“If you do not believe in God
Go on a blue spring day across these fields:
Listen to the orchids, race the sea, scent the wind.

Come back and tell me it was all an accident
A collision of blind chance
In the empty hugeness of space.”
~Kenneth C. Steven

I did not know it. But I have been searching for prayer. After the groundedness of Advent and the flurry of Christmas, I entered this season of Epiphany much like the Magi……searching. I found myself wandering from bookshelf to bookshelf. Leafing through poems, devotions,digging out bits and pieces of theological candy. But in the end, I was left still hungry. It was frustrating and confusing.

And then Friday I headed to a local store that caters to ‘all things churchy’. Candles, vestments, music, and books. I found myself roaming around, somewhat aimless, until I landed in the section labeled prayer. I began to look around at the various books and felt something move inside me. Like the Wise Ones who traveled through the desert, the Star had led me to a treasured place. I began to read the pages filled with prayers and words about prayer from various perspectives. Prayers from other traditions. Prayers for those who wanted a deep, spiritual practice. Prayers for women. Prayers to color. Prayers to read aloud with others. I walked out of the store with four books that seemed to bring something hopeful to my search.

Now I don’t hold any illusions that these prayers written by others will completely fill this longing I feel. But they may be a start. Like Mary Oliver who wrote:”I don’t know what a prayer is, but I do know how to pay attention.”, I am paying attention to this gnawing at my core that will not let me go. I am paying attention to the Holy trying to communicate with me. I am trying, trying to listen.

What better time to be searching for prayer than when our country has just suffered another horrible and violent destructive act like the one in Tucson? How do we make sense of such a thing? While my heart goes out, not only to the families of those killed and injured, my heart also goes out to this young man who is so ill. To plan and execute such violence is unimaginable. And yet, over the last few years our society has surrounded itself on the fear, rhetoric, meanness and vile evil of its own words. Words that are played at a fever pitch over and over on news, in newspapers, and on the internet. Words that come to make a home in us. How can our hearts not break with the sadness, the deep sadness of it?

This morning as I sat, coffee cup in hand, preparing for a little quiet time before my day began, I reached for one of the books I had purchased on Friday. “Where does this deep down, soulful hunger come from? The ache that you and I experience deep in our souls was created by the One in whose image we are made. We are meant for God and God is meant for us.“, writes author Dan Schutte. In the fullness of this day, with all its beauty and its violence, I am holding out that prayer can and does make a difference. And with each breath, I will continue paying attention and………..searching.