Prayer

I've known that I feel a very definite connection/very clear link with the Divine for at least the last 50 of my 60 years. When I consider when it began, when I became conscious of this knowing, I can remember that while taking Sunday communion I would feel a special jolt/a special kind of zing in my heart. It would feel good. Or after saying the last Hail Mary or Our Father for confession of some inane thing, I'd walk home from Saturday night confession feeling lighter/feeling a special connection to something greater than myself. I didn't really know how to think about it, but I clearly felt it. And I liked it. Taking the communion wafer and letting it melt on my tongue always felt good. Special. A cementing of this connection between me and the unknown.

When I was eight years old, my mother was placed in Belvue for "observation." New York state had only two ways to end a marriage: proof of insanity or proof of adultery. My father had my mother committed to prove she was insane. She wasn't. But she had to stay there for at least a month, and I was devastated. It was December, close to Christmas. One afternoon my father took me and my two older sisters to visit my mother. After seeing my mother in Belvue, I felt raw and in shock. There was my mother in her pajama's, with a cheap terrycloth robe, at two in the afternoon, in this place where everyone looked strange. My mother had been taken from me, to this place where she could not put on street clothes, could not own who she was; could not show her humanness via clothing identity. The institutional dress was actually undress.

I was sobbing as we said our goodbyes, and I felt shock and disbelief at what I'd just seen.
My father, sisters and I walked down Fifth avenue, and stopped at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
It was very cold outside, so we went into the Cathedral to get warm. The creche was on display for Christmas. We entered, and I was allowed to wander off on my own. I went over to look at the creche but the rows of small voltives in red glass caught my eye. It was only ten cents to light one, so I did. I took the wax starter, put it into a lit candle, then found just the right one to accept this flame. The fire took hold. I knelt down, put my head in my hands, and I began to cry. I was distraught that my mother was not with us, was not coming home. And as I cried, with my head bowed, I gradually felt a presence. Not human. Somehow I knew that I was not alone. I knew that God/The Almighty/The Universe/The Sacred was with me. I knew that I would be alright, and that my mother would be alright.

As profound an experience as this was, I believe that I didn't reflect on it as a kid. My mother came home, and my world was right again. Some years later the divorce laws changed, and my father left. We moved to California, and as a teen I became obsessed with sex and politics. There were years that I never once contemplated my Saint Patrick's awakening. I stopped going to church, and fancied myself Agnostic, during the time that I fancied myself Socialist. Then during the summer I turned 15, while taking a physiology class, my soul stirred again.
Learning about the intricacies of the human body, I realized that this perfect harmony that is our body, our being, is no accident. Could never be an accident. There is some Divine plan afoot.
It again became clear to me that we are not alone.

Reading Gertrude Stein in the university library I fell in love with her maze of words. With how she hooks the reader into considering all the nuances of language. But most importantly, she meditated, and I vowed to learn how to meditate. I knew it would be one of the things I would do in my life.

Next I realized that I no longer wanted to eat flesh. This was a very very gradual awareness. At first I eschewed flesh because of the World Hunger Crisis. This was just before the start of the Green Revolution, and Paul Ehrlich had pronounced The Population Bomb and had shown the water and soil toll of breeding animals for food versus using feed crops for humans. The desire to not eat flesh gradually changed from a political statement, to the realization that I didn't want to eat flesh because I began to find it repugnant. For me eating one flesh became eating all flesh.
I tried to not cook meat meals for me and my husband Bob, but he objected. He would have his meat daily, thus I did too.

Till I left. After six years married, ten years together/inseparable, I left Bob.
The fact of my loving women began to consume me, and I strayed. I discovered what I didn't know could be discovered because I didn't know it was there, for me, to discover. The discovery of loving women propelled me to Boston. It became very clear that I must leave, that I must be in Boston; that I must restart my life.

In Boston I stopped eating meat, and I learned how to meditate. I found my Life's Teacher: Sant Ajaib Singh Ji who initiated me into Holy Naam. I have been given five names of God to use as a mantra, to help me stay focused, to help me not fear, to help me remember The Divine. These five names have seeped into my core and repeating them has become as natural as breathing.

My one and only prayer, each day, is:
"God Help me to realize that loving You is the most important thing in my life."
This has been my daily prayer since I was in my late thirties.

After my move to Ventura Couty, I found Margaret's copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
Her lover Marisa gave it to her one Christmas. "Una amiga siempre es una amiga.
Sinceramente, Marisa 12-77." I'd read The Prophet in my twenty's' of course, but I sat there and re-read it. Gibran's section on Prayer made we weep. It expressed what I feel; what I've been praying to the Universe each day since my late thirties.

Gibran says:
For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?

And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for
your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.
And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she
should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you stall come laughing.
When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very
hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.
Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy
and sweet communion.
For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking
you shall not receive:
And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted:
Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others you shall
not be heard.
It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.

I cannot teach you how to pray in words.
God listens not to your words save when He Himself utters them through your lips.
And I cannot teach you the prayer of the seas and the forests and the mountains.
But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their
prayer in your heart,
And if you but listen in the stillness of the night you shall hear them saying
in silence,
"Our God, who art our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth.
It is thy desire in us that desireth.
It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days which
are thine also.
We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us:
Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all."