Beginner's Grace

Beginner's Grace: Bringing Prayer into Your Life

Kate Braestrup (Free Press, 2010)

    There's something scandalous about prayer. Even for people who go to church, the thought of having a personal prayer life is challenging. We build our own stumbling blocks: imagining that our prayers have to be fresh, original and perfect; or knowing them so well we can't hear their inner life any more. Most seriously, I think, trying to pray means sitting face to face with the fact that we aren't as self-sufficient as we like to imagine. We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can take nothing from it, but in between, we are going to pretend to have this thing covered.

    In her capacity as a chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, Kate Braestrup meets people in need of prayer, even if they have gone years without thinking about it. Or, if they have thought of it, it's been with reluctance, or indeed resistance. "I'm too busy. I'm uncomfortable. All the people I know who pray are real jerks, and I don't want to be one of them. I have bad memories of abusive religious figures. I wouldn't know who I was praying to. I don't know what to say."

 

    So, if we imagine prayer in our own lives, we may not feel that we know when or how to pray, to whom, or to what end. Braestrup's Beginner's Grace proposes answers to these questions. She gives examples from assorted traditions, along with some simple, direct prayers of her own devising. Like Anne Lamott's Help, Thanks, Wow, which came out two years later, it also points out the places where our hearts lead the way, and we're praying without quite knowing it.

   Some of the 'whens' and 'hows' present themselves in the most ordinary ways. "Offering thanks for a meal is familiar, mannerly, and sensible, so much so that you might overlook the other helpful attribute of mealtime. It occurs with considerable regularity, once, twice, or three times a day, and because even forgetful and preoccupied people generally remember to eat, saying grace before supper doesn't require nearly as much self-discipline as carving out a distinct time for spiritual activity from days that are already overbooked."

    We part from our loved ones on a regular basis, and we could probably remember to say, or think, "God go with you till we meet again," or words to that effect. Like the physical threshold of our household, the passing into the night's sleep represents a change of state worthy to be noticed: "Because we don't know what the night will bring, because we will not necessarily remember what the night has held, bedtime is, as it has always been, a time that lends itself to prayer."

    How to pray? Braestrup has good words, but she sees beyond them. On a night when you can see a thousand stars, words may be superfluous. If the officers of the Warden Service are searching for your child in the woods, "Oh God, Oh God, Oh God" may be all you have, but you'll have it deeply. The God who 'makes me lie down in green pastures' may bring me to my knees, or, like a novice nun, to complete prostration; or he may permit me to hold the hand of a friend in a hospital bed.

    To whom? Braestrup is a Unitarian Universalist, so she is philosophically as well as temperamentally unlikely to try to persuade people of The One Right Way. But she'll take her stand here: "I believe all human souls are called to become as loving as they possibly can be, given the limitations that time and luck will inevitably impose. Love is the point, the purpose, and the ultimate value; it is consciousness and empathy, alpha and omega, beginning and end. God is love."

    And what's it all for? My favorite part of this book may be Braestrup's fitness instructor informing her cheerfully "that the logic of physical fitness is not teleological but tautological. This means that the goal of exercise is to enable you to exercise more." While we live, there is no 'last' workout, no final state of fitness. That's true of prayer, too. "There will be no moment–in this life, anyway–when I will be able to say, 'That's it! I've prayed, and the prayers have paid off: I'm a fully conscious, totally grateful, and unstintingly generous person. I can just start stuffing myself as soon as the plate hits the table.'" That's such a gloriously silly way of reminding us that life is made up of habits and practices, and we are always works in progress.

    That being the case, we always have an option for courage. Prayer feels risky, vulnerable - that's because it is. To pray is to stand, for that moment, in need: grateful for riches you didn't make, incomplete, imperfect, mortal. Like all those squats and crunches, we can expect it to feel like work, at least sometimes. "Doubt, frustration, and plain hard work are inevitable and more or less permanent features of a spiritual life. How could it be otherwise? No word, book, story, scent, or pretty statue can mask for long the essential pathos of the human being struggling to extract transcendent meaning from her merely human life."

Nonetheless, we persist. Alleluia! Amen.

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April 1, 2018