2. Welcoming Prayer

In my first update, I mentioned that we opened our kickoff orientation with some silent prayer. Well, I suppose it wasn’t entirely silent. It started with these words:

I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment because I trust it can be part of my healing. 

I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations, and conditions.

I let go of my desire for approval.

I let go of my desire for control.

I let go of my desire for false security. 

I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person, for myself.

I am open to the love and presence of God, and the healing action and grace within.

This is One Parish One Prisoner’s Welcoming Prayer. OPOP recommends starting each meeting by reading it aloud and taking 3-5 minutes to meditate in silence. I remember feeling a bit bewildered when I first heard this prayer at our kickoff orientation - I found I wasn’t alone in that.

To a group of mainline protestants, this prayer can seem difficult and confronting both in its content and in the way it is prayed. We’re very used to beginning prayers by addressing God: God of [grace, truth, hope, peace, etc.], Lord Jesus, almighty God, divine Creator. But this prayer doesn’t even mention God until the last line. Instead of addressing God in suitably reverent terms and then asking for something very specific, we’re first affirming that we are open to everything — every thought and emotion and situation and person — before finally saying that we are open to God’s love and presence.

I think many of us are also uncomfortable with silence, at least in the context of our corporate worship. During a typical service at Faith, there are about two designated moments of silence. We have a bit of silence to mentally list our sins during confession and forgiveness and a bit of silence to mentally list the people we pray for during prayers of intercession. 

The words “welcoming prayer” call to mind the statement read during announcements before services at Faith: “All are welcome in this place, including those with doubts and questions.” That kind of welcoming is important, of course, but OPOP’s Welcoming Prayer refers to a kind of inner welcome. 

As Christians, we are called to practice hospitality and welcome. On Sundays, we volunteer to greet visitors at the door or to serve communion wine. We make sure there’s enough coffee and food to go around. We share the peace. But how often do we think about practicing welcome within ourselves? Forgive me, reader, for what I’m about to do in bringing SpongeBob Squarepants into this contemplative atmosphere. There’s an episode in which SpongeBob’s brain is depicted as an office full of little SpongeBobs. SpongeBob is desperately trying to remember something, and all his inner SpongeBobs are frantically searching through filing cabinets. 

SpongeBob’s Brain Office eventually descends into chaos and catches on fire. If you had an inner church full of miniature versions of you, what would it look like? Are you practicing welcome to each of your thoughts and emotions, each facet of your experience? Are you casting judgmental glances at some of your mini-yous or even barring some of them from entry?

I’m harping on SpongeBob’s Brain Office and our own hypothetical Brain Churches because our learning module kept bringing up this idea of microcosm/macrocosm. Part of our “homework” for this meeting was to watch a short documentary, Holding Still, which follows the Centering Prayer group at Folsom Prison. It is a good introduction to the practice which inspires OPOP’s Welcoming Prayer. The men in the documentary would sit in a circle of chairs at Folsom’s Greystone Chapel and sit silently together. Then a facilitator would lead a discussion about what sorts of things came up in the men’s minds. It’s that simple; there are no creeds to recite or hymns to sing or sermons to listen to. Yet the men interviewed attest to feeling deeply transformed by this practice. 

The formerly-incarcerated men in the documentary were repressed in a very literal sense when they were in prison. But they also held prisons within themselves, acting as wardens and guards over deeply repressed feelings of shame. One interviewee, Ket, shared that while he had participated in many self-help groups in prison, none of them really confronted shame in the way that the centering prayer group did. Shame is a difficult emotion - one that we often keep hidden deep inside us, underground. In our learning module, Chris Hoke describes the long, descending path of stairs which he walked in order to visit the prayer group at Folsom Prison. The physical descent mirrors the spiritual descent. We each have an inner underground: our traumas, our secrets, our shame, our fear. In a way, the prison system is a macrocosm of that underground. Hoke describes feeling, in the silence at Folsom, that he was “inside the nation’s subconscious.”

We know the words in the Apostles’ Creed: “he descended to the dead.” Like the resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus’s descent into Hades is a central story in OPOP’s theology. Jesus told Peter “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) In the icon below, you can see those broken gates amid a black void full of locks, keys, and chains.

It’s natural and common to think of God being distantly above us, a big “sky daddy,” as I’ve heard people say with varying levels of snarkiness. It’s easy to turn our heads upward when we pray. After all, the Apostles’ Creed also says “he ascended into heaven.” We stretch our hands aspiringly towards heaven but often forget that God’s arms are long enough to reach down to the very depths of the earth. God is not just up there in the sky; He is with us here on the ground and even under it. Jesus is Emmanuel - God with us. 

God’s love is big enough to enfold every single person - including those whom the world has judged to be beyond redemption. Going underground is frightening. But the God who made us knew us even before we were formed in the womb. There is nothing frightening or awful inside us which is too big for him to handle. 

“Be still and know that I am God,” says Psalm 46. (Last scripture quotation, I promise). Centering prayer is one way to follow God’s invitation to stillness. It isn’t about clearing your mind entirely, but allowing yourself to be at peace in the midst of your thoughts. This is how Lawrence, another of the interviewees in the documentary, puts it:

“The thoughts are always taking you away . . . it might be a terrible thought, like something that happened to you when you were a child, something that happened to somebody that you love. But as you just sit there, pretty soon you’re able to not react physically or mentally or emotionally. So the story is just going. . . But in between that thought and the next thought there’s silence. And in that silence you can kind of hear God’s voice.”

Try the welcoming prayer for yourself - read it slowly and take a few minutes of silence. Rinse and repeat. What comes up in your mind? Is there a word or phrase in the prayer you fixate on? One of our team shared that she found herself breathing in “welcome” and breathing out “let go.” One caveat - this prayer isn’t about letting go of our desire for approval or wanting to change things for ourselves forever - just for the moment. We can want approval or control in healthy ways - we don’t want to let down people who are important to us, or we want to enact positive change through ministry or activism. And the prayer isn’t asking us to welcome persons or situations that harm us. But in the context of silent meditation, we have the safety to let go of desires which can become toxic or harmful, and see what God is inviting us to welcome in their stead.