Pray and soar

Last updated on: August 23, 2016 at 1:22 pm by Brad Roth

Pray and soar 2016-08-23T13:22:27-05:00 Brad Roth

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The Mississippi kites are migrating. They’ve been wheeling over our neighborhood since spring, rising on thermals and diving on cicadas and dragonflies. They’re just big enough that I keep a watchful eye on our chickens–and our chickens keep an eye on the kites. The chickens have a distinctive cluck that means heads up! (Yes, I can speak a little chicken).

The kites gather in the sky in gray whorls as they prepare to migrate to somewhere in South America. Their wings angle back like boomerangs. They make no effort. They just rise, up and beyond, to useless heights, into the ice-crystal air and the cotton-spinning clouds. They float. It’s the opposite of flapping.

The ancient desert monk, Evagrios the Solitary, wrote in his treatise on prayer: “Pray gently and calmly…then you will soar like a young eagle high in the heavens.” (#82).1

Sometimes prayer is struggle. Sometimes prayer is fervent. Sometimes prayer has an anxious wobble. But sometimes, prayer just rises. It floats.

Have you been there?

For me, this sort of prayer happens when I keep in mind that God is God, and that God upholds the world by his mighty word (Heb. 1:3)–not by my spindly, anxious prayers. This sort of prayer happens when I remember that prayer is ultimately about being present to God. It’s the opposite of flapping.

I can’t pray like this on demand. It takes discipline, mainly the discipline of continuing to show up to God, day after day, and remain planted long enough for my mind to stop flapping. It strikes me that Evagrios came out of the ancient desert hesychast–“quietness”–tradition. The hesychasts were folks who went into the desert and managed to remain there–for a long time–in quiet. They tucked themselves into rocky nooks and hidden crannies and dedicated themselves to prayer. They still had their demons and their struggles, but they kept showing up to God, day after day, as God opened a way for them into merciful quiet.

“Pray gently and calmly,” said Evagrios. Be present to God. Maybe then our prayers will start to soar a little, rising up into the heights like a Mississippi kite.

1 from: The Philokalia: The complete text (Compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, trans and ed. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware; London: Faber and Faber, 1979), p.65.

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