Prayer

Betsy Shirley 3-24-2023
A cartoon illustration of Brother Lawrence praying with a giant sunnyside egg as a backdrop with the yellow yolk behind his head, made to look like a halo. To the left and right, there are mirrored reflections of objects like a Bible, fork, apple, etc.

Illustration by Ryan McQuade

CHRISTIAN MYSTICS HAVE a definite dramatic streak. Their transformative encounters with God are full of divine revelations (Julian of Norwich), ecstatic visions (Teresa of Ávila), stigmata (Francis of Assisi), erotic imagery (John of the Cross), and all manner of artistic compositions (here’s to you, Hildegard of Bingen).

But then there’s Brother Lawrence who — if he is known at all — is known for experiencing God’s presence as he washed dishes, cooked eggs, or did other monotonous chores that came with life in a 17th-century French monastery.

Born Nicolas Herman, he emerged from one of Europe’s deadliest religious wars a disabled veteran. Haunted by his past actions and convinced he was eternally condemned, he failed as a hermit (too much time alone with his thoughts), then as a footman (“a clumsy oaf who broke everything,” he recalled), before eventually joining the lay brothers of the Order of the Discalced Carmelites in Paris in 1640. Yet Brother Lawrence’s anxiety persisted. When he tried to pray, he spent the whole time “rejecting thoughts and then tumbling back into these same thoughts.” Eventually, he gave up all his spiritual exercises and focused on becoming aware of God’s presence as he did his assigned work in the monastery’s kitchen. What he experienced wasn’t a celestial vision, but what he had sought all along: God’s peace.

“We go to such great lengths, trying to remain in the presence of God by so many methods,” he told a friend who posthumously published Lawrence’s modest writings and letters. “Isn’t it much shorter and more direct to do everything for the love of God?”

Carmen Acevedo Butcher, an award-winning translator of mystical and classic Christian texts, was drawn to Brother Lawrence’s gentle practice. Acevedo Butcher herself grew up saddled with severe “self-loathing” and anxiety from a childhood shaped by trauma, hellfire preaching, and the strain of being “a brown girl in a white society.” But in Lawrence’s writing she finds someone who experienced real Love amid real pain.

In Practice of the Presence, Acevedo Butcher’s new English translation of Brother Lawrence, she emphasizes his embodied joy and his “original welcoming spirit,” which she sees in his frequent use of tout le monde — “for everybody.” Drawing on Lawrence’s deeply trinitarian theology, Acevedo Butcher uses they/them pronouns for God, a move she hopes will communicate Lawrence’s kind, inclusive understanding of Love to a wide audience. Acevedo Butcher spoke with Sojourners’ Betsy Shirley about translation, mysticism, and how Brother Lawrence’s practice connects to the work of social justice today.

A person wearing a black suit carries a paper program with a photo and name of Tyre Nichols.

An attendee holds a program while exiting a Feb. 1 memorial service for Tyre Nichols who died after being beaten by Memphis Police officers. REUTERS/Ronda Churchill 

Sometimes our nation and world are so full of injustice, loss, and pain that words fail us and our spirit can find no rest. We don’t even know what to say, how to pray, and where to begin to set right the many things that are so overwhelmingly wrong. The vicious murder of Tyre Nichols feels like one of those moments.

Cassidy Klein 8-31-2021

“Self-portrait,” by Benjamin PowerGriffin. Photo courtesy of the artist.

With his knife, brightly colored paper, and the meditations of his heart, Benjamin PowerGriffin cuts “what prayer feels like, or what I yearn for it to feel like,” he said.

Megan Rohrer 6-30-2021

Shepherding God, be palpably present with us when we dance, snuggle, and enjoy the sensations of the creation you declare good.

Help us to name, define, redefine, deconstruct, claim, and properly pronoun our fabulousness. We commit to properly naming and pronouning the fabulousness of others.

Gina Ciliberto 1-20-2021

The U.S. Capitol during the inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2021. REUTERS/Jim Bourg

At President Joe Biden’s inauguration, Rev. Leo O’Donovan, SJ, invoked the “Holy Mystery of Love” to be with us “as we dream together.”

Gina Ciliberto 1-20-2021

Shortly before Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, Rev. Leo O’Donovan, SJ, a longtime friend and mentor of President Biden's, delivered this prayer. 

Gina Ciliberto 1-15-2021

A woman holds a sign at the ‘Get Off Our Necks’ Commitment March on Washington in August 2020 in Washington, D.C. Jelani Photography / Shutterstock.com

As the Inauguration Day nears, one thing is clear: The U.S. needs as many prayers as possible. Here are places where you can pray virtually, both before and after new elected officials take office.

Gina Ciliberto 10-30-2020

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

As Election Day nears, one thing is clear: We all need as many prayers as possible. After you vote, while you wait in line to vote, or while you anxiously tune in as votes are tallied, here are places that you can pray on Election Day.

Juliet Vedral 5-14-2020

Image via Father's Heart Ministries 

Much has been written about the ways in which the pandemic is exposing the fragility of our communities and the underlying vulnerabilities that were ignored. Over the years, Father’s Heart has tried to do what it can to knit the fraying margins of the neighborhood back into the whole, by reminding people of their God-given dignity and worth. But they are working against decades-long policies that have kept so many New Yorkers from accessing affordable housing and better paying jobs.

Image via Travis Bara

As the plague continued to spread with every cough, they blamed a lunar eclipse and the malignant forces of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars for deadly vapors arriving on currents of air, passing into the blood stream. They hypothesized that this “corrupted air … penetrates to the heart” and “destroys the life force.” From where else could this curse have come? A product of “divine will” they decreed, and urged the people “to return humbly to God.”

J. Dana Trent 3-11-2020

Photo by FOODISM360 on Unsplash

Ash Wednesday 2020 marked a meat-free decade for me, a spiritual choice I made in 2010, just after I became engaged to a devout Hindu. What began as both a Lenten fast of solidarity and desperation — my husband is the cook, I am not — has held steady. A liturgical season turned into a year, then another and another. At each meal, I’ve made choice: Do I eat meat or not? Why or why not?

Adam Russell Taylor 12-18-2019

Demonstrators gather to demand the impeachment and removal of President Donald Trump during a rally at Times Square, New York City, Dec. 17, 2019. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

We can respect a diversity of Christian opinion around whether impeachment is the necessary and only remedy to the president’s actions and whether the president’s offenses rise to the constitutional level of "Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But what I can’t understand or respect are direct efforts to subvert the truth, deflect attention, and defend the indefensible.

Jim Wallis 8-06-2019

Illustration by David Plunkert

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. This is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. —1 Timothy 2:1-4

This is a scripture passage that’s been on my heart quite a bit this summer, really since Donald Trump took office in January 2017. On the surface, it seems challenging to reconcile this instruction to offer thanksgiving to God for Trump, whose tenure in the highest elected position in the United States (and perhaps the world) has been filled with so much amorality and cruelty to so many groups of vulnerable people that, in Matthew 25, Jesus calls us to protect.

Martin L. Smith 4-25-2019

PRAYER IS MOSTLY not a matter of getting what we lack; rather, as Thomas Merton taught at the very end of his life, it’s a means to experience what we already possess.

None of the gifts of the Spirit—“love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23)—are fixed endowments. These are precarious resources, in the strict sense of the word “precarious,” which comes from the Latin precare, meaning “to pray.” These gifts must be rediscovered, relived, and newly explored, as we will in this Pentecost season.

Rose S. Aslan 3-19-2019

Image via Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock

Muslims believe Friday was chosen by God as a dedicated day of worship. In addition to the prayer itself, which is shorter than the usual midday prayers, Friday services include a sermon, usually given by a professional male Muslim clergy member in Muslim majority countries, but in the West, they are also given by a male lay community member.

Jamie D. Aten 2-19-2019

City of Lights Community Prayer Vigil in Aurora, Ill. Photo Courtesy of Jamie D. Aten. 

Two days after a brutal workplace shooting in the Chicago suburb of Aurora, where five were killed and six were injured, over 1,000 people joined together for a prayer vigil at the Henry Pratt Company plant, filling the street near the building where the shooting occurred. As several local pastors shared prayers with the huge gathering of mourners, the only sounds that broke the silence between prayers were quiet sobs. Beside a gate connected to the plant, people placed flowers, candles, and signs.

Jim Wallis 2-14-2019

Photo by Jonathan Simcoe on Unsplash

On Ash Wednesday 2018, a group of elders met for a retreat together because of a national political crisis, which was also revealing a crisis of faith. At Pentecost, in overcrowded churches in downtown Washington, D.C., we launched a declaration that we called Reclaiming Jesus: A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis. More than 5 million people have directly responded to the Reclaiming Jesus declaration thus far and many more have been reached by it and are addressing the declaration in their churches. A declaration is becoming a movement to re-claim Jesus; the message of Jesus needs reclaiming at a time like this.

Jim Wallis 1-29-2019

The dome of the U.S. Capitol following a weekend snowstorm. Jan. 14, 2019. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Thanks be to God! For all the government workers and their families who will, hopefully, soon get their deeply deserved paychecks, we give thanks. For those of us who are constantly on the look out for what’s next on the breaking news horizon, this is a good place to start today: giving thanks to God. Let us first be thankful, then ask what is next.

Jim Wallis 1-16-2019

The U.S. Capitol is seen behind a snow pile in Washington, D.C. Jan. 16, 2019. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history reveals the brokenness of our systems, the danger of a strong man exploiting that brokenness instead of trying to fix it, and the suffering of countless people, always beginning with the most vulnerable. It also painfully shows Washington’s current habit of blaming instead of solving problems, which has left our politics both polarized and paralyzed.

Faith-Marie Zamblé 11-13-2018

"Prayer" at the Art Institute of Chicago. Photo courtesy of Faith Zamblé.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, James Webb has fit the sound of Chicago’s religious devotion into one room. The city’s religious life spouts from speakers fixed to the floor. Museumgoers shuffle across the expanse of red carpet, pausing over one mushroom shaped speaker and then another — like bees gathering pollen, intent on producing cultural understanding and greater empathy.