Prayers of Attention

Mary Oliver’s timely poem “The Summer Day” keeps turning up. First in a Southborough L’Abri lecture by Sarah Chestnut, which I listened to after returning from a visit, enriched by the hospitality there. Then it was shared by my friend Dena Hill, as she seeks to savour summer as autumn nears.

Oliver muses:

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day.

In "Prayer", Carol Ann Duffy sounds a different tone, echoing the plaintiveness of Romans 8:26, as she circles around similar themes as Oliver, with shared humility and candour:

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer

utters itself. So, a woman will lift

her head from the sieve of her hands and stare

at the minims [half notes] sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Photo by Syuhei Inoue on Unsplash

The poets' receptivity to nature's gifts resonates with "Perfect Days," a film we recently watched with my church. The protagonist leads a simple and contented life cleaning toilets in Tokyo. He bears his joys and sorrows with lots of interludes gazing up at tree canopies, dreaming of them, watching their shadow play on walls. The film was going to be called "komorebi" after a Japanese term for sun leaking through trees, the kind of everyday gift we may be granted or perhaps we need to seek out.

I wonder if the prayers of the poems---kneeling in grass to receive blessing, involuntarily beholding a gift of tree song, prayers of attention---join in creation's praise or are the beginnings of such worship. The rejoicing trees and fields of Psalm 96 and Isaiah 55 are heralds of God's promised restoration, return, righteousness. So it seems to me that we are offered a foretaste of this now as we linger in fields, lift our gaze to what is before us with the receptivity of Oliver and Duffy. Perhaps also with a response of thankful, hopeful praise.

There is much in life that may feel toilsome or futile, much that weighs us down like the speechless woman Duffy evokes, head clasped in hands. But I trust that in the solace of singing trees, the light spilling through, God may be met, as we still ourselves to look, listen, pray.

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Sources

https://www.frieze.com/article/wim-wenders-perfect-days-interview

https://www.morethantokyo.com/komorebi-japanese-word/

Photo by Syuhei Inoue on Unsplash