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9. Daily Prayer
- State University of New York Press
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9 h Daily Prayer 204 A SPIRITUAL LIFE [35.175.113.125] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:00 GMT) 205 DAILY PRAYER Over the years I have slowly come to see the need to mediate, to integrate, how I live in the world as an activist, focused on large and complex moral and ethical issues, and how I live day by day, noticing the minutia of life, living in the moment and so being spiritually nourished and enlivened. As I look back on the unspoken assumptions of my upbringing, I see that I was acculturated as a child of the fifties—more precisely, a girl of the fifties—raised to care for the small circle of my immediate family, the husband and children I was supposed to have. What my years of political involvement have taught me is that being a full human being necessitates looking past that small tight nuclear circle to find my place in the larger world, and also necessitates taking time for myself, my needs and development as an individual. In other words, I needed to both widen the focus of my attention and narrow the focus of my attention. Making room for both, moving awareness back and forth between the small and the large— that’s the dance. More and more I see the profound value of attention to and respect for the fabric of everyday life—what are the ordinary tasks and what are the ordinary objects that take up my time and go to make up my day. The reality that I have had deep and earnest and ongoing conversations with a musician from Kabul, a physicist from Bombay, an educator from Cairo, a playwright from Chernigov, cannot distract me from listening closely to a newly arrived and perhaps lonely academic in my little New England town, to the director of the local crisis center who comes to share her writing practice with me, to the neighbor on my street who has just lost her younger brother to cancer, to the woman behind the supermarket counter from whom I buy my fish. I need to be grounded in that place where I plant tulips in the autumn and shovel snow in the winter, where I drive to the local high school that is the site of my voting precinct and where I cast ballots for town mayor, state senator, and president of the United States. If at one time perhaps I took these activities and encounters for granted, I now see them as uniquely important. Dramatic moments of meeting in distant lands occur unpredictably, occasions for 206 A SPIRITUAL LIFE celebration are few and far between, crises come and go. In fact, life is largely made up of a warp and woof of ordinary moments, casual encounters, subtle opportunities. If I am to be fully alive, then I must be alive in those moments and with those people. I must learn to stop and look and really see, to listen, to hear, to hold, to finger, to contemplate, to take care with the minutia of my life, the seemingly “ordinary” moments and artifacts that are so easy to miss. It’s a spiritual reinvention of the wheel—traditional Judaism with its blessings for fruit, bread, rainbows, twilight, a beautiful woman, the king as he passes in procession—all were attempts to wake us up to the moment, the now, the myriad forms of life as it pulsates around and within us. 207 DAILY PRAYER Supermarket Prayer Last week in the supermarket at an unlikely hour I saw a woman I know. She tried to avoid me, pretended not to remember me, but I had unwittingly trapped her, blocked escape in the tuna fish aisle. I just wanted to say hello, my cruelty was inadvertent, but up close I saw her hair was in disarray and dirty, her face without its careful mask of lipstick, blusher, shadow. She was wearing a ratty old jacket, the discard of her husband or perhaps her teenaged son. Nine thirty, on a Tuesday morning, dressed like that— suddenly I knew she was out of work and ashamed. And coming undone there in the tuna fish aisle. I tried as best I could to help her cover her nakedness but all that day and the next she haunted me. How strange, I thought, how strange and how sad that she should feel threatened, judged, shamed by me. 208 A SPIRITUAL LIFE The rabbis say when you bring color...