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When I was very young, I learned to pray in all the places young children are wont to do. There were the usual prayers before meals—Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, let these gifts to us be blessed and O give thanks to the Lord for God is good and God’s mercy endures forever—prayed with one eye half open in order better to survey the food before us. Sometimes prayer followed the meal—Thanks dear Lord, for meat and drink, through Jesus Christ, Amen—said in a cadence that resembled marching, which might have been what we wished we were doing, eager as we were to get away from the table and on to more interesting things.

And there were bedtime prayers, these more complicated and often more engaging if only because they were a way of prolonging evenings spent with parents at our bedside—Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray dear Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray dear Lord my soul to take. I don’t remember conversations about death, though this prayer certainly could have opened a door into a long night of interesting questions. Dear Jesus, be with all the people behind the Iron Curtain. Protect everyone behind the Bamboo Curtain and be with those surrounded by the Wall. Watch over all the hungry children in China . . . These images conveyed all sorts of possibilities for nighttime conversation. What was that iron curtain actually made of and how did bamboo become a curtain? Was everyone behind some sort of wall or barrier? Might walls—barriers—mean something more than physical dividers or ramparts? How, really, could we share our food? And might food also be a metaphor for other kinds of nourishment?

Later on, I remember the prayers of my mother and father, and especially those of my grandparents, whose habits of prayer helped shape the whole family. I also recall conversations about how to pray and how not to pray. These were not necessarily analytical or systematic reviews of types of prayer as much as critiques of people who prayed in ways thought—perhaps only by us—to be self-serving or manipulative or lacking understanding of a God who did not serve as our divine and personal valet, delivering weather we requested or answers we sought or any other exchange of prayer for goods.

When a well-meaning friend might tell of praying for rain for her garden and another neighbor about hoping it wouldn’t rain while his cherry orchard was vulnerable and rain would mean cracked fruit, the irony was not lost on us. What would God do? Who would God decide to please? Deep down, we knew that our prayers were not about bargaining with God and not about exchanging conversation and information with the sacred—as if God only needed to know more in order to respond appropriately.

Even at a young age, perhaps because of the experience of prayer in worship, we knew prayer to be about putting ourselves in places where God might be present. I also had a keen sense of being with God, experiencing the sacred in daily life, and knowing that somehow this too is prayer—mysterious, enigmatic, inexplicable, both knowing and not knowing.

Later as a young adult, I discovered the writings of a great rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who introduced me to a Jewish sensibility: God resting on our eyelids. I loved the immediacy and literalness of the image coupled with Heschel’s passionate belief that God accompanies us whether we desire God’s presence or not.

I also remember a story—perhaps told by Rabbi Heschel—of a Jewish shoemaker who would work late into the evening repairing the worn shoes of fellow villagers, the only pair of shoes they owned, so that they could return to work the following morning. The poor shoemaker found himself torn between making time to pray the required daily prayers of his tradition and repairing the shoes so desperately needed by his customers. His sigh of frustration became a prayer, a literal longing for God to be present in his work of mending and sewing and repairing—in order for the people of his village to wear shoes the next day. The sigh of the shoemaker was enough.

Too often we turn prayer into well-intentioned patterns of our own making. Too often we assume prayer is primarily about words. Sometimes there’s an almost magical understanding that if we get the words right, if we trust enough, if we believe enough, God will answer. But most of us know that God is not a divine magician and that prayer is much more than our feeble attempts to make God pay attention to what God already knows or to make of God a puppet responding to our tugs on the strings of God’s heart. Prayer is so much more than words.

Several years ago, I was invited to write a monthly column for a denominational magazine. I was at once both honored and terrified. The column’s title, Let Us Pray, conveyed certain assumptions I was not at all sure about—did they think I had prayer all figured out? Did they assume I was a disciplined pray-er, perhaps one of those “prayer warriors” I’d heard about? Did they have any idea how much I struggle with praying, with knowing how to talk to God, listen to God? Did they know of my doubts and skepticism about much of Christian life?

I wanted to write and I wanted to write about all I do not know. The editors said yes and we were off and running. After some years of columns which seemed to resonate with readers, I chose to use the alphabet as a template for the monthly articles. It provided a pattern to follow for twenty-six columns. It fit the allotted months ending appropriately in December almost three years later. And it allowed me to write about an expansive and spacious understanding of prayer, ways of praying that might not include words.

Armed with a large assortment of books on prayer and an especially lovely tome by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, I set out to explore prayer and spiritual practices alphabetically, following many of their suggestions as ways for understanding prayer in everyday life. I also paid attention to the writings of Richard Rohr and his admonition that prayer is not primarily words but a place, an attitude, a stance—and that for Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love, returning to love, and trusting that love is the unceasing stream of reality.1

The prayers I learned as a child were bookmarked by Scripture: daily readings, family devotions, worship. Because I am steeped in the rich biblical traditions of a liturgical church, patterns of biblical prayer are rooted in my psyche. Early on, I found the stories of the Bible to be multilayered, complex, enigmatic—a way of listening to a mysterious God. Over the years, these encounters with Scripture continue to challenge and engage. Listening to God in Scripture is part of my habit, part of my history. But Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer is not meant to be a theological or biblical description of prayer. Holy Ground reflects some non-traditional ways of thinking about the spirit of the living God and how God’s spirit might be heard in ways or places or acts often not associated with prayer. This book reveals my wrestling with a God who makes the ordinary holy. “Cleave the wood and I am there,” says Isaiah in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. “Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

Those twenty-six columns written for GATHER, revised and rewritten for book format, are the basis of Holy Ground: An Alphabet of Prayer. Readers will find here a collection of reflections about prayer as Attention, Beauty, Compassion, Devotion, Enthusiasm, Faith, Gratitude, Hospitality, Imagination, Joy, Kindness, Listening, Mindfulness, Nurturing, Openness, Play, Questing, Reverence, Stillness, Thanksgiving, Unity, Vision, Wonder, X signifying mystery, Yearning, and Zeal. This alphabet is one way of thinking about the practice of prayer in broader, more inclusive language and practice. It’s meant to help readers experience prayer as the sigh of the shoemaker, too busy to drop his worn shoes and kneel in disciplined prayer but not too busy to recognize and acknowledge God’s presence in the midst of ordinary life. And it’s meant to celebrate prayer in the broadest of ways as together with all of humanity we yearn to know God and to be known by God.

Each reflection begins alphabetically with beautifully formed calligraphic letters. These pages are meant to encourage engagement with that particular word: a place for meditation, reflection, and should it “suit the reader’s fancy”, coloring or embellishing the letters. In this way, readers are invited to practice God’s presence meditatively and perhaps tangibly in the pleasure of coloring or embellishing the designated words for prayer. Following each reflection, readers are encouraged to consider their own ways of praying using a statement and questions for pondering God’s presence: paying attention to daily life, looking for beauty in the commonplace, showing compassion, practicing devotion, celebrating enthusiasm—all the way to discovering wonder, the X as mystery, and the Z as zeal for a God who continues to pursue us in our everyday lives. It is the hope of the author that these simple acts of creating and contemplating will connect readers to the holy ground of everyday prayer—from A to Z.

Julie K. Aageson

1. From Rohr, “Becoming Pure in Heart.” https://cac.org/becoming-pure-heart-2016-05-11/.