Sacred Collaborations

What is prayer?

When we hold sweat lodges at our home there is a tangible energy that builds as people become energized around the fire and pending ceremony.  Kids who are on property when we do a lodge often get caught up in the energy and want to join in.  My thought is to create a child positive opportunity for them to participate and so I often will conduct a kid’s round in which they sing songs and say prayers.  I bring the children and their parents in the lodge, and we sit around the pit with the door closed with maybe one or two stones.  I invite the kids to sing songs they know from school, or I sing songs that the children might be able to relate. Between songs I will invite each child by name to offer a prayer. 

 This time, when I invited the kids to pray, they had no concept of what a prayer was.  This startled me and I scrambled to find words to describe prayer in a way a child would appreciate.

 How do you teach someone how to pray? 

 The word prayer can trigger many responses based on cultural and social cues and often the word is used as if there is a common relationship to prayer when it’s likely to be highly individualistic.

 This dilemma got me to thinking about how frequently we use the word prayer in ceremony without any suggestion of how to approach prayer, is the word ‘prayer’ even appropriate for what we do in ceremony?  If the word prayer didn’t exist, then what word would best describe the action of prayer?

In ceremony I have witnessed many prayers done in many ways.  Some folks are long in their prayers hitting every note of their oratory and others are brief and to the point.  Sometimes people wax poetic while some people take 30 seconds identifying and calling in their higher power.  Some prayers are performative and others intimate petitions for help. 

I recently posted the question on Facebook on how to pray and explain efficient and effect prayers and got varied responses.  

 Some people offered platitudes of a prayer as a simple communication from the heart. Some explained that prayer is an overused word. Words like communion, intimate communication, and remembrance were examples of explanation of prayer.  Obviously, each comment carries some sliver of insight and truth. If I invite someone to speak from the heart to their ancestors, and if all they can conjure in their mind are ancestors who traumatize them in the past, what good is that?

 What about individuals that have been so traumatized that they disassociate from spaces of the heart?  To say pray from your heart sounds Hallmark-ish although accurate but could leave some stumbling and insecure in that form of communication.  Religious trauma in which the verbiage of prayer, faith, etc. can provoke the damage of that trauma from organized religion.  I take all these things in consideration as I post this question because I’m guilty of inviting people to pray without perhaps exercising this level of empathy that may be required to invite them to have a true and intimate conversation with the beings and ancestors on the other side.

 I find myself as someone in the community who’s looked to for eldership and teachings, and what I want to ensure the reader is that my path of spirituality invites me to constantly question, and to examine the story of who I am and unfold the mysteries that are within my own being.  Bruce and I have been fortunate to have many teachers offering many perspectives, and I should note that none of them have ever been prescriptive of a right or wrong way to do things, although they have encouraged us to connect with our intuition and our sense of connection to spirit, creator, ancestors and the natural world.

 What I offer to you now is my personal definition and relationship with prayer. I recognize that throughout the years I have developed a pattern of opening my prayer that begins with announcing myself to the creator (Which I see fully manifested in the natural world, life and all beings seen and unseen) and ancestors by the name gifted to me many years ago by one of my native friends.   For me, I like to dig deep into a place of considering myself communicating and collaborating with my ancestors (of my blood, heart and beings who align themselves with me).   When I think of ancestors, I think of the lineage of the Italians and the Scottish that are my family line.  I think of relatives that are both loved and those who I struggled with in this life, I think beyond these immediate relatives to the relatives who migrated to this country generations before my birth.   I have no point of reference of who many of these ancestors are, I do have a glimpse of history and a glimpse of ancestral history that offers hints and clues. There’s an adage that what we do impacts seven generations beyond us. I think about the choices I make today and how those choices might impact my great great great grandchildren. What stories will they share about Grandpa Buie?  Likewise, I wonder if my ancestors from faraway places wondered about how their choices might impact who I am today?  What prayers, thoughts, intentions, collaborations did they engage and was my generation part of that consideration?

 I drift in my description of how I pray. 

 If I were to eliminate the word prayer and replace it with a new word, it would be collaboration and perhaps a secondary word of communion.

It might include the word acknowledgment.

It might be the concept of heart felt communication. 

I may think about prayer as an intimate expression of what’s in my heart and mind to the collective (seen and unseen) that is invested in the outcome of my life (as I visualize my ancestral guides to be invested in my outcomes).

I may solicit their assistance and guidance as well as their insight and visions. I may ask them to guide my intuition as I assist others and to provoke my thoughts as I offer divinations.  I call upon them to watch over my child and grandchildren.  

 When I consider this concept of collaboration and communion with those on the other side, it opens my heart in a way that I’m able to recognize that I am sustained and blessed by the vibrational energy of projecting my intention and receiving the echo of those words/intentions as the ancestors amplify what I expel from my heart.

 So, the next time you sit in a Sacred Circle, and are asked to pray, consider the possibility of allowing yourself a collaborative counsel with your higher power(s) and communication with your ancestors, acknowledge that your existence is worth having an audience with those who sit on the other side. That your words are an intimate communication of what you hold in your heart, and that those on the other side, whoever or whatever they may be, are listening and attentive with equally receptive, warm hearts.

 Written by

Jerry Buie

October 18, 2022