The Prayer Book: Introduction
I have found every prayer book that I have picked up to be a disappointment and I imagine this one will not be much different. That's because we often seek a thing for what it promises—and how that promise makes us feel—rather than what it actually is. The old Zen saying goes that enlightenment is the moon and the teachings are a finger pointing to the moon. What a let-down, then, when you open a book expecting cold, enormous luminance and get a wrinkly finger instead. What do I expect to feel when I open a book of prayers? To be comforted, perhaps. Or challenged in a way that's just the right amount of challenging but not too much. Or to have my “life changed,” whatever that means. Instead, I get words written, usually, by people with a different belief system than mine, whose comforts and challenges and life-changing moments are completely out of step with me.
And yet I keep looking through those prayer books. It's an intermittent search, driven by a need that overtakes me every few years. I suddenly find myself poring over the Book of Common Prayer online, wondering if I should order a copy. Clicking through the pages and finding prayers that are both exactly what I need and far from it. I am jealous of Christian prayer books and devotionals, the rosary, the pocket-sized books of psalms. I want something that I can carry around with me, that can serve as a comfort when I need it, as a reminder of what's important when I get distracted, as a restraint when I need to be humble. I tried on the Christian books for size, but for the most part they would not do. Too exclusionary, too reductionist of mystery. Or, on the other hand, just poorly written rambles with no structure and no poetry, impossible to recite or memorize.
I am not a praying person, but sometime a few years ago, around 2019 or 2020, I began to write prayers without knowing why or to whom they were addressed or what they were for. There is something about prayer as a language of earnestness. It's not about wheedling the universe for what we want, but being in a practice of standing without anything to hide behind, saying: this is what I value, this is what I need, this is what I love.
I write and recite prayers like everyone else, mostly in times of stress and duress. Not only when I feel my own frailty, but my suffering opens me up to compassion for others. Suffering, along with the fragility of life, is something that I turn to over and over again in these prayers.
These prayers come primarily from three inspirational sources. The first is Anglican prayers, in particular the prayers of the people I don't have an Anglican/Episcopalian background, but when I was in my late 20s I was fortunate enough to encounter these prayers in their natural habitat. At that time I traveled to the UK for grad school research. My hosts in Oxford took me to an Evensong service at Exeter College Chapel. This was the first time that I heard the Prayers of the People. The priest said, “We pray for those who will die tonight, and those who tend to them.” This was Christian prayer unlike any that I had ever heard before and opened up for me a much more expansive notion of what prayer could be. Up until that point, the prayers I learned were either about trying to get what you want or trying to stay on God's good side. But here were prayers that simply expanded our compassion beyond ourselves.
The second source is Buddhist prayer with its beautiful and aspirational qualities that expand to hold the entire universe. Sometimes these prayers are addressed to specific entities like Buddhas or Bodhisattvas, but they are often just uttered aspirations for wisdom, compassion, well-being, and ease, and they routinely include all beings in the universe within their scope. Or they are prayed in devotion to beings who embody qualities we are trying to cultivate within ourselves, like compassion or diligence.
The third source is a more particular and modern: Pádraig Ó Tuama's prayer book for the Corrymeela community. This is liturgy was created from scratch by an accomplished poet and theologian, whose job it was to bring together groups of people real grievances and hatreds toward one another every morning and unite them in ecumenical prayer. These prayers are a model for me in thinking about prayer as a communal activity, even when we're praying alone.
You will notice that some of these prayers are spoken with the “I” pronoun while others use “we”. That's a reflection of my beliefs about prayer. I was taught as a young person that prayer was a personal thing between you and God. In the practice of my inspirational sources, however, prayer is something that is said out loud in each others' hearing, something that we commit to in unison and in community. I chose the pronouns to use based on what struck me when composing the prayer, but you can switch them out, replacing I with We, and vice versa.
Likewise, the entity—if anyone—being addressed changes from prayer to prayer. Sometimes I say “Dear One” and at other times I say “Compassionate Ones” and many prayers address no one in particular. Again, I made these choices intuitively based on the contents of the prayers, but they can easily be switched around to suit your needs.
And that's what I hope: that these prayers will be useful to you. While they cannot heal you or give you wisdom or lighten your heart, may they point to the way.