This is me. This is how I pray.
It’s how I prayed for two years, actually. Scurrying to the secret place and writing longhand every morning through intense soul-pain, repressed emotions, and life changes, tears of rage and gratitude dried in the margins.
I stopped last December after a major revelation brought closure to issues stemming from before I was born. After a thousand pages, all the disparate, broken pieces of my psyche suddenly fused into one singular ME.
So I left it behind. Moved on to more “normal” prayer practices like closing my eyes and saying words with my mouth.
But yesterday I started writing again. These weeks of quarantine, with their isolation and togetherness, have dredged up my substrata. Exposed the next layer of work to be done.
Things I can’t say with my mouth because I don’t know how to think them yet.
Writing my prayers bypasses the need to make sense. It connects spirit to Spirit. It slows me down, streams instead of skips, is allowed to rhyme without reason―and thereby let the reason emerge.
It looks like a journal. And mostly, it is. But it’s so much more than that.
It’s a conversation. Messy ink shaped into daily letters to (and sometimes from) God, straight from my heart.