prayers like gravel flung at the sky
“Folk Tale” - R.S. Thomas
The poem “Folk Tale” first landed in my consciousness thanks to a sermon – a good one – I heard in Los Angeles sometime in 2013. The sermon might have been about prayer or perhaps something else, but the preacher pointed to the image of the poet here, tossing his pebbles up toward an apparently imperviable window, to describe what it can feel like to pray.
His point was that prayer can feel like a fruitless effort. It can feel as if we are outside of something, standing below a window that we have been told belongs to our Beloved, pouring our life into the undertaking only to be met by silence and the vague perception that we are becoming gradually more unhinged.
It is the slight movement of the curtain that might keep us at our devotion. Maybe someone is moving around up there. Maybe Someone has heard us.
I know about as much about prayer as I do about life, which is to say, very little, but the more I have prayed, and the more I have failed at praying, the more and more I have been convinced of the blessings in an alternative understanding of Thomas’s poem and its imagery. I think it is true that the poem describes certain seasons of our human reality, and in this is a reassuring beauty and solidarity. We are, all of us, on the ground. We experience a sort of spiritual exile. We look to a God who seems distant from us, and we continue in our faithfulness by the promise glimpsed in fleeting, uncertain benedictions that fall like snow: merciful, disruptive, impermanent.
But the more I have read this poem, and the more I have prayed, the more I am sure that the relationship described here between the two parties – the Lover and the Beloved – describes not so much our individual or collective human desire for God, but God’s own perfect and unbridled desire for each of us. God is the one sending pebbles up toward the window with earnestness and passion. We are the Beloved in our tidy little rooms, curtains drawn tight against the world and its precarity.
The great spiritual mothers and fathers of the Church (Teresa of Avila, Benedict of Nursia, Thomas Aquinas, and the rest of the heavenly company) all explore this dynamic in their own way, of course, and it is no insight of mine that sheds any new light on the profundity of God’s desire. This is simply to say that the imagery of the poem has been a balm for my heart in this week of petty and international catastrophes, and it has blossomed into renewed invitation to recollection and to grace.
Some years ago I had a spiritual director who was very faithful in asking me, “how’s your prayer life” within the first five minutes of our time together. I remember one time I replied, “well, it’s like I’m passing God in the hallway and giving him a high-five on the way toward somewhere. I know he’s there, I know he’s encouraging me, but we don’t see each other for very long.” In the clarity of her wisdom, my director took my hands and looked deliberately into my spirit and said, “the hallway is a nice place to move around, but you won’t learn anything or get to know anyone unless you accompany God into the room.”
I hadn’t yet read Mere Christianity in which C.S. Lewis makes functionally this exact same point. Lewis lingers more on the importance of embracing a rooted Christian faith vs. some nebulous affiliation with or affirmation of the Divine, but the logic was applicable to my chaotic spiritual life. I wasn’t going to get anywhere if I was always going somewhere.
It was only in long, purposeful hours of solitude that I learned to pray. It was only by the quiet confidence of stillness I was able to rise from the musty old desk in the not-so-tidy room of my spirit and begin to open the curtains. It was only when my voice ebbed into silence that I was able to hear Someone else and to know Him as my Beloved. Needless to say, I did a lot of crying for awhile, because each time my prayer was met by a steady, crystalline reply, it was more than I could ever bear – too good, too annihilating, too gracious and underserved and large and unutterable – more than I could ever hope for or understand. I couldn’t (and still often cannot) believe that Someone like God would ever bother to throw even a singular pebble up toward someone like me.
Protecting a place of silence within ourselves is the ultimate defiance of despair. Everything on earth will attempt to colonize the gentlest pieces of us – the pieces that know how to speak to and hear from and revel in the extraordinary tenderness of Jesus. This place, these pieces – like the rest of us – belong only to God, and it is vital that we protect them with the fervor of a lover on the ground.
Prayer is a matter of life and death. Without it, we are consumed by need and we are broken against the forces of wickedness and abuse that are only too easy to listen to when they seem to be calling our name. With prayer, we are inhabited by Life itself. There is no turning away from light or grace, because in prayer, it is light and grace that are in fact the conditions in which this communion unfolds. To pray is to be met fully in our fullness, to feel the cracks inside of us kissed with affection and filled up to the brim with mercy. Even repentance is like coming out of the womb: absolute, abject terror and also the only possible way to stay alive.
Just a few days ago, I wrote in my journal, “I have no idea what to do besides pray, so that is what I will do.”
We must continue to pray. We must teach one another to pray and trust in prayer as a real, true, and material labor. We must tell one another about our prayer, however solid or weak it has been, and we must be companions to one another in the effort. Mercifully we are accompanied by the great communion of saints who are our gracious teachers, and by their example, we might broaden our sense of possibility.
God is still seeking us, longing for the gift of our whole heart. Keep still for awhile, sometime today. Listen for the timbre of His voice. Let nothing be more precious than what you hear.