Lenten Prayer 1

For Lent this year I've decided to write a prayer every Friday.  There are some things I could give up, I suppose, like wine or chocolate or all the usuals, but it's always struck me that since I partake in moderation always, it's more helpful to my own journey to add something substantial instead of subtracting.  In past years Martin and I took up dancing for twenty minutes every night; but we are so exhausted with his unrelenting schedule that we're in bed by 9 or 10.  So here's the prayer. I don't feel prepared to craft it, but then I guess that's the whole point.


As Charley and I drove back up the hill toward home
listening to psychedelic jazz on the radio,
(his white paws, muddy from a walk, tucked beneath a pink towel)
suddenly I was struck by our lack of speech,
and I said out loud
"I miss running my mouth off, Charley."

When did I become this adult?
Hours go by and I talk to no one
except maybe a dog, a crow or the sparrows in the yard.
Sometimes silence billows with loneliness

but sometimes it is taut with others:

A cloud of people,
the edge of their voices,
the poppy-red brightness of their laughter.
Something they said makes me laugh out loud,
or I see the turn of their wrist
as they peel an apple,
their head bent
over a cup of tea.

There are footsteps
in this silence, too,
and something else.

Trust, perhaps?
Words offered into the emptiness of silence
Like stones thrown from my hand,
caught by another.
And held.

*
And this, from Sing the Journey--Faith & Life Resources, a division of Mennonite Publishing Network:

184.
For those who walked with us,
this is a prayer.

For those who have gone ahead,
this is a blessing.

For those who touched and tended us,
who lingered with us while they lived,
this is a thanksgiving.

For those who journey still with us
in the shadows of awareness,
in the crevices of memory,
in the landscape of our dreams,
this is a benediction.