A Prayer

Writing is the form of prayer that chose me

This piece is in my essay collection, “We’re Here to Renew the Sacred.” Before that, I circulated it privately among a few close friends. Now feels like the right time to put it out there more widely.

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i

When I pray, truly pray, I become Reality's way of expressing itself to itself.

When I pray, I sit in stillness, letting every haze between me and Reality fade and fall away. In that stillness, I can see what is waiting in the silent space at the bottom of everything, what twisting play of light I can bring back with me. What subtle strength wants me to build a body for it.

Writing is the form of prayer that chose me.

When I write, I drop so deeply into myself that I enter somewhere else, somewhere sacred and urgent, the silent place where Reality keeps what still needs to be said and seen and sung.

When I come back, I craft a home for the unsaid thing, the living aurora that has curled up in my chest like a cat in sunlight. From words, I shape a place for it to live, a house of prose where people can visit, be touched by it, be transformed by the aurora's bloom in the space behind their own hearts.

I am a man who crafts reliquaries, small shrines for what lives in the silent place.

ii

Writing is how I pray — a poetic angel laid his hand on my head as a child — but I can feel my prayer pulsing and stretching for more space, more channels to fill. Writing has a clarity and strength to it, but it doesn’t have everything.

"I see something in you," a woman said, "like a pipe coming out the top of your head, stretching to a place that loves to pour wisdom through you. But there's so much, so much. It's like the ocean is trying to pour itself through a straw. You have to find the ways to let more through."

My writing is my way of quieting the world until I can sing Reality back to itself. But my prayer wants to be more than just writing. The conduit above my head begs to grow wider, fuller. It begs for more body.

iii

We were talking about eros, and my friend closed her eyes; she found something in the silent dark, "I want to live the way I have sex, and I want to have sex the way I live."

Something in me reverberated with that plea, that prayer for a unity of Life and Eros.

The way I write — how I descend through the body and into the world-soul, how I wait for what called me there, how I bring it back and make for it a home, a shrine, a body, a way to dwell in and touch my world — that's the way I want to speak, the way I want to move; it's the way I want to love, to befriend people, to show up in work and play and romance and sex and in the strangeful savor of the many intimacies I have no easy word or template for.

iv

In sexuality, I am so close to this creative energy, this erotic Life that hungers to be made Present. I am also so close, so nakedly near to all the ways I block, siphon, and numb that energy. So close to the places I'm scared to let that energy go, either because I'm scared it will hurt me, or because I'm scared I'll love it too much and be ruined if it leaves.

This energy is the force of creation and transformation — and it is terrifying to be transformed. In every transformation, death is a guest. He comes to kill the parts of us that can't cross the next threshold; the parts of us that can’t survive at higher altitudes of the soul.

In sex, there is the possibility, so near and so distant, unlocked only with certain partners, only in certain alignments of the planetary and biochemical forces — there is the possibility of letting those parts of myself burn up in the erotic fire, of blazing through them and making room for something else. There is a possibility, it feels like a possibility, of radiating so intensely that only what survives in light can remain.

v

This creativity, this energy, this lust for the Life That Wants to Be Lived: this is how I write; it’s how I pray; it’s how I meditate.

It's how I want to live, how I want to dance, how I want to sing and cook and swim and fuck. I want every angle of my existence aglow with what the world-soul shines through me.

vi

I sometimes feel like I'm on a winding, stream-like quest to find the oaths I took before I was born.

Today, one oath is coming into view: to live in the place where prayer, poetry, sex, art, Life, dance, and the sacred all spring from — and to let that place live through me, more and more fully, until only that place remains.

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