My chief work is prayer and yours is . . .

. . . dear friends, also prayer. But prayer is NOT only the pious down-on-your-knees prayers in church, nor just the scripted prayers in the prayer book, nor just words to God shut in your room alone at home.

Prayer is all the conversation we have with God in the room of our mind and soul. Wherever we go, whatever we do. Prayer can be stirred by something we read or something we see in nature, by work or through our interactions with people.

The leader of our clergy retreat, Esther de Waal, is an expert in Benedictine prayer. St. Benedict lived in the end of the 5th century and beginning of the 6th century. Though many people think of him as a priest, he never was. He started monasteries as a "brother," and focused on the life of brothers learning to live in harmony with each other. The traditional model had been more top-down, learning from and being ordered about by a "father" who was mentor and final authority on everything.

Our homes are not unlike these early Benedictine communities: places where we struggle to get along with each other and to love each other, places where we do the work and learning and celebrating and communing which sustains us.

This home community is also the place where we say our daily prayers. Of course, our home communities are also sustained by the weekly coming together with other home communities at church to worship, but these Sabbath prayers are only a small part of the prayers we need to thrive.

Part of my at-home prayers are in the form of poetry. I've always felt short of shy about confessing that, feeling somehow that reading someone else's beautiful meditations must be cheating in some way. But our speaker, Esther, talked about the joy and nourishment she takes in poetry. In poetry, we stand alongside someone who is seeing the beauty and glory of creation, and even across generations and centuries enjoy that poetry together.

So here's a gift of poetry from me to you today, a poem written not be me (as "The Geese" poem that I posted last week was), but by a famous Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. Enjoy your prayers!

Faithfully,
Janet+

THE BRIGHT FIELD
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.