and creative, and enjoys surprising us with distinctive words and phrases. “The wind pushed the rain as a dog herding sheep, gathering the scattered drops into a solid mat of wool driven through the narrow gate of the pen.” Prayer is not unlike that. 

 I have spent the last several months attuning my soul to the sound of prayer. I have been trying to get accustomed to prayer as dialogue. I had to figure out what to say, and I had to learn to listen. If I had to describe my prayer six months ago, I would say that I used to mumble a lot and then look at my nails and scratch a lot instead of listening for an answer. I would imagine that God experienced me like I experience most teenagers.

 “Like, I don’t know what to do,” I would mumble to God, hands stuffed in pockets, looking at the ground, a kind of blank look on my face.

“Waa wa waa waa wa,” God would say, but mostly what I heard was Paul Simon singing Cecelia.

“What?” I asked, although it is not a question, it’s a deflection.

“Wa waa wa wa?”

I would look at the ceiling and stare with an expression that indicated I had just shut down and that nothing more would go in or come out of my brain, perhaps forever.

Prayer is ultimately conversation, and I have never been a good (or at least not a comfortable) conversationalist. Fortunately, there is loads of advice for those who would like to be, and most all of it says something like “look for something of interest in the other person and comment on it, ask questions, and listen.”

A lot of what I hear from God is still "waa waa waa," but at least Paul has forgotten about Cecelia and has begun asking pertinent questions: Lord, is it Be Bop a Lula? Or ooh Papa Doo?

A Stitch in Time

I have started a cross stitch project. A picture of what it will someday look like is just to the left. Sand introduced me to cross stitch years and years ago. I don't remember the circumstances of why she might have done that. I did one little piece, and recall being reasonable pleased with the process, but not pleased enough apparently to try it again. Of course that was back in the day, as they say. I was working long hours and didn't feel any need to find a pastime.

Things change however. Now, I am not working long hours. I am busy with this and that -- a future blog will treat the issue of shelves, for example. I've put up more shelves in the house in the past year than in the entire rest of my life. And I have yet to encounter a boring day. A significant amount of my time has been devoted to trying to regain some spiritual discipline in my life. Finding myself outside the former NUMMI plant with a big boot mark on my butt presented me with the opportunity to do a self inventory, and one thing I knew I had to do with my time was to re-establish some spiritual discipline. Perhaps because I am a product of my culture, I assumed I could knock that out in a few weeks and move on. Well, either I was spiritually more decrepit than I thought, or spiritual renovation occurs on its own unique timetable, but here it is almost a year later and I find that if I had to estimate how much I've accomplished, I would say that I am maybe 75% of the way to where I want to be.

Where do I want to be? Just a bit further, I'm sure.

During this past NFL season, Troy Aikmen (the former Dallas quarterback and now one of Fox television's sportscasters) made several references to young quarterbacks reaching a point in their play where "the game slows down." He was referring to that point at which experience begins to kick in, and a player starts to see more of what's going on around him. He's been around the block enough to quickly recognize patterns and is able to anticipate outcomes and recognize opportunities more easily. It happens in every workplace. There are those people that seem to be so calm and collected in their jobs, and they're smooth, seemingly always one step ahead.

I think I will be able to recognize when I reach the point where spiritually "the game slows down." There will come a point where prayer will flow more naturally and easily. There will be time when I won't have to think so hard about what is the right thing to do next. There will come a time when no matter how much turmoil there is around me, I will be able to be at peace.

Oddly, there are incredibly mundane things you can do to obtain these lofty goals. "Avoid idleness," Father Dom Lorenzo Scupoli advises in the 16th century classic The Spiritual Combat. "Avoid idleness and be awake and vigilant, and busied with the thoughts and deeds which befit your state of life."

There really is some wisdom in that. Of the people that I've talked to that are retired -- voluntarily or otherwise -- the ones who are having a hard time coping talk about being bored or feeling directionless, and the ones who are doing well say they keep themselves busy doing something they like. One guy now has enough time to devote to his long time hobby of restoring old cars. That's a little too rich for me of course. I am cheap, something that I listed as a good point on my personal inventory incidently. That's one of the reasons that cross stitch appealed to me. I spent less than five dollars on this project (a kit that includes fabric, thread, instructions, and even the needle), and another couple for the plastic hoop that holds the material. For that modest investment, I will keep myself occupied for many hours, and in the end have a pretty little piece of art.

There is a satisfaction in having an activity to pass time, something to keep the mind from wandering too far afield. That might have been obvious to everybody else in the world, but I don't know that I would have understood that a year ago. I was too busy to understand the beauty of being busy.

So, how many cross stitch projects and how many new shelves will it take before my game slows down?

I'm just hoping my game slows down before it stops, if you catch my drift.

OMG!!!

OMG!!! by Bernie

So I was listening to my eight year old granddaughter having a conversation with her eight year old friend. The friend was talking about a third party who was not present.

"So she says to her," the friend said of the third party. "'Oh my God, I hate you."

"That wasn't nice," my granddaughter admonished. "She shouldn't have said that. It's one of the Commandments. She should have said 'Oh my gosh, I hate you.'"

The other girl agreed.

I was very proud of my daughter at that moment -- her efforts to instill a sense of right and wrong in her daughter are bearing fruit. And I was very proud of my granddaughter for having the courage to use this knowledge in her everyday life.

Life is a little complicated most of the time. It is difficult to get a firm grasp on all its elements. Just when you think you've got it under control the transmission in the car goes out, or you burn the dinner on the stove top, or you lose your job. Oh my God, what am I going to do?  Worse still are those times when you are in control, or so you think, and still you wind up doing or saying the exact wrong thing. Oh my God, I shouldn't have done that.

My granddaughter is appropriately myopic in her observations about the world. She's eight, she's allowed to be. Hopefully, some day soon, she will begin to realize there is another dynamic at work in the statement she heard and with equal courage question the appropriateness of hate.

When I look at myself in the mirror, the phrase that most often comes to mind nowadays is Oh my God, I am getting old. I am really trying to move past this being simply an expletive. I am trying to embrace this as a prayer, trying to be grateful and hopeful. Oh my God, thank you for getting me this far, thank you for allowing me to see the fruits of my labor, thank you giving me the sense to appreciate life in all its dimensions. But there are those days when I am most keenly aware of the aches and pains, when I feel particularly diminished by the things that don't work anymore, when resignation replaces anticipation, and on those days I am saying Oh my God, do you see what's happening to me?

Then again, sometimes looking in the mirror is not a spiritual experience at all -- you just look at the skid marks and the wreckage and wonder if drinking contributed to the accident or did you just fall asleep at the wheel. In this case, follow my granddaughter's advice and say Oh my gosh, look at that mess.