On Lifting the Wrist: Prayer

Every once in a while something clicks in while I’m trying to learn. With the piano, I’ve lately discovered an elementary concept: I have to lift my hand off the keyboard at certain moments or get entangled in my own fingers. I’ll have to practice this, as I’ve been hugging the keyboard tight.

            In all arts, there comes a time when you have to stop clinging. Clinging, clutching, gripping, hanging on for dear life. In drawing, you'll  find the draft doesn’t have to resemble the finished image in any fine respect. In music, less clinging and more singing. You can only get there from here.

            Is the same possibly true of prayer? Can I praise and bless with a light touch? God hears so many petitions. Do petitions grip and clutch? Of course, from time to time things reach a dire stage where there’s nothing to do but appeal to God.

            Praise and blessing are maybe like breathing. Breathe in: praise. Breathe out: bless. Always bless an attacker. Ask the martial artists. Is the pause between one breath and another like lifting the wrist, taking your hand off it for a second, letting it go?

On Practice

Not unlike, I suspect, not a few others, I like to practice the piano intensively on the day of the lesson, to make up for neglect caused by the interventions of life on my time throughout the week. I try to keep the morning of my lesson day free enough for me to make up for lost time. But yesterday, I found my lesson day practice time removed by the Angel of Death.

            I received a call as I was practicing, to tell me that a loved and respected mentor and friend had died and the funeral will be tomorrow. Yvonne had been ill and so it wasn’t unexpected, but it had been sudden, happening quickly over the weekend, without a lot of warning, so it wasn’t expected either. Of course a funeral is an absolute obligation and commitment upon our time, our valued chance to show love, regard, and respect to our dead who are now in the hands of God, and to give love, compassion, and listening to family and friends. And to share memories of the practices of her life and her gifts of generosity, kindness, patience, and knowledge.

            So what is practice? The hands understand repetition, many repeats of bars and phrases, notes and beats, in a closed and concentrated situation. How does the soul understand practice? American writer Fenton Johnson points out that while practice may be “any disciplined undertaking” (such as the practice of medicine), spiritual practice — for example, meditation practice — is “a never-ending striving toward perfection” and I wonder if the practice of the hands is no different from the spiritual practice in this way. And then, says, Johnson, “the process of striving — the practicing — turns out to be the thing itself.”

            While practicing towards some future state of perfection we stand in the presence of our mortality, and that of others: Memento Mori. While it’s true that today’s practice is tomorrow’s reality, it’s also today’s reality, as looking to the past will demonstrate. You probably don’t know how the things you do and say today will be treasured or resented ten years from now. I’m surprised to see my words, photographs and paintings either better or worse than I thought at the time: my self-expression. The soul practices of patience, compassion, reverence and love are today's reality or they are nothing. You can't be patient in the future! (I think I'll be patient with this tomorrow...)  Take heed of what you're doing at the present time, for this is the time of your practice. There is, actually, no time to prepare at the last minute, before the last lesson.