Opening and Sealing Prayers

So, starting with the practice, rather than with the theory: rather than deciding what the prayers that open and close my daily meditation should be, I’ve just been trying out prayers, seeing what works and what doesn’t. (“Works,” is vague, I know, but in practice it seems pretty precise: some things I have tried quite obviously did not work.) The current version of the opening prayer is this:

Until light returns I wait with the dark
Until beauty returns I wait with the breath
I give drink that beauty may come to the thirsty
I give food that beauty may come to the hungry
I give thought that beauty may come to the heedless
I give peace that beauty may come to the troubled.
Until light returns I wait with the dark
Until beauty returns I wait with the breath

I suppose that one could substitute other “objects of meditation” for the breath. I tend to use either the breath or the ambient sound (in practice mostly the hum of my tinnitus!) as my object of attention: I’m sort of halfway to meditation without an object, or maybe I’m just sloppy. But “breath” is “spirit” and stands for attention of any sort, anyway. What the hell.

Then comes the bodhicitta prayer, which I discussed before, and then I sit for some predetermined amount of time (anywhere from five to thirty minutes, these days; not long. My knees and hips are still getting used to sitting at all, again.)

At the end come the sealing prayers, which obstinately retain their reference to Mahamudra (“the great seal,” which in this context traditionally means I think complete enlightenment: but I make a possibly louche semantic sideslip so that it means “that thing we’re talking about: that aspiration to be more in harmony with myself, more attuned to the world, and more benevolent to others.”)

By this virtue may I quickly realize Mahamudra
And establish all beings without exception in this state

… this with palms together (anjali mudra), touching forehead, lips, and chest (i.e. body, speech, and mind.) Then lastly hands laid palm up on my knees as I say the Navajo hozho prayer:

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind my I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again
It has become beauty again

I have no business meddling with Navajo stuff, which is its own intricate tradition with its own demands, of which I know very little: but the first time I read those words they landed with me, in a way no other prayer has. That. So I use it for a sealing prayer. "Dedicating the merit," as they say, in the Tibetan tradition, anyway. Wrapping it up and declaring what all this is in aid of.

Strange Rites

In Strange Rites Tara Burton sets out to tell “the story of the religious sensibility of a whole generation. It’s the story not just of the religious “Nones,” but of an even broader category: those who aren’t rejecting religion, but rather remixing it. It’s the story of how more and more Americans – and particularly how more and more millennials – envision themselves as creators of their own bespoke religions, mixing and matching spiritual and aesthetic and experiential and philosophical traditions.” 

Burton does a fabulous job, but I’m irritated at once by this way of putting it. We’re not remixers because we want to be. At least I’m not. We’re remixers because we have to be, because we’ve been made painfully aware that we’re already remixing, “negotiating” with our traditions, and we’re aware (unless we’re real dullards) of dozens of vibrant competing traditions: and we can’t legitimately disavow responsibility for our religious selections. We’ve been backed into remixing. We have no choice.

I am by temperament loyalist and traditionalist. I want to sink into a tradition, and be trained and corrected by it. It’s just not a course that’s available to me. We’re in an age like the age of St Augustine, a maelstrom of competing faiths, and an upwelling of heresies. Whether we like it or not, we're pitched into creating the patristics of the future. What can we do but lean into it?

September Comes Anyway

Drinking air in long
sweet drafts. O God, I thought
maybe I was done, I am not done,
the light is breaking over me in waves.
I am not done. I am not real:
of course not. An orange seed
is not an orange tree, let alone
an orange grove, where the girls
do their washing and hear the mill wheel turn.
But there are glancing lights everywhere.
Dilations and contractions. God,
I can be so stupid,
am so stupid, most of the time;
but September comes anyway.