What is prayer? I don’t know really. But if it’s anything, it must be a repository for the experience of today, a place for reckoning, with yourself, with the story of God that you tell or don’t tell, with the decisions you’re facing, with the guts of yourself. — Pádraig Ó Tuama 1
When I was a teenager, I knew a girl who used to say to people, “I love your guts”! Then she would explain that if you really hated someone, you’d say “I hate your guts,” so obviously to love someone’s viscera is, well, pretty special.
And now here comes Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, who admits he has no idea what prayer is, but links whatever it is to our guts. Prayer is a place of reckoning — and that right there is a delicious pun, for here in the American South when someone says “I reckon” they basically mean they believe something to be true. But I imagine in Belfast “a place for reckoning” probably carries much more weight, something more along the lines of a setting where everything gets examined carefully, and what is real is seen and said for what it truly is.
So casual affirmation or in-your-guts responsibility — either way, prayer is a place where something happens. It’s deep, it’s in your heart, your intestines. It’s here and now, in the present moment, and it’s experiential: embodied, not merely thought about. But this embodied reality dances like Ginger Rogers with the story we tell (or fail to tell) about “God” — whatever that is. I’m reminded of the definition of God attributed to Barry Taylor, the AC/DC roadie who became an Episcopal priest: “God is the name of the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.”
So what is the story we tell (or don’t tell) about that blanket-enfolded Mystery? And how does it land in our heart, in our faith (or lack thereof), in our moment of deepest accountability or merely in the radical freedom of the present moment? Give your answer for that question to that Mystery and you have prayer.
I can imagine someone replying, “But — does prayer have to be so… heavy? I was just going to ask God to help me balance my budget.”
Okay, so not every prayer rocks the entire cosmos. Or maybe it does? Maybe that frantic plea for a parking spot when you’re ten minutes late for a meeting that could change your life, really does matter. And maybe in those desperate words, you’re reckoning with your guts far more deeply than you realize. Think about this for a bit, and perhaps contemplative silence could begin to make a lot more sense — and call us into its prayerful presence.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love (Kindle Edition), p. 7.