AIF Week Three: Prayer for Today with Zemirah Adionah-Dose

Josh Reeves (0:01)

Hey, this is Josh Reeves. You're listening to the Mile Hi Church Podcast.

On Friday, October 23rd, we're thrilled to welcome Lyssa Rankin and Jeffrey Rediger. They're going to be speaking on the topic of their new book, Relationsick, and it's about how toxic relationships can affect our health. The next day, Saturday, October 24th, they're going to bring all their great healing wisdom that we've read about in their many books to a workshop from 9 a.m. to 12 So you can get tickets to one or to both of these events on our website, milehichurch.org.

Zemirah Adionah-Dose (0:34)

We continue our Adventures in Faith series today with a focus on prayer, an ancient tool for our modern lives. And there's a reason why prayer is a spiritual technology that has been present throughout the ages. From my Sufi studies, we discussed at length how our souls call and long for communion. And in the Sufi tradition, we believe that this longing draws us ever closer into an experience of the beloved, the divine, should we heed the call. We also believe in the Sufi tradition that the heart is the altar place of God. It is that indwelling presence within our own heart that we touch the divine spark that is eternal within us. And because our heart is this altar of God, our souls are always moving back in to that awareness, calling to enter into that awareness. So we're going to begin this morning with a call to prayer.

It is a prayer that is going to be sung by Laura in the ancient Aramaic, the conversational language of Jesus. And so I invite you to take a breath with me now. Perhaps even put your hands on your heart if you feel open to it, and just invite and receive the call.

Thank you, Laura.

Prayer is designed to, when entered into with reverence, bring us deeper into center.

That is why it is a spiritual technology, a call to prayer as we find throughout faith traditions around the world is to call back the members of that faith tradition, to call them back into that sacred space and to invite them into the circle of prayer.

This call to prayer that Laura just sang was so beautifully shared and written about by Janahara Loramangas.

This previous weekend, a week ago, Saturday last night, I was walking through Boulder on a date night with my new beloved husband and our furry child Rosie, and we're walking down Pearl Street and I got a tap from the Divine. It said, enter this bookstore. And when I went to the bottom of the stairs, greeting me was her book, Becoming Honey, an Aramaic work and translation of the Hail Mary prayer.

I was completely immersed in this book, so much so that I called her or I sent an email, reached out to this author, a Sufi sister, on Monday morning, and she nearly immediately called me back. And we entered into a dialogue about prayer.

Prayer.

Her call to prayer is actually Elizabeth's response when the archangel Gabriel comes to Mother Mary and says that she is going to give birth to Jesus. This is the response. She says, Mariam, and Mariam is inviting and creating a circle, a container of reverence for the Holy Mother, for the Divine Mother, for the Ultimate Mother. And it is followed by that Aramaic word, Barakhtu. Barakhtu literally means blessing in Aramaic. But it has such a deeper meaning. Janahara writes that since Aramaic is a relational language, it has the contextual meaning, of course, but it is relational in that all of the words carry a depth of meaning, and their meaning is determined based on the words that they come together in relationship with in utterance. Barakhtu literally means, as Janahara writes, a field of magnetic influence, a sphere of sweetness, an ever-flowing movement, the motion of blessing, and a spiritual presence that defies time.

That is prayer. Prayer is a tool of blessing that brings us into spiritual presence, a sense of the timelessness, the timeless.

And that awakens within us this morning a key question, which is how do we answer the call to prayer? What is your relationship with prayer in your life right now? How are you answering the call to prayer? And even a deeper question can be born out of that, and that is how do we respond to our soul's longing for communion, and how can we do it through prayer? And the first step that I want to bring forward this morning is to pause, the remembering pause. The remembering pause is that yes, we remember to pause, but the remembering is also remembering, bringing back the different parts of ourselves and remembering, collecting them together in this spaciousness, this container of prayer within us. Jackie gave such a spacious silence. Do you notice every single week we begin with a moment of silence because it's in that stillness, that pause, that we move in to the spaciousness of prayer. So we've remembered a pause, and it's in that pause that the sacred can be felt. Let's circle back to Aramaic for just a moment because there are keys and clues within that ancient language that hold true, that ring true for our present day spirituality. That which is relevant and universal doesn't fade over time. It is timeless. And Jesus, who spoke Galilean Aramaic, delivered his instructions for prayer on the Sermon on the Mount that day. He gave us the Lord's prayer. And when the scholars of Aramaic talk about the meaning of the word prayer in Aramaic, they share with us that the word for prayer is shaluta, shaluta, shaluta. And it carries layers of meaning. A couple of scholars that I have found such value and depth in their work are Neil Douglas Klotz and Dr. Rocco Errico. And they both written books that explore these meanings associated with prayer that include meanings around setting a trap for God, as well as the meaning that Neil Douglas, Douglas Klotz brings, which is hollowing ourselves out. And both of those meanings give us clues because to set a trap is to be exquisitely attentive to quiet our wandering mind, so that we may catch those subtle impulses, those taps of the divine presence already within us. Prayer, then, and then also works to hollow us out, so that we create an inner spaciousness to become like a vessel to receive.