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Holy Ground
An Alphabet of Prayer
Julie K. Aageson
HOLY GROUND
An Alphabet of Prayer
Copyright © 2018 Julie K. Aageson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3922-7
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3923-4
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3924-1
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Aageson, Julie K.
Title: Holy ground : an alphabet of prayer / Julie K. Aageson
Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018 | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-3922-7 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-3923-4 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-3924-1 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Prayer—Christianity | Spiritual life—Christianity
Classification: BV2010.3 A132 2018 (paperback) | BV2010.3 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 01/29/18
Prior Publications by Julie K. Aageson
One Hope: Re-Membering the Body of Christ (Augsburg Fortress and Liturgical Press, 2015) (Co-authored in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation)
Benedictions: 26 Reflections (Wipf and Stock, 2016)
With love and gratitude for my three daughters, Erin Kristine, Anne Elizabeth, and Megan Kathleen, each of whom is woven into these reflections in subtle and not so subtle ways. Their presence in my life is holy ground.
Permissions
Enthusiasm, p. 20. Use of the lines from “Now the feast and celebration, all of creation sings for joy.” Haugen, “Now the Feast.” 1990, GIA. Fair use.
Enthusiasm, p. 20. Use of the line, “This is the feast of victory for our God.” Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Augsburg Fortress, 2006. Fair use.
Faith, p. 24. “O God, Why are You Silent.” Text by Marty Haugen. GIA, 2003. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Nurturing, p. 57. “Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth.” Text by Jean Janzen. Minneapolis, Augsburg Fortress, 1995. Used with permission.
Yearning, p. 104. “Christ, Be Our Light” ©1993, Bernadette Farrell. Published by Oregon Catholic Press. 5536 NE Hassalo, Portland, OR 97213 All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Yearning, p. 105. Use of the lines “. . . for peace in the world, for the health of the church, for the unity of all . . . for peace in our hearts, for peace in our homes . . . let us pray to the Lord.” Evangelical Lutheran Worship, Augsburg Fortress, 2006. Reproduced with permission.
Preface
When I was very young, I learned to pray in all the places young children are wont to do. There were the usual prayers before meals—Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, let these gifts to us be blessed and O give thanks to the Lord for God is good and God’s mercy endures forever—prayed with one eye half open in order better to survey the food before us. Sometimes prayer followed the meal—Thanks dear Lord, for meat and drink, through Jesus Christ, Amen—said in a cadence that resembled marching, which might have been what we wished we were doing, eager as we were to get away from the table and on to more interesting things.
And there were bedtime prayers, these more complicated and often more engaging if only because they were a way of prolonging evenings spent with parents at our bedside—Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray dear Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray dear Lord my soul to take. I don’t remember conversations about death, though this prayer certainly could have opened a door into a long night of interesting questions. Dear Jesus, be with all the people behind the Iron Curtain. Protect everyone behind the Bamboo Curtain and be with those surrounded by the Wall. Watch over all the hungry children in China . . . These images conveyed all sorts of possibilities for nighttime conversation. What was that iron curtain actually made of and how did bamboo become a curtain? Was everyone behind some sort of wall or barrier? Might walls—barriers—mean something more than physical dividers or ramparts? How, really, could we share our food? And might food also be a metaphor for other kinds of nourishment?
Later on, I remember the prayers of my mother and father, and especially those of my grandparents, whose habits of prayer helped shape the whole family. I also recall conversations about how to pray and how not to pray. These were not necessarily analytical or systematic reviews of types of prayer as much as critiques of people who prayed in ways thought—perhaps only by us—to be self-serving or manipulative or lacking understanding of a God who did not serve as our divine and personal valet, delivering weather we requested or answers we sought or any other exchange of prayer for goods.
When a well-meaning friend might tell of praying for rain for her garden and another neighbor about hoping it wouldn’t rain while his cherry orchard was vulnerable and rain would mean cracked fruit, the irony was not lost on us. What would God do? Who would God decide to please? Deep down, we knew that our prayers were not about bargaining with God and not about exchanging conversation and information with the sacred—as if God only needed to know more in order to respond appropriately.
Even at a young age, perhaps because of the experience of prayer in worship, we knew prayer to be about putting ourselves in places where God might be present. I also had a keen sense of being with God, experiencing the sacred in daily life, and knowing that somehow this too is prayer—mysterious, enigmatic, inexplicable, both knowing and not knowing.
Later as a young adult, I discovered the writings of a great rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who introduced me to a Jewish sensibility: God resting on our eyelids. I loved the immediacy and literalness of the image coupled with Heschel’s passionate belief that God accompanies us whether we desire God’s presence or not.
I also remember a story—perhaps told by Rabbi Heschel—of a Jewish shoemaker who would work late into the evening repairing the worn shoes of fellow villagers, the only pair of shoes they owned, so that they could return to work the following morning. The poor shoemaker found himself torn between making time to pray the required daily prayers of his tradition and repairing the shoes so desperately needed by his customers. His sigh of frustration became a prayer, a literal longing for God to be present in his work of mending and sewing and repairing—in order for the people of his village to wear shoes the next day. The sigh of the shoemaker was enough.
Too often we turn prayer into well-intentioned patterns of our own making. Too often we assume prayer is primarily about words. Sometimes there’s an almost magical understanding that if we get the words right, if we trust enough, if we believe enough, God will answer. But most of us know that God is not a divine magician and that prayer is much more than our feeble attempts to make God pay attention to what God already knows or to make of God a puppet responding to our tugs on the strings of God’s heart. Prayer is so much more than words.
Several years ago, I was invited to write a monthly column for a denominational magazine. I was at once both honored and terrified. The column’s title, Let Us Pray, conveyed certain assumptions I was not at all sure about—did they think I had prayer all figured out? Did they assume