Places PartV: Places to Pray

I was taught early in life that it was an important conviction of Christian teaching that one can pray anywhere, no exceptions. Early in life the places were the usual: at the dining table (always, although we used to have so many potatoes that we joked that if there were no potatoes on the table it wasn’t really a meal and therefore no table prayer was required.) I have memories of my mother teaching me to pray every night before going to sleep. The habit continues. I was once chided by a pastor after admitting that I had prayed over a four-foot putt; and I no longer do that. Even with divine guidance I missed them anyway!

Interestingly I was not taught to pray on my knees and to this day I almost never pray on my knees except at the Communion altar.

I do not really appreciate the truism that ”there are no atheists in foxholes”, but it has been my experience that great fear and anxiety do produce deep prayers. I recall more than a few of those situations: when hitchhiking and being driven by an very inebriated driver who had to take very intent aim to make it between the two sides of a narrow bridge, accompanying my wife in the plane across the Pacific while she struggled with a cerebral aneurysm, being shot at as I was fleeing Tian An Men Square in 1989.

There have been moments of extended immersion in blatant secularism that my soul ached for the non-material and the spiritual. I recall these feelings especially after a few days in Russia years ago, especially after my Leningrad guide fed me several days of official atheistic communist propaganda. It was more subtle but as palpable to spend two weeks leading workshops for secular psychologists in Germany and then finally finding my soul refreshed in prayer at the beautiful cathedral in Cologne.

Remembering the dead in thankful prayer is for me an important virtual. I love taking a candle on All Saints Day and slowly parading before God my parents and others in grateful remembrance. When I stood at the Punch Bowl War Memorial Cemetery in Hawaii I was so overcome with feelings that I was speechless. My heart remembered all those young lives. They died for my freedom as an American citizen, including my freedom to pray if I should choose to do that. I did.

Then there are moments that point to realities beyond that which can be quantified or measured by scientific definitions. I include watching our children being born and then holding each new child for the first time, or the view of the sunset across the Pacific, or a glorious bright morning sun making the freshly fallen Alpine snow glisten in all its Switzerland beauty.

There are so many times, places and situations in which my heart overflows and what flows out is prayer.