Flash back to a brilliant November day: Five older people sat in a room filled with autumn light that streamed in from the garden. We had prayed silently together for half an hour, until one of us rang a bell marking the end of this meditation. Then we spoke about the experience we had shared.
Hamilton, an African-American aged 76, said he had felt “peace flowing by.” (I have given the real people described here other names to protect their privacy.) Lucy, hostess for the group, spoke of shared spiritual travel: “We’re on a journey toward surrender,” she said with quiet conviction. Of her husband, Ned, she observed, “He’s ahead of us, but we’re all going there.”
Ned has undergone serious loss of memory and takes part each week in group support sessions with others in his situation. He continues to experience the multiple effects of disorientation. Just that day he had lost his eyeglasses and had felt distress until he could find them again. “How difficult it is to lose things,” he remarked, “especially glasses.”
For myself, I feel uplifted by Ned’s courage. He knows what is happening to him as his memory falters but he moves ahead. Identifying with his struggle, his wife offers him loving support. So do the rest of us prayer group members in whatever ways we can – in silence and by word and gesture.
Ned’s ordeal gives an edge to our group’s spiritual experience. Knowing the likely outcome of his illness, we grieve for the confusion imposed on him in his everyday life. At the same time we admire, perhaps even envy, his fortitude and see it as a precious spiritual gift. The many adult years he has spent in the spiritual search have clearly prepared him for this time of trial.
Watching our friend Ned, we learn to face our own future with all its possibilities for something just as hard to bear. I look upon this prospect with foreboding but also, in faith, see it as freeing the human heart for possession by God in a life that continues forever.
Lucy brought our prayer session to an appropriate end, one that teased our imaginations and stirred our spiritual aspirations. She quoted a thirteenth century Persian poet named Rumi: “Birds make great sky-circles of their freedom / How do they learn it? / They fall, and falling / They’re given wings.”
This scene, marked by spiritual striving against a backdrop of trial and suffering, inspires me with new appreciation of meditation and its benefits for soul and body. Like the others, I come away from the experience refreshed and better prepared for the difficulties of daily life.
Flash forward to another meditation just this week. On this occasion the sky outside threatens to rain; partway through, the drops start to fall gently and I hear them in my silent prayer,
When afterward we talk about the experience of prayer, Hamilton tells how he keeps his hands open because he feels a spiritual energy that he wants to share with the rest of us. His feeling for us all is evident and moves me to admiration of this loving man.
He shares with us a poem that was used in his church on Sunday. It was written by Howard Thurman who, at Boston University, was Martin Luther King’s teacher and mentor.
“When the song of angels is stilled, / When the star in the sky is gone, / When the kings and princes are home, / When the shepherds are back with their flock / The work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the brothers, to make music in the heart.”
We all receive this as an inspiration for our prayer in this beginning of the post-Christmas season. Its agenda intimidates the realist in us, but we take heart from the power of the spirit.
When Lucy gently rings the bell in signal that our allotted time for prayer is over, she lights small candles for us to take home. The flame, she explains, derives from a candle lit by the Dalai Lama in the name of peace.
Richard Griffin