Welcome to A Prayer Practice,
A weekly podcast by The Gathering.
I'm Kelly Weber,
And I'm a spiritual director.
A spiritual director is someone who accompanies you as you share about your spiritual journey,
Helping you notice God's presence and activity along the way.
Spiritual direction is a ministry that helps you grow in prayer,
In authenticity,
And into your calling.
There are times in all of our lives when perhaps prayers become stale,
When we feel disconnected from God,
Or perhaps the idea of prayer is overwhelming and we just don't know where to start.
Or maybe we've fallen out of the habit of praying and want to learn new ways that are more personal,
More contemplative,
More embodied.
Well,
I'm here to tell you that prayer is something we learn how to do and something we practice doing in order to live more fully into our relationship with God.
There are a lot of ways to pray,
And in this podcast,
We'll explore different modes of prayer,
We'll pray together,
And you'll even find that you're praying in ways that you might not have even considered to be prayer before.
Today is a prayer for hope.
As a noun,
There are two definitions of hope.
The first and probably the one we think of most is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.
Inherent in this definition,
There's a bit of anxiety.
You've probably heard the idiom,
An expectation is a resentment waiting to happen.
I'm not sure hope as an expectation is what we really mean.
The more archaic definition though is a feeling of trust.
Hope does not have an end game.
Rather,
Hope is an abiding state that we are called to live in.
It's often described as a wellspring because within us,
God is the bountiful source where hope resides.
Connecting to that wellspring of hope allows us,
When we are in times of hardship,
To suffer generously.
It's not rational to continue to trust to hope when we are suffering,
And yet we do.
The poets have often spoken of this hoping beyond hope.
In 1732,
The poet Alexander Pope coined the phrase,
Hope springs eternal,
In his poem Essay on Man.
Hope humbly then,
With trembling pinion sore,
Wait the great teacher death and God adore.
What future bliss he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Man never is but always to be blessed.
The soul uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
And perhaps our own American mystic,
Emily Dickinson,
Writes,
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.
And sweetest in the gale is heard,
And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird that kept so many wool.
I've heard it in the chillest land and on the strangest sea,
Yet never in extremity it asked a crumb of me.
Hope is the free gift infused into us by a benevolent God that says,
I'm here.
This prayer for hope today is going to be a breathing practice.
How amazing that God created our bodies to respond to breath in such a physical,
Emotional,
And spiritual way.
Neuroscience tells us that when our nervous system is in overwhelm,
Our blood pressure rises,
Our heart beats faster,
The neural pathways from our prefrontal cortex,
The part of our brain that deals with executive functions,
To the other parts of our brain,
Get muddy and slow down.
We freeze,
We fly,
Or we fight.
But the wisdom of our bodies created by God tell us that when we slow down and breathe deeply,
We are able to slow our heart rates,
Lower our blood pressure,
Reconnect those neural pathways.
And by doing so,
Sink deeply into that wellspring of hope,
That calm reminder that God is here and worthy of trust.
Let's pray.
Start by repeating each of these phrases after me.
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be.
Spend a minute inviting and acknowledging that God is here.
Be in the presence of the one who made you.
Trust in God's presence.
Inhale deeply for a count of five,
Feeling your chest and your ribcage expand.
Let the breath naturally release as it wants to.
Do that a few more times.
Pay attention to any tension you feel in your body.
Are your shoulders dropping as you exhale?
Is your jaw unclenching?
Where in your body do you need to send a breath of hope?
Spend a minute checking in with your body like a flashlight of awareness.
Send breath to your feet,
Your calves,
Your belly,
Your chest,
Your left hip,
Your right shoulder.
Send breath to all the stuck places.
Maybe you even have pain in places.
Allow the breath of hope to penetrate these hurting spaces within you.
Dear Jesus,
You came to bring us hope not as an expectation of life to come,
But hope as an abiding trust that life with you is here and now and forever.
Teach us to abide in that trust.
Teach us to sink deeply into the hope you've infused into us.
Teach us to breathe and know that you are God.
Allow our bodies to understand what hope feels like.
Allow the synapses of our brains to fire freely.
And where the pain resides in our bodies,
Let hope reside too,
Changing if not the pain and changing us in our capacity.
Thank you for creating us to be such resilient creatures that we might suffer generously as you did for us.
All this we ask in the name of the one who is here with us,
Emmanuel.
Amen.
Thanks for praying with me today.
Take this blessing as you move throughout your day.
May your chest open wide and warm with hope.
May your feet take you to those who need you today.
May your voice be useful and powerful in the spaces you inhabit.
May your imagination bring joy and your intellect bring peace.
May you suffer generously in solidarity with the world.
And may you be replenished from the wellspring of the one who loves you and says,
I'm here.
Be well,
Friends.
Join me next week as we continue our practice.
