Among my various experiments with breath prayer, centering prayer, and meditation, one of the most helpful has been a simple focus on what we do when we breathe: we receive the breath that gives us life. Then we release it. Then we receive it again. We cannot keep or hold it for long. It comes like the manna, or the dew, or daylight, or any of the other many gifts that “come dropping slow” into our timebound days and then evaporate, leaving only a memory and a promise. We live by those memories and promises.
In graduate school I went through a period of what I now recognize may have been depression, though perhaps it wasn’t anything so clinical. Perhaps it was simply sorrow. Life had brought losses and I mourned them. And still each day began, and continued, with all its immediacies, small urgencies, deadlines, friendly encounters, occasions for laughter, and work that often lifted my heart and released me from myself. The sorrow swelled and sank in the course of those days like seawater and sometimes threatened to sink me, and sometimes offered its own paradoxical peace. Now and then it offered me new ways of understanding Jesus’ blessing on those who mourn.
I needed to sit with that sorrow and find my way into that rhythm: receive, release, receive . . . . Some days it was the only prayer I could pray, my words having been expended elsewhere and my spirits flagging. Now and then Keats’ words, written when he was facing his own death, came to me with their dark and honest beauty: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”—not really a suicidal thought, but a sense that ending the journey sooner rather than later might release me into light and rest and release from pain that, though not quite wracking, was tedious and tiring.
In that state, intentional focus on those little imperatives—receive, release, receive—summoned me to deep acquiescence. I was as happy to release as to receive. I was not indifferent to the gift of life, but willing to imagine relinquishing it with equanimity. I came to think of it as practicing the presence of death, which was, oddly, a way of practicing the presence of God. “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away,” Job intoned, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Yes to life, yes to death. Yes to the God who gives and takes.
So here’s the surprise, lest it sound as though all this breathing left me in a place of theological lassitude and unholy indifference: as I received, released, received and released I began to realize a deep calm that brought confidence with it and trust and then physical as well as spiritual pleasure, and finally joy. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning,” I remembered, and felt it come slow as daylight, “a ribbon at a time.”
I don’t consciously pray with every breath, but when I notice my breathing, I find myself close to prayer, and quick to remember that all that is given goes, and even as it goes, the next gift comes. I know now that even Isaiah’s sober reminder, “All flesh is grass” is not bad news, but an awareness to live into because it is a truth that helps to set us free. I played Braham’s exquisite choral rendering of that text again and again in that season of sorrow, and was comforted.
Comfort, I found, is not cheering but clarifying. We can take comfort in what is true about our condition. The large truths lift us out of our little whirlpools to a place where we can cease flailing and float, as Denise Levertov so beautifully writes, “into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace.”
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