Faith practices in Western, U.S. mainline protestant congregations have implicit rules created centuries earlier by elite, educated, male clergy. I have experienced much of religion to be dominated by normative colonial practices, including prayer. For centuries, these prayers have been spoken aloud, addressing a God I don’t recognize in a voice I cannot replicate.
These prayers, centuries-old and steeped in American culture, have marginalized individuals and groups of people from an intimate and individualized prayer life and God. Recognizing the harm done by this kind of male-dominated prayer is the work of decolonizing prayer. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh write: “It implies the recognition and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and class that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures that clearly intertwined with global capitalism and Western modernity.”
Praying is not just for those that want to be silently infused with beautiful words. Prayer is the noise of ordinary life that is sometimes messy and uncomfortable. Prayer is not contained or orderly. Pray with loud chants of anguish for the land you stand on, the small weeping whispers of grief for love lost. Pray by noticing the color of your teenage daughter’s hair or recognizing the smell of a home-cooked meal. Pray what makes sense to you, here and now, without reservation.
When I was in my twenties and attending seminary for the first time, someone asked me about prayer. They wanted to know how I practiced prayer regularly. I thought, a regular, systematic, routine, performed practice of prayer? The kind of prayer spoken by gifted orators? I panicked at the inquiry. I did not pray like that, and I responded with, “My life is a prayer.” The response was defensive. I was a seminarian. I did not pray the way everyone thought I should and had suggested. I continued my defense by describing when I noticed the tree-lined city walk with autumn trees and rainbow fallen leaves as a prayer. This practice was the intentional noticing of God’s miraculous creation through the relationship with each other and the earth. It was not formal or written or spoken in a beautiful cadence. When I noticed the fallen leaves, it was a prayer of hope for a renewed world, and I paused. This was good. How could that not be prayer?
In my thirties, after my second time in seminary and years of teaching young people about the practice of prayer with rituals, candles, and stories, I began to imagine the beloved community differently using a feminist lens. Biblical women centered my ordination service and later my installation service--Esther, Ruth, and Naomi. Telling their ancient stories by intersecting the sacred text with my modern-day story was a prayer too. Acknowledging stories that are often marginalized and practicing the stories was a form of prayer. There were words spoken, but they felt like a poem to my heart rather than words in my head. The lyrics of their story spoke more Holy than the words written in the Book of Worship or ages-long traditional prayer.
14 For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” Esther, 4:14
16 But Ruth said, “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Ruth, 1:17
Most recently, in my forties, I am back in seminary for the third time, studying intersectional feminism and decolonial theory. Now, I am okay praying in ways that tell my story, not theirs. Prayer is not of the patriarchy, or the normative practices set by men long before me. No longer will colonialism take away my culture, religion, and identity, and I would not let it deny anyone else. Prayer is sharing the platform with voices and stories of people on the margins. This is how I pastor as a petite, female, bi-cultural woman in the U.S., interested in the power of feminism. What I was doing all along was being me, authentically and fully who God created me to be. Despite the demands, criticisms, and even marginalizing church’s tactics today, I prayed the way that made sense to me, in action rather than in word. I prayed with stories, walks, yoga, knitting, serving others, and breaking bread. Sometimes, I have had words to say, but God often comes to me, or I come to God, in other ways. The prayers I pray are fluid, nuanced, experiential with broken barriers, deeply relational, and creative. In other words, it was more about how I prayed rather than what I prayed. Dismantling the status quo and disrupting patriarchal norms is not easy and comfortable.
I began working in the church in my undergraduate years. Teaching young people about the church and finding their own authentic prayer practice was also the prayer I practiced. I did not have to give them particular words or tell them what prayer looked like. Their prayers were theirs, not mine. I helped navigate young people toward God, and that, too, was my prayer. In the beginning, a large poster hung in my office, most often (but not always) over my desk with the poem ”Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. She begins with these first lines: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” I did not read the prayer daily or even weekly. The images of the poster, flocks of geese playing, paired with the idea of the poem, were my prayers. More simply, the ritual of it hanging in my offices across the nation, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Iowa, and Colorado, for a few decades was also a prayer. You don’t have to be good. Rituals are more than traditional rites and published liturgy. Faith practices are more expansive than Our Mother and Father. More expansive than the Lord’s Prayer. More expansive than any prayer or label. If you pay attention to the rhythms of your life, they too become the poetry of your prayer life. More than anything, the words of the poem “Wild Geese” were an invitation to own my prayer life, as mine.
Mary Oliver is a renowned poet painting pictures with her words of the natural world and ordinary human experiences. What did she mean when she wrote you don’t have to be good? Was the poem comparing “good” to the dominant, capitalistic culture in which we are all dripping, even in the church? Did she mean you don’t have to yearn for success in the modern world, absent of art, authenticity, and imperfection? Did she mean that I did not have to be “good” at praying words out loud in a performance like my predecessors? Was she giving me permission to be a pastor in the way that made the most sense to me, not the world? The poem goes on, You love what the animal body of yours loves. You feel love and despair and you share and find liberation. And whether you do all of that well or not, the world continues on its way. I did not have to repent via a prayer that was established by capitalism and empire and misogyny. I didn’t have to pray a prayer that did not make sense to me. I resolved to cultivate a prayer life that is mine, not someone else’s. I would also teach others to do the same.
I have been most intrigued by women of the Bible. I have been more fascinated by their actions than by their words. None of them have been particularly articulate or performers of the faith in the way that we know today. Recently, I met with one of my professors, Rev. Dr. Kristina Lizardy-Hajbi. I was curious about my work with dismantling hierarchical and patriarchal practices in the church, feminist pedagogy, and how hard that would be as an ordained clergy and accomplice in modern American culture. She said something like, it will be more about the act of ministry that you will transform rather than the words you speak. In other words, titles do not matter; staffing structures are not the most important and leadership models that are not collaborative are not the most important. It is the method of your ministry within the dominating systems of the centuries-old church that matters the most. The same can be said about the way we pray. It is the divine action behind the prayer life that matters.
My prayer life is dependent on a bandwidth of grace. A lot of it. Part of my process was finding stories from my sacred text that spoke to me and gave me examples of prayer in many ways. If you are inclined, I invite you to pray with the ladies of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: Dance and sing and play instruments in the work of liberation with Miriam (Exodus 15:20). Pray with Puah and Shiphrah as they circle up and put the experiences of those economically disadvantaged in the center (Exodus 1:15). Pray with Esther as she risked her life and others to protect a whole generation of “others” (Esther 1). Pray with Ruth and Naomi by honoring the journey and relationship (Ruth 1). Pray with Hagar and her boy in isolation, listening to the still small voice of God (Gen. 16:1). Pray with Lydia, under the tree in small groups using your intersectionality and privilege to birth new communities in the way of love (Acts 16). Pray with Mary Magdalene on your knees out of the shadows (Luke 7:36). Pray with Martha in the kitchen and Mary in the living room (Luke 10:38). Pray with your daughters, nieces, mothers, and grandmothers because they all pray, and it is not always with words, but the poetry of the heart.
You don’t have to be good.
Ten steps to cultivating your own unique prayer practice:
Gather a piece of paper and writing utensils or your favorite art supplies. I encourage you to be creative.
Draw or write the words or images of an important sacred text (however you define sacred). A Poem? Scripture? Quote?
Reflect on how this sacred text has connected to your life of Spirituality. Have you recited it daily? Are there specific words that you hang on to? Has the writing been an invitation to behave or act in ways that feel Holy and Divine? What parts have spoken to your heart? Trust yourself. That trust is God.
Write about your reflection or create something beautiful about the sacred text.
Now, who are you? Write about the most unique parts of yourself. You may think about your learning style. You may reflect on your relationships. You may conjure up memories of your childhood. Perhaps you create your family tree or write about Sunday dinners with your mama and mama’s mama.
Write about your self-reflection or create something beautiful about the characteristics that describe you.
Look at your two creations (written or images), and then take your time. Be silent in those moments.
Out of your musings, create a prayer practice that works for you. Remember, it must fit in your lifestyle and one that you will be able to practice. Also, remember, there are no rules or expectations. Your prayer practice is yours, nobody else’s.
Judgment and expectation are what get us in the most trouble with prayer practice. If you catch yourself judging or having impossible expectations, return to the words you created.
Trust yourself. When you do that, you are accessing God.
Mignolo/Walsh On decoloniality, concepts, analytics, praxis.