How and Why I Wrote My Own Morning Prayer Service

So already, last month I created a prayer service for myself, something I could do every morning before I embarked on "the day" as prescribed by anticipated obligations and often unpredicted thoughts and feelings. I've been adhering to my ritual pretty regularly, speaking the words of the service out loud as I stand in my office facing the window. 

I was reminded of my daily practice this morning while reading Maria Popova's "Proximity: A Meditative Visual Poem for Those Reaching for Something They Can’t Quite Grasp, Inspired by Trees" in this week's" Brain Pickings newsletter--and, in particular, while watching the ten-minute film "Proximity" embedded within it. The film by Russell Dawson was inspired by David Whyte's "short lyrical essay"*  called "Close," which Popova quotes in her essay. Among other much more important things, it reminds us that being close to and comforted by trees, even embodying them, does not require fleeing the town.

Much but not all of the film is presented in two side-by-side frames, regularly creating two perspectives. Its many images of trees and its clips of Dawson moving with the grace and the apparent inner stillness of trees are simultaneously calming and captivating. 

Screen shot of video on Brain Pickings Page

I was immediately mesmerized by the film. But I did not begin thinking about my morning prayer service until I saw that Dawson was not "surrounded by nature": his chair was located near, and in fact was facing, a rather utilitarian, inhabited town-like place.

Similarly, my office window looks out on a relatively nondescript residential setting. And almost every morning when I look out at it during the first part of my prayer service, I laugh. That's because the view always reminds me of a story in Ben Birnbaum's essay "How to Pray: Reverence, Stories, and The Rebbe's Dream."** In telling the story, Birnbaum recounts*** a renowned Chasidic rabbi's answer to his son's question, "'With what are you praying?'": "'With the floor and with the bench'"  (24). Speaking of himself, Birnbaum explains that he learned to pray "with the sheet linoleum and the gunmetal folding chairs in the Young Israel Synagogue of New Lots and East New York" (24).

These mornings, as I look out my office window during the first part my morning prayer service, I always think to myself, "I'm praying with two trees and a dozen parked cars"--you can see them above. And then I laugh.

I love to laugh as part of my prayer service because I haven't laughed very much during these past months, and it's not just pandemic fatigue and worry that have gotten me down. Frankly, I probably wouldn't have created a prayer service had I not lost my dad in December and were my mother not living with Alzheimer's and the slow, steady decline associated with it.

When I first sensed that I was anxiously adrift in uncharted emotional waters, I purchased a book called The Jewish Book of Grief & Healing: A Spiritual Companion for Mourning to help me feel a little easier with my predictably difficult situation. (Only now that I am posting this picture of it do I realize that its cover also depicts a chair set on some kind of a field!) The book contains a variety of brief essays by rabbis and others, most of which are no more than four pages long: I suspect the book's wise editors and authors understood that those in the early months of mourning generally can't read more than four pages at a time.

In his essay entitled "Praying in Crisis," Rabbi Mike Comins begins with a long quotation from Rabbi Zoë Klein, which includes these sentences:

" . . . I have noticed a difference between people who try to muster some relationship with God in crises and those who have always been in relationship with God. Those who have always been in relationship can lean more easily on God, and can speak more freely, expressing their hope as well as their anger. I have seen prayer help people overcome loss, deal with grief, change their direction, and recover, but usually it is in people  who have become practiced in prayer through their own rituals and devotion to it. It is not usual that someone prays for the first time and their life is altered, although sometimes it can happen, rare as revelation" (38).****

Rabbi Klein's phrase "practiced in prayer" reminded me of a question that Rabbi Mona Strick posed last fall to those of us enrolled the adult education class she was teaching called "Service of the Heart: Wrestling with Prayer"*****: how might you change as a result of establishing and sustaining a prayer practice? As the course went along, a related question was added for our consideration: what (else) might change as a result of your establishing and sustaining a prayer practice? In one class, we even considered how God might change in response to people's prayers.******

I was glad that Rabbi Strick spoke about practice rather than discipline. For me, practice suggests repetition until something becomes more customary, natural, efficient, and/or better, whereas discipline suggests adherence for the sake of improvement or correction. Rabbi Strick's language was distinctly invitational, as opposed to judgmental: we weren't in trouble if we'd never been in the habit of praying.

When our class concluded on December 3, I had it in mind to go back through my course materials in order to choose some prayer translations Rabbi Strick had shared to cobble together into a personal prayer practice. But my dad took sick on the same day the course ended and died of COVID-19 a little bit more than a week later. For a number of weeks, there was no other focus except the passing of my dad.

But as I suspected, once more and more of the legal and financial ends related to my dad's death had been tied up, or at least organized, there was more time to feel. I was already in the habit of being kinder to myself, courtesy of Katherine May's Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times:

"When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began treating myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?" (238)*******

But my attempts at self-care weren't seeming sufficient: this wasn't a time simply about darkness as a precursor to dawn. Slow cooker pot roast and long walks even in combination weren't going to do it, though they definitely helped. 

That's when I began reading parts of The Jewish Book of Grief and Healing more often. When I came upon Rabbi Comins' essay and its wisdom from Rabbi Klein, I knew it was time to come up with my own daily prayer practice that, if Rabbi Klein was right, might better enable me to feel comforted and less alone on those days when I really was praying in crisis.

         So I headed back to my Rabbi Strick materials and found a lot of what needed. From our class's discussions of fixed prayer (keva) and prayer practice, I borrowed some language from Abraham Joshua Heschel to remind me to pray even when I wasn't inclined--and to remind me that prayers in the words of others could help me to pray when I wasn't at all feeling inspired or inclined to pray--and that even that uninspired, "canned" prayer might lead me to more intentional or inspired prayer down the road.

Drawing by Scott Ketcham

From a class session focused on praying in love and awe, I borrowed an alternative translation of Ahava Rabah (from Siddur Sha'ar Zahav) that reminds me to think of God, others, the world, justice for all--and to express gratitude--in other words, to get me--my ego, my  sadness, my fear--from dominating, even becoming my world view. About the time I was pulling together my prayer service, my husband Scott was frequently drawing a model who often posed with a pilates balls of various sizes. Initially, I tended to think of the model as hugging something that comforted her, almost like a body, but the more I said this particular prayer, the more I also saw her as embracing and loving the world, which needs loving. I think the view outside of my office window has also helped with this: we often love what we laugh at.

Finally, I just had to have some of my prayer service be in my own words. So I wrote a very particular prayer and some contextualizing, even explanatory words for it and a few other parts of the service--just to remind me of the intention of my own choices. What I love about the sections I've written is that I don't have to think them up every day, even though they're original: like the rest of my prayer service, they're there waiting for me when I walk into my office in the morning.

As spring approaches, and wintering is on the verge of being literally and figuratively over, I've been sensing that my prayer service needs a little updating. The Jewish fixed prayers I've chosen are keepers, but the original sections may need a little revising to better reflect my present state and needs: everything is always shifting and changing, including grief, including me. What won't change, though, is my heading into my office each morning for this five-minute practice that has made me feel connected, held, and much more peaceful if no less sad. I hope I'll keep feeling this way. But if I don't, I'll keep at it a good while longer in hopes that it will again come to sustain me.

Drawing by Scott Ketcham

* Popova, M. (2021, March 12). Proximity: A Meditative Visual Poem for Those Reaching for Something They Can't Quite Grasp, Inspired by Trees. Brain Pickings. https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/03/10/proximity/?mc_cid=a336f1f004&mc_eid=dbe9e53593.  

** Birnbaum, B. (2001). How to Pray: Reverence, Stories, and the Rebbe's Dream. In The best American essays 2001 (pp. 22–41). essay, Houghton Mifflin. 

*** Here's the whole story:  "One day . . .  a Russian Chasidic rabbi known as Schneur Zalman of Ladi was praying alongside his son and, turning to the boy, asked what bit of scripture he was using to focus his prayers. The child answered that he was meditating on the phrase 'Whatsoever is lofty shall bow down before Thee.' Then he asked his father the same question: 'With what are you praying?' The rabbi answered, 'With the floor and with the bench'" (24).

**** Comins, M. (2016). Praying in Crisis. In The Jewish book of grief & healing: a spiritual companion for mourning (pp. 38–40). essay, Jewish Lights Publishing. 

***** The course was offered as part of Hebrew College's Open Circle Jewish Learning program, and most but not all of my classmates were fellow members of the Boston Synagogue

*(6) I remember being especially struck by two companion questions during our fourth session. The first was "What happens to us during prayer? How are we transformed?" I was intrigued that the question was not asking what happened to us after or as a result of prayer, but rather during it. The second was "How is God transformed?" Never had I thought of God as being transformable--as needing, wanting, even aspiring to any kind of transformation, through prayer or anything else.

*(7) May, K. (2020). Wintering: the power of rest and retreat in difficult times. Riverhead Books.