The Joy of Feeling Close to God: The Practice of Prayer and the Work of Accompaniment

What does it mean to pray in response to the most acute challenges of everyday historical existence? When prayer is conceived of primarily as a personal, deeply interiorized expression of the soul's longing to communicate with a transcendent God, it can be difficult to imagine what it might mean to incorporate the embodied, communal, historically mediated dimensions of human experience into the broader understanding about what it means to pray. The challenge is to find a way of understanding and articulating how the powerful and supple language of prayer comes to expression in and through the concrete, historically mediated forms in which human beings actually live. Thinking about prayer in this way, as an embodied, socially and historically situated spiritual practice, can help us overcome a long-standing habit of thinking of prayer primarily in terms of dispositions or mental habits and help us retrieve a sense of the wholeness of prayer within the Christian tradition.I kneel on the ground to pick up a small handful of salt. It is coarse, luminous blue. I open my fingers and let it drift to the ground. Again and again I do this, marveling as I see these words slowly form before me: junios somos libres. "Together we are free." Then: Unidad. Esperanza. Paz. Amor. Fe. Words full of feeling and hope that are also prayers. It is the anniversary of the martyrs of the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador.1 Here on a narrow road running through the campus, hundreds of students, along with friends, family members, and others from the community, are bent over the ground, creating dozens of alfombras, or carpets, from colored salt. They are filled with the images and words of the martyrs, with crosses and churches, birds and trees-expressions of hope for a future different from the one that has led to the violent deaths of these women and men. A solemn occasion, marked by great seriousness of purpose, but also by much laughter and a sense of play: we are creating something beautiful to express our feeling for these witnesses and what they meant for our lives. Later that evening, hundreds more people, Salvadorans but also many who have come here to join in the anniversary celebration from other parts of the world, walk together in a procession along this path, the alfombras themselves marking the way toward a large field where we join in a communal mass in memory of the martyrs. The celebration continues long into the night, with music, food, dancing. No one wants to leave. Some of those who have traveled to San Salvador from the campo to be part of the celebration spend the night in that field, much like those early Christians who, in their longing to draw near to the presence of the sacred, engaged in the practice of "incubation"-sleeping near tombs of the martyrs.There is such an evident longing among those gathered for the celebration: to draw close to the martyrs, to feel their presence, and in so doing to cultivate a sense of hope within the community. The presence of the martyrs is indeed palpable. But this is due in no small measure to the actions and gestures of those hundreds and hundreds of persons who have come to bear witness to their own faith, to call forth by their own embodied presence a vision of hope for the future. The need to remember, to touch and be touched by the memory (and presence) of the martyrs, is strong. So too is the longing to give it concrete form-through the creation of alfombras, the commitment to walk together through the streets of San Salvador with images of the martyrs held aloft, the making of rich, beautiful music, the willingness to enter into a deep silence where the painful memory of the pierced bodies of the martyrs and the beauty of their lives can penetrate the soul. These gestures, at once communal and personal, are the means through which so many of the hidden longings and hopes of those gathered there come to expression.Rarely have I felt the power and meaning of prayer in the life of the Christian community or the importance of practice to the expression of prayer as deeply as I did on this day. …