What is a prayer if not an offering from the heart?
I learned about prayer in a religious context where this was a very narrowly defined verb, to pray. Prayer was associated with the narrowly defined subject of God. I have never wished to belong to a religion, so for a very long time, I simply did not pray. Words like prayer and God made me angry. I was angry at the way that they were used to rob people (women, queers, etc.) of their sovereignty (their access to joy).
I associated having any belief in the divine, with a loss of personal sovereignty.
I mimicked for myself a God of judgement and control. I shamed myself. I cast myself out of the garden of my own pleasure and promise. For many years I worshipped the God-proxy of romantic attachments and self personas. I put faith and trust and hope into people who did not deserve it. I devoted myself, tirelessly.
In my darkest night of the soul (~early 2021), from the turret of a West Philly apartment, I verbally spoke aloud into the winter sky- a prayer. I was horrified.
I said a prayer when the only thing more terrifying than praying was living another day disconnected from the divine.
It was desperate. It was humbling.
In the morning when I awoke, shifting direction in the labyrinth, turning the spiral back inwards, I remember feeling like I could breathe.
That morning, a surge of creative energy moved through me in a way I had not experienced in years. I channelled a symbol of three nested circles. I had no idea what it meant. I drew the symbol obsessively.
Over the next several days, the shape began to feel like three parts of the self: the child, the adult, and the elder. It looked like a cavern, a flame, a shell, a vagina, a portal. I googled the painting “Birth of Venus”. I clicked on Venus, went to the Wikipedia page. Did you know before she was Venus she was Aphrodite and before that she was Astarte and before that her name was Inanna? Inanna. Ancient Sumerian Goddess of civic life, sex, war, and justice. Inanna. Who they called “the head turner” for performing gender reassignments in her temple. Inanna. Who was dead for three days and then resurrected to life. Inanna. Who chose not to have children. Inanna. Who murdered a man who r*ped her. Inanna. Who was a queer and trans advocate. Inanna. Who lived 5,000 years before the Bible was written.
When I asked for God, I was given a symbol- a map. A map to her, to a story of womanhood and queer liberation that was the oldest story of divinity ever recorded in human language.
Today I pray to feel the mundane, my body, my time, and my community as a conduit for the divine. What is a prayer if not an offering from the heart? Perhaps it is a map.
just pausing for this stanza from Mary Oliver’s Peonies which rings in my heart like a prayer always:
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
on loop
this fun take on Inanna by Callie Beusman of The Cut, “I Think About This a Lot: A Sumerian Goddess’s Demand to Have Her Vulva Plowed”