Which brings me to the thing that opened my mind to the concept of prayer. Rumi, the Persian mystic, is credited with this simple truth: There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. I found myself repeating this line often during the time that my late husband was dying of cancer. So many people prayed for his survival and repeatedly told us they were doing so. We had to learn to thank them for something that we knew was not going to change his fate. Their intentions were good, and we knew that. I still recall what may have been the wisest thing ever said to me. When I asked him privately to dedicate a song to Pete at a concert, the folksinger Tom Rush said to me, "I hope things turn out the way they'e supposed to." While I don't think I can understand why things turned out the way they did in this life, at least his wisdom helped to dispel the notion that all that prayer had failed when it did not produce a cure.
As for Pete, his preferred ways of kneeling to kiss the ground included solitary hikes in the woods, fiercely-played tennis matches, watching herons in flight, and top-down drives to secret waterfalls.
This morning, a friend posted a poem by one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. Its theme, similar to the Rumi quote, reminded me that there is a place for prayer in my life. Of course, I fell in love with the poem. I hope that you do, too:
Praying
It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak
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