When our son was five, we started a family prayer practice that we’re still doing with our eleven-year-old today. Like most of the good ideas in our family, it started with my spouse. “Let’s each share a high, low, and grateful from our day,” she said, and we all agreed it was a good idea. I was also searching for a more meaningful way to introduce prayer to our son.
A couple of years into the practice, Sam looked at us one night and said he thought we should add more to the list. Remarkably, this was right around the time Covid was roiling in the world around us. “Okay, what should we add?” I asked. We all thought for a while, but he eventually filled the silence. “Let’s add a beautiful and a wow.” So, we did and, on most nights, unless he’s super tired, we each name our five prayers from the day. We still call them our “H. L. G’s.”
I recently returned from my professional conference where each year I learn from and network with friends and colleagues doing college and university chaplaincy around the United States. The night before I was dreading going. It had been a long day, and I was tired, and it was the weekend. The older I get, the harder it is to get on a plane for some reason too. Ami reminded me that I would probably regret not going and, well, I already had the flight and hotel booked.
The conference was in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California (USC). It should have been sunny, but it turns out LA was getting the rainstorm of the decade. An atmospheric river, they called it. It even had a name, “The Pineapple Express.” It was my first visit there and other than the first evening when I arrived, I never saw the sun.
There was flooding and some landslides, but the area of LA I was in was mostly ok. The Grammy’s still happened about a mile and a half from my hotel despite all the rain. In that building that night, the world was reminded of how beautiful music is – the making of it and our listening to it. We saw it in all the stars of our day, but we also were taken back across the years with artists like Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, and, of course, Tracy Chapman as she performed for the first time in public in years. Her duet with Luke Combs on their now shared hit of “Fast Car” was a snapshot of hope.
My conference was good too. I reconnected with colleagues, a few of them mentors to me over these twenty-one years in chaplaincy. The USC Trojan Band showed up to play for us at the opening of the first night’s dinner. And the actor Rainn Wilson (who played Dwight on the television show, “The Office”) talked about his new book, Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution.
I made it back home to Georgia just in time for our prayer practice on Tuesday night. In part, it helped me get caught up on some of the things I had missed at home. In my prayers, I recounted much of what I just shared here in this article. Trying to capture my prayers from the entire weekend. Including a low for the people in the LA area and all the weather they endured. A grateful that my travels had been safe. And a wow that we can somehow be on one side of this ginormous country in the morning and on the other later that same day. It still blows my mind.
I love our prayer practice. Because it encourages us to think about our days with greater intention not only at the end of the day but all throughout. Perhaps the greater meaning, though, is related to the upcoming Christian season of Lent. These forty days that lead us to Holy Week and Easter are days of pilgrimage. We journey through the season with the opportunity to more deeply understand how we live amid the complexities of life. That the highs and gratefuls of our life sit right beside the lows too. That a wow may be a glad surprise, or it may very well shake us to our core. Sometimes it’s both. The season of Lent is a season that reminds us of this, especially as it winds its way to Holy Week, a week of tremendous highs and lows in the life of Jesus.
Divisive politics. Flights that return home safely. Weather disasters. Joy of new life. Woes of war and death across the globe. We need prayer and other contemplative practices that help us learn how to live with these complexities. Our life is full of them – ones that affect us personally and others we, perhaps, only see on the news or in the prayer concerns in our worshipping community.
The season of Lent gives us time and space to journey into the paradox of life. I’m both awed by that and grateful for it.
The Rev. Dr. Lyn Pace is the college chaplain at Oxford College of Emory University and author of The Sacred Year: A Contemplative Journey Through the Liturgical Year.
