To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent and being silent and waiting until God is heard. -Soren Kierkegaard

Prayer is not sending in an order and expecting it to be fulfilled. Prayer is attuning yourself to the life of the world, to love, the force that moves the sun and the moon and the stars. -David Steindl-Rast, The Music of Silence

He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding in his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands, all those people who were in stress or grief. -Ellis Peters, A Morbid Taste for Bones

When I was an overly introspective teenager, I had a friend who kept notebook full of “sayings” she had collected. Our idea of a good time was an overnight where she would read these bits of wisdom and together we would try them on, like clothing in a department store. Did they fit? Did we like them? Were they practical, comfortable, beautiful? Were they for us, for someone else?

I kept a journal at the time, but only occasionally recorded quotations. Connie, on the other hand, poured herself into this search for wisdom. She eventually entered a Roman Catholic convent, then left the convent and became a teacher. I would like to know where else her search has taken her.

I remembered Connie’s collection of wisdom sayings when I met again a woman who had been part of my former university parish and lives now in Vermont. She’s a woman who vibrates with creativity, joyfully making connections and seeing patterns others seldom see, a “both/and” person after my own heart. She finds connections and networks and sparks of insight that jump across the gaps - and has no fear that she may be heading way beyond her depth into a sea of irreconcilable truths. She’s energized by those waters, not defeated by them. You would never hear her say, “Well, I guess I’ll never understand. I’m drowning in mystery and paradox. Too bad.” She would say, with love and wonder in her voice, “Well, I guess I’ll never understand. I’m buoyed up by mystery and paradox. What grace!”

I ran into Karen again while doing chaplaincy at Gifford Medical Center in Randolph, Vermont. She was almost finished framing and editing a book (Our Day to End Poverty) and was doing this while receiving treatment for recurrent cancer. But I also learned that she, like my high school friend Connie, had kept notebooks full of “sayings” from her readings all of her life. And in 2005 she decided to edit them for a wider audience, in Divine Sparks:Collected Wisdom from the Heart, taking her title from Hildegard of Bingen’s belief that “we are all sparks of the Divine flame.”

The sayings on prayer that appear at the beginning of this article are from her book. I’m seeking wisdom on prayer as I look forward to the Women’s Retreat on “Praying Unceasingly” this month. I’m grateful for the reminder of my wisdom-seeking but not wisdom-hoarding friends that have accompanied me on my way. I’m hoping for more of this during the remainder of my life!

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