This post is a continuation of last week’s, Prayer Boots – Part 1, a chapter from my book, Letters from the Holy Ground.
This summer a friend and I had a yard sale. For a week I hauled boxes from attic and basement. The children and I lugged baby clothes and infant swings to the dining room, where the kids promptly set up house. “Remember this? O Mom, look! I remember this cute little dress. I really looked so sweet in it, didn’t I?” they chirped sounding like they were eighty years old. Cicelia spent two hours playing with the Johnson and Johnson baby blocks. They had a tea party with the chipped china sitting at the little red table with their knees up to their chins. Each box held wonder. “Look mom, these beautiful curtains. Can I have them in my room?” Diana crowed, pulling out the tattered remains of the drapes that hung in our first apartment.
Later that evening she came to me. Holding a tiny blue sock to her lip and tucking her head under my arm, she said softly, eyes glowing with the rapt smile of one who has seen a vision of angels, “Oh Mommie, I remember me.”
Something forgotten, something precious, tender and pure that Diana called me had been recovered for her in that tiny sock. When I asked what she meant, she said, “Well I just remember myself when I was a baby.” That tiny sock I could never keep on her foot took her back to a pre-verbal time where she was held, rocked, nursed, sung to. It was a place where me dwelled, the essence of her being in the holy ground of the womb. And she stilled her non-stop seven year old inquisitive mind to forget herself, to pay attention, and remember who she is: a child cradled in the loving bliss of One who is larger, kinder and more beautiful than she, and in whom she lives and moves and has her being.
She still crawls in bed with me in the mornings, her coltish long legs and arms poking, thrashing around, giggling, telling me jokes and that she loves me so much. She seeks herself in that safe place, before she bolts into her day of dolls and math and spelling and exuberant surprises. I wish we could all come to our prayer with her trust, playfulness and devotion.
I stared in shock whenever I passed the dining room with all those cartons brimming over with my past. This is the room where we gather to pray, to recount our salvation history, to remember and receive the Eucharist. Boxes lined the walls. Infant seats and infant carriers and infant bottles and infant sleepers, undershirts and socks spilled all over the space where we sing songs of love to Mary’s baby.
My daughters poked about in their past, where we come to poke in our past, holding it to the light, turning it over in our palms, wondering what sort of price it would bring, praying God to be merciful.
The sale was one day only. My friend and I sweated it out, swilling ice tea, tallying our profits and losses. During lulls in business, stricken with visions of having to haul all the stuff to the dump, we rushed about with markers slashing our prices. “Everything must go,” we resolved, as we paused to fold one last time the sleeper we had laundered and folded so many occasions we had lost count. We smoothed tiny collars and wrote $.10 on the stickers.
The Age of Aquarius macrame went, along with the tires, decrepit lounger, ice crusher, and malt maker. We carted off my friend’s wedding gown, the fondue pot and five or six boxes of baby clothes to the thrift shop.
It was afterwards as I was picking up hangers and empty boxes from the floor of the room where we, breaking the bread and lifting the cup, do as he asked. Gathering up scraps of newspaper and tags, I saw the little nightie on the table. It was then, forgetting myself in the mystery that rocks us all, and holding the soft worn flannel, sweet with baby scent to my cheek, that I remembered me.
One of the deepest mysteries of holy ground is the mystery of identity. When God meets Moses at the burning bush, the two exchange their identities. God calls, “Moses, Moses.” The call is unique, distinct. There can be no mistaking who is being summoned.
Moses’ response is the classic prophetic response to a call from God: Henanni, or Here I Am. After Moses receives his mission, he presses this burning Reality for its identity. “Who shall I say sent me?” he asks. And God responds, “Tell them that I Am.”
Holy ground is the place of exchange where I Am meets Here I Am, where What I Have Been will be transformed by Who I Am Becoming, where I forget what I thought I was and remember I am.
On just about every communion table I have ever seen are carved the words: “Do this in remembrance.” The little sacraments of our lives are those graced moments of holy communion when we do something prayerfully and in remembrance. We release our grasping and coping. Then bread is transformed into the body of Christ, a blue sock into an angel’s wing, and a mortal being into a being in God.
God instructed Moses on Mt. Sinai to make holy garments for Aaron and his sons, including a plate of gold engraved with the words “Holy to the Lord,” which Aaron was to wear on his forehead, apparently to help everyone keep their parts straight. My boots came with a tag that read: “Genuine Leather, Ozark Trail.” They didn’t have any with gold plates. I’ll try to remember my part anyway.
These days you can buy all kinds of prayer paraphernalia: crystals, incense, podcasts of famous pray-ers, cds of words of power, icons, statues, pictures of Jesus in a startling array of poses, holy bells and whistles, oils and unguents. My hunch is that it’s best to travel light, and you could do a lot worse than to get a good pair of boots.
Why not do it in remembrance? Maybe we’ll meet on the trail.
Read more about prayer at
www.fromholyground.org
Contact Loretta at
lross@fromholyground.org, www.fbook.me/sanctuary
Follow at http://twitter.com/lfross
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I held out the tray of tiny plastic cups filled with juice, freshly poured, bubbles still floating on top. He delicately placed finger and thumb around his choice, and went to draw it out, but it was stuck and would not budge. He tightened his grip, pulled, and the thin plastic cup shattered in his fingers. Juice flew onto the suit jacket of the fellow next to him, the carpet before the altar, and my white robe and scapular with the appliquéd wheat and golden sun. How can such a tiny cup hold so much? we wondered.
ith her here, and, in her contact with God, find healing for her soul. Inside the hermitage my two daughters, ages four and six, are playing quietly. My guest and I sit still, leaning into the grace of the moment-listening to meadowlarks and watching willows bend in the breeze. After a while my children’s play grows noisier. Thumping, giggles, and something crashing to the floor intrude on the serenity. They are jumping on the bed. The more I try to focus on the silence and my guest, the louder the girls get. Finally I rise from my prayer stool and go inside. “Please be quiet,” I whisper. As I take Diana’s arm to lead her over to some books, she shouts in a screechy, ear-splitting whine, “Mom, stop! You are hurting my arm.”
The Praying Life 