I have a couple of little prayers like that. When I was 8 and in the choir we sang a version of the prayer from St. Patrick's breastplate, which I memorized on terrifying nighttime walks to my Grandma Gertie's. She lived next door, but because we lived in the country, it wasn't all that close, really. In the middle of the walk it was too dark to see.
Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Erin go bragh.
I'll admit that's kind of long, and it's actually part of a much longer prayer. It doesn't have the Twitter-worthy cache of Anne Lamott's, but then again I bet she doesn't have "Help, Thanks, Wow" sewn into her bra.
"Be with me" is another one of my security blanket prayers. This one stretches way back, and I'm betting it will reach far forward, because when does more security ever seem like a bad thing?
Security means safety. Safety means calm. Calm leads to productivity and creativity and stuff like work, food prep, sex-- which if nothing else ensures the survival of the species. Praying this prayer is generally a sign that I'm on the edge of something, leaning away from what's comfortable and into the hazy unknown. And if you want to get all zen about it, think about all those wise sayings about how only change is constant. Change is forever and ever. Leaning into change means participating in the eternal, where, paradoxically, we find the Center unmoved.
I went for a walk tonight in the dark and the rain. Walking in the dark is something it turns out I really love to do, but learned to fear in the way all girls learn to fear walks in the dark. It is not safe, it is not secure, and I am not stupid. I don't usually do it.
When it's raining, though, I figure I've got logic on my side. Most people stay inside to avoid the rain. Fewer people at all must mean fewer dangerous people. That plus rain equals win/win.
Rain during the day is, at best, just nice. At its worst it means a three hour cock-up on the interstate, and its potential to mean that even in the barest drizzle takes off some of the shine. Rain at the darkening end of the day is a different sort of thing. It's like walking in an enormous, sky-sided cave, especially if you live in an area that's patchily lit. Darkness, shadow, and water. Occasionally, wind. Even more occasionally a wind chime, tiny and precious and worth stopping for in the rivers on the street.
Tonight I was walking and thinking and the thinking became a prayer. It became "Be with me" as I walked past the police car with its flashing lights, past the elementary school, into the dark of the streets lined with houses. "Be with me" in the heavy bursts of floral fragrance on the side of the road, some manicured, some wild weeds. "Be with me" walking down the long side of a house with an old woman on the porch, at first completely camouflaged with gray hair and a gray housecoat in her gray chair in the gray porch light. Older and someone else but also a woman in the rainy dark, so much the same. I asked God to be with her, too.
And then the surroundings got a little bit creepier, rounding the corner by the abandoned house. Not much light there at all, and boards on the windows. Spray paint: YOLO, all up the side of the stair-rail. "Be with me," I said out loud. And then an azalea bush, seeming to speak: "I never left."
That was jarring, and stopped me short. I took the temperature of the time and the wind and the street, and sure enough, it was completely true.
I stood there in the road for a long, long time-- as long as I dared, and longer. Because really, who would be seeing me, out in the dark and the rain?
Only crazy people go for walks in weather like that.
I've heard it said that when we pray, God's doing all the work. That it's less about reaching up to meet that sense of presence than letting it reach out to us, touch us, fall on us. Some times and places it just seems more likely-- in the morning before anyone else is awake, in the chapel at church, way out in the woods, on an old porch swing. You can go /do/ be in those times and places and almost know what you're going to find there, and that's a comfort. It's safety and security.
Just like that, sometimes we expect the rain, because we look outside and see it coming. We read the weather online so we know what to put in our bag before work in the morning, and sure enough, rain shows up.
And sometimes? Sometimes the rain is a complete and shocking surprise, soaking all our clothes and all our plans and kind of ferocious with the thunder and the wind and the lightning. The world ceases to be a place we exist in and, instead, exists all over us.
It can be scary to be existed upon. To be taken over, enthralled, enraptured, possessed by this something else, this Other, this God of the hazy unknown. But I defy you to ever feel less amazingly alive-- ever less sure of the amazing fact of your life, lived with you in it, with him in you, precisely because you are the very one God wants to be with in that moment.
Yes, it can be frightening, and rain is like that, too. But there is something so precious, so sacred, in every little glimpse we get of how beloved we are. I wonder sometimes why it's so easy to forget that, because why would we want to? What are we up, really, to that's more important or appealing?
Rain doesn't equal mystical. Generally rain just equals wet. But sometimes, in places like these walks, something special happens. And even when it doesn't, it's pretty in the rainy dark, and that always counts for something.
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