About a decade ago I had a dream about my impending death. It blew me open. For weeks afterward, I was saturated by a silence so pervasive it felt like a presence. Once it dissipated, I desperately wanted it back and so plunged head-first into an ancient Christian form of silent meditation. I also began writing to figure out what had happened. A narrative essay, with its cadence and thrust, its capacious generosity, I knew could usher me into the fiery core of my questions. To find again that silence I used the two tools I knew could help.
I shared that writing with no one. It was too secret, too embarrassing, too Christian. When after a few years I realized I was withholding an important dimension of my prayer life from my spiritual director (because the process itself was as much prayer as the experiences I was describing), I let him read it. The essay evolved over five years. Finally finished, at 8000 words with quotes from the Bible and theologians and my contemplative teachers, I assumed it was unpublishable and tucked it away. Other than Terry, no one laid eyes on it.
Since then I’ve grown a bit into what I’d written. The insights gleaned from writing in deep privacy have spilled into my teaching, my friendships, and my prayer practice. What once felt embarrassing became a truth I now share openly, if infrequently: I’ve become a serious practitioner of Centering Prayer.
Then in 2023 I saw a call for submissions to Orison Books’ chapbook contest. Orison is an archaic word that means “prayer.” “The best spiritual art and literature call us to meditate and contemplate, rather than asking us to adopt any ideology or set of propositions,” Orison writes in their mission. “This type of art evokes the human experience of transcendence and explores the mysteries of being, and in so doing opens our minds and hearts to the divine and the possibility of becoming the fullest humans we can be.” Orison articulates what I’ve always hoped my writing might accomplish. I submitted the essay.
And won. Two years later, the chapbook is in print. I’m reeling with wonder that anyone, friends or strangers, might join me between the bound pages of my prayer practice. It’s dark there, vulnerable and aching. Time slows. I know nothing, am struck dumb, am foolish and broken and faulty. Nonetheless I’m bathed in mercy, as we all are. Today I’m grateful beyond words, which perhaps was the point all along.
—Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew