Unraveled

 

The prayer flags I bought in Katmandu and strung across the apple trees in my yard are unraveling.  Thread by thread unwoven by winds, rain, and snow, the passing of time. Not unlike myself. 

Praying can do this to you.  Unravel you.  Make you lighter, more open and tender fragile with each releasement. 

I am not talking about the kind of prayers for things or outcomes although I still do pray in this way. No, this is the kind of unraveling prayer that is pulled from your body when you do not know what else to do and have no hope.  When you are being asked to let go of something that you are not nearly ready to let go of. When the suffering of the world no longer bounces off so easily but flows into your tender heart space.  When you realize with more and more fascination the utter awesomeness and mystery of this life that has been gifted to you, but how often you still fail to be more generous. This is the prayer of longing for light in the darkness and the knowing of your own power in the midst of your powerlessness.

I recently visited J an elderly man who has landed in a nursing home after a bad fall.  Mary and I were visiting as lay ministers for our church offering company, caring, and the Eucharist.  I never imagined myself as someone who would give the Eucharist to another.  For one thing, being raised Catholic, it still seems sacrosanct that someone other than a priest or assigned deacon could offer up the bread of life in prayer.  But the progressive Episcopal church that I belong to is generous with the sacraments.  After a short training and armed with the prayer book, I was deemed ready to offer up the prayers of communion to anyone who was hungry for it – wisely paired with a member of the church who had done this before.

J’s nursing home was on the threadbare side of care and reminded me of the facility that my grandmother spent the last decade of her life.  The old and frail lined the hallways in wheelchairs, as if ready to be taken somewhere but endlessly waiting and staring out quietly into space.  There were the pungent smells of ammonia and mold mixed with lunch scents rising up from the basement kitchen. In J’s room there was only a small curtain of privacy between the two beds. I was nervous about meeting J, what to say, how to pray, but he fell into easy conversation telling Mary and I about his children, the apartment he missed and hoped to return to, the stroke that left him unable to move well on his whole left side. 

Mary asked the aid to remove the small plastic urinal from the tray table so she could set out the small chalice of wine and saucer for wafers.  The church had prepared an easy-to-follow sequence of prayers that we all read from.  J needed help turning the pages. His bird like hand folding into itself from the stroke couldn’t separate the pages.  As we shared in the communion, I felt the presence of the divine with us “two or three gathered in their name” and felt a flow of love from my heart into J’s into Mary’s out into the tender old people sitting the wheel chairs.  My grandmother was with me during those prayers. I felt deep gratitude for the aids and nurses caring for the most fragile in our community, in our world, day after day doing what they can to bring comfort often without enough resources for their patients, for themselves.

I am not sure if and when I will be invited to visit J again but I pray for him now when I walk through the woods with so much gratitude for my strong legs, still nimble hands to cook the food that I like and turn the page of a book. I pray for J and for my own mother who lives in a facility now and so much more alone than before, for my church for giving me a chance to learn how to be part of community in a more generous and loving way, for my own confused aging and where it might end up.  This praying unravels me into something less solid, more open, more fragile, more clear and courageous.