Dancing Prayers of Mindfulness

“Pray continually.”  

1 Thessalonians 5:17

In a letter to a particular community of faith, the Apostle Paul gave this instruction concerning prayer.

For a long time in my spiritual life I couldn’t fathom such a thing.  I had been taught as a child how to pray with repeated words that usually rhymed.  It had to happen beside my bed just before climbing in at night.  And it had to be down on my knees.  What a good gift my parents gave me in helping me understand the importance of connecting with God.  But my child-mind was very concrete, and prayer had very little room to dance then.

On Sundays during the church service our pastor prayed.  They were big prayers, long prayers, very important-sounding prayers with lots of big words in them.  Children squirmed in them.  Some people ‘rested their eyes’ in them.  Looking back, I see this as yet another gift in helping me understand the importance of addressing God respectfully, and the honest blessing over a congregation a pastor gives his or her people.  There did seem to be more room for prayer to move around at church.  But still.  Just here, in church.

Prayer didn’t dance for me until I was much older.  Then Paul’s words made more sense.

I run into many folks who confess that they ‘don’t pray enough’, and I wonder if it’s because of some of the same misconceptions.  I wonder if Paul’s instructions end up just making many of us feel guilty or inadequate in prayer, restricted and stiff, instead of inspiring us toward something that moves more gracefully, more naturally, in ways life-giving and fun. 

What if ‘thinking’ and ‘praying’ could move together in coordinated choreography of communing with God?

All of us have a running inner dialogue going on all the time.  Some of us are more aware of it than others.  Some of us express it verbally more than others.  I’m told I talk to myself all the time, and I confess this is true.  But I really wasn’t very aware of this internal conversation with myself until it became part of a burnout recovery in 1992. 

‘Self talk’ might be another word for it; the messages we’re giving to ourselves on an ongoing basis, whether we fully know it or not.  And in this recovery, it was suggested to me that there could be more positive intentionality in this internal monologue, and that actually it could be turned into more of a conversation.  Not with myself, but with the Someone who cared deeply for me, and who was privy to those thoughts anyway.

“Take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”  Paul again, in his letter this time to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 10:5).  Not as a guilt-trip shaming into avoiding ‘naughty thinking’, but as an invitation to a new dance of prayer and spiritual vitality that had escaped me up to that point in my life.  In fact, the shaming part had actually helped to contribute to the rather desperate mental state I now found myself in.

I tried to explain this ‘thoughts as prayer’ practice in a Bible study group setting once, just quickly, without very much background.  The response I got from one person was ‘That sounds exhausting!”  Clearly I hadn’t explained things well.  Because far from being exhausting, on the days I can relax into this, I find it both energizing and calming at the same time.  Once I was able to tune into what was going on in my head, how I was thinking about any given moment in any given day, and once I was able to choose what I would and would not allow to influence my spirit and my life, it was just one step away from changing that from merely talking with myself, to talking with God.  And then one day I looked up and I was pretty sure I was ‘praying continually’, at least most of the time.  Not every day.  Not all the time.  Fatigue and self-centeredness sabotages some more days than I’d care to admit.  Some days I am distracted and fussy and not praying at all.  But over time, gradually, turning thoughts into prayers has become more and more of a way of being.

It’s obvious, of course, that this casual, natural way of turning thoughts into prayers won’t replace a more concentrated time of being before God to mediate on behalf of others, or seek His guidance on important decisions, or any of the other ways we do indeed come aside to pray in a more concentrated way.  Like the casual conversations I have with my husband Ken throughout the day, compared to the more intentional times we sit down to work things out, make decisions, or even just to give each other undivided attention.

But one seems to enrich the other, I think.  The deeper times become the springboard for the running conversational prayer, and the natural conversations feed into the more concentrated conversations.  Like that. 

The mental health benefits of this for me have been nothing short of life-changing.  Whatever scraps of sanity I can now claim are because of this dancing prayer-thought habit.  God is always so Present in the moments, and the dance of it keeps me free and focused.

But the other huge and most significant benefit has been the fostering of an ongoing, real and deeply anchoring intimacy with God.  Praying continually undergirds all the other practices I employ and enjoy to keep my spirit open and fresh and alive. 

Like an invitation to be set free in a Divine dance of grace and love.