I have learned that I am a visual person. I pray best within physical tangible experiences as opposed to mental gymnastics. Wonderful pious language sings in my ears and I can read it with passion. The words come from my mouth with the right intonation and expression, but they sit in my heart like a stone. They merely weigh down my experiences, making me believe there must be some sort of deficit in me if I these words don’t speak to me. It forces me to ask what am I missing? Why can I not see what generations before me have seen in Julian of Norwich or Catherine of Siena? What is it that prevents me from taking their language and realizing it is speaking of experiences that touched them so profoundly that their lives were altered? Many people that I speak to have been touched by the writings of these experiences, but at the moment, in my own journey of faith, they simply feel empty and pointless.
Trying to pray in a variety of ways has often lead me to either struggle with deafening silences, or simply become too busy to undertake what it is that others expect me to try in prayer for fear of those deafening silences; and sometimes, silence is scary. I know that I am stubborn. I don’t like to be told how I should pray, what I should experience, and yet I love trying suggestions and gentle offerings from people who have tried different forms of prayer and found them life giving. I love being exposed to ways that other people have been able to connect with God. That is how I discovered the prayers in the Carmina Gadelica as compiled by Alexander Carmichael in the late 1800’s. These words have struck me as so much more than just words to be recited, but prayers that were integrated into the very fabric of daily life in the Irish and Scottish cultures. They weren’t learned and recited by rote, but grew from their collective experiences. It was a thanksgiving in the midst of harsh conditions. I first read these when I was volunteering on the isle of Iona. I spent six weeks was doing menial tasks as a housekeeper in the Abbey. Making bed, scrubbing floors, washing dishes and taking purposeful time away from my secular job and my life in Canada trying to discern what it was that I felt called to. These prayers don’t just speak to people who prayed them in the past, but their simplicity works now. I may not have sheep to feed or cloth to weave, but I can be thankful that I can go and buy groceries and walk to have lunch with a friend. I can recall God’s presence in the moment, reminding me of how I treat others, what I do with my time. Simple little things of the day that let me see the face of Christ in everyone I meet.
I have walked the empty shores, certain that no one is anywhere nearby, with the cold winds whipping around me and the seas crashing on the stony shoreline, and these words spoke to me about who God is. Then in lighting a fire, on the cool Scottish nights, talking with new friends and strangers from all over the world, these prayers illuminated what I was feeling. They have the same sort of otherness about them, differences in culture, time and space that the Julian’s and Catherine’s have, but I have come to understand better since they echo my own personal experience of the Divine. It’s not only in those shores that I found God, but also in bringing thanksgiving into my life, in Toronto traffic, within the walls of my cubicle or anywhere I found myself.
This has been a difficult journey because I have spent years separating out what is church and what is life; what is prayer, and what is business; what is fun and what is expected. These prayers were a catalyst for me in my spiritual experience that started me down a path to try to reunite my spiritual and my secular self. Now they feel like an old friend, comfortable and nurturing precisely because these prayers speak of everyday experiences. They taught me to go beyond what my experiences of prayer have been in the childish ways of ‘now I lay me down to sleep.’ Growing up without a tradition of prayer to grow with me, I was left with an elementary understanding of prayer that didn’t fit in my adult life, and only pushed me further from God. These prayers taught me that prayer is not an external experience to revere God, but an inward understanding of what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God, with all the faults, frailties and oddities that are associated with being human. These prayers are grateful and thankful and thoughtful. They call their attention to God in the everyday. In the morning rising, in the evening and in the smooring of the fires. Instead of suddenly being struck by the ordinariness of extraordinary events in life, they see the extraordinary in the absolute ordinariness that surrounds.
Here is one of my favourites, but all are listed in Carmina Gadelica
