This week’s prayer is an old one. I wrote it approximately twenty years ago, at the age of 21. I call it a prayer, but I don’t think I thought of it as such when I wrote it. It doesn’t say anything about God. It doesn’t praise, give thanks, or ask for intercession.
It was written as a song, so I recorded myself singing it (rustily.) Please forgive the poor sound quality and the voice crackles.
I remember writing the lyrics to this song as a sort of spiritual response to the world-weariness I was experiencing at the time. You know when you’re just about sick of everything and kind of wish the giant meteor would hurry up and finish off this cursed timeline? But then you’re like, “Ah, but the sunsets are beautiful and cheeseburgers are delicious and I have people who love me, so maybe it’s worth hanging around and seeing what develops.”
It was a song to remind myself of who I am beneath all the layers of identity and belief and opinion, of emotion and intellect and flesh. And to recall, to center upon, the truth that this funny, tragic, illusory world isn’t the be-all end-all of life. And so I think it does in fact qualify as a prayer, in the sense that it realigns me with spirit.
The lyrics popped into my head this week in a similar moment of exasperation with The Circumstances, a bit on the personal and a bit on the global level. I think that I’m not alone in having these moments of world-weariness crop up from time to time. This is an age of Revelation. We’re all beginning to see reality in ways that we hadn’t thought to before, or hadn’t wanted to. Some revelations are horrid and some are ecstatic. They are sweeping the globe, and we probably each have our share of each.
But whether you’re in positive or negative revelation mode today, you might benefit from a little reminder of the impermanence of it all, and of the miraculous eternality of that truth, that goodness, that peace below.
I want to leave this place
and I want to stay always
but I know I’m just visiting
my departure date is unknown
so I’m watching and I’m listening
to find
a way
to transcend time.
The whole world is suffering
but I don’t fear anything
cause I know we’re just traveling
in a strange and distant land
and our costumes are unraveling
to show
that we
are peace below.
Thank you for praying with me. It helps.
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