I have come to believe there are many levels of prayer. By this I don’t mean that there are different levels of importance to the One who hears and receives our prayer. I mean, instead, that there are different levels of how our prayer has the potential to change us, transform us, make us more responsible to our living. While I still believe that Anne Lamott’s notion that we really only pray two prayers: “Help me! Help me! Help me!” and “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”, I do believe there are prayers we pray that can have an impact on us and the world that are bigger than anything we intend. Many times these efforts to commune with the Holy are formed in words. Other times they are birthed through sighs so deep they seem to come from a place within yet beyond us. Prayers that change us can also come in the form of screams or tears or belly laughs. Prayer always, I believe, comes to us on breath: ours, a friend’s, a partner’s, a child’s, the wings of a bird, the undulating of the Universe.

When prayers find words, words that continue to call us to ourselves and our relationship with the Sacred, we often like to commit them to memory. Prayers like the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer come to mind. While stored away on the hard drive of our brain, we may be able to pull up the words and repeat them at the perfect moment. The words may be the same but we kid ourselves if we think we are the same each time we repeat what we have memorized. When praying these long held prayers, is always wise to pay attention to the way certain words or phrases take on a new life, mean different things,nudge us in certain ways, surprise us or feel like a burr under our saddle.

Yesterday at a brunch we attended at Seattle University, we read the words of Jesuit Pedro Arrupe(1907-1991). We read his words as a prayer. They were words that reached out and grabbed me, begging me to pay attention. His words are worthy of committing to memory. “Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love. In a quite absolute, final way, what you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”

Reading these words with a room full of people, framing them as a prayer, was a powerful experience. As we finished sharing the breath of these words, something shifted in the room. It was filled with a possibility that had not been there before. Each of us brought our life experience, our age, our various connections to this institution to these words. Certainly those in the room who had chosen the life of religious orders knew the depths of falling in love with God. Parents and guardians in the room knew what it meant to fall in love and stay in love with one another and with those young ones sitting by their side. The young adults who graced the tables, full of possibility for what their life might hold, are only beginning to grasp the gifts and responsibilities of falling in love. Somehow praying these words together united us all in a hope for a falling in love that will continue to affect everything regardless of where we are on life’s path.

And so today I am surrounded by questions. Questions which I also offer. What have I fallen in love with? What have you? What seizes my imagination? What seizes yours? How has this falling in love shaped my life(and yours) in ways that helps heal the world? How has what I am in love with helped me walk in holy paths? And you?

These are all good questions for an autumn Monday. I invite you to them.I invite you to fall in love this day. I can pretty much promise, it will affect everything.

Blessed be.