Maybe it is the sun

Prayer and presence at serendipitous moments

Sunset over the South Cumberland Plateau, facing west towards Nashville. Sewanee, TN. 11.04.2023

For a long time, I thought God was the sun. What else could a child make of something described as omnipresent, omnipotent, and life-encompassing but the center of our solar system?

Then Christian schools distorted my holy ball of gas into a white-bearded man on a cloud, someone whom you beg or lament to, like a Therapist-Santa-Prison Guard. (I have a muddled vision of Christian faith).

I remember weeping over a boy’s rejection, a missing pet, or a friend moving away. My mother would almost always suggest the same balm: Pray.

Whatever cacophony of pain rattled around in my little body or soul, she explained that someone on the planet was feeling the exact same anguish. Pray for that person, she instructed. Pray for their pain to abate. Wish for them to be happy above all else, because you know their suffering.

So I’d lay in bed, close my teary eyes, and imagine not the sun or a bearded old man, but someone my size, collapsed, decimated by a text from their 7th grade crush. I’d hope that this suffering lump of a person would slowly congeal back into human form. From my blue bedroom, I’d wish for them to feel joy, to feel hope, to feel better. That their pain would just go away.

We can’t often see a way out for ourselves. We’re too ingrained in our story and too enmeshed in our pain. But to imagine someone in parallel circumstances finding joy again—even in fiction, it inspires hope that our circumstances can shift, too.

Praying is not the best means to help others. The phrase “sending thoughts and prayers” is now widely known as a cop-out. It usually means, “I want to feign allyship while really remaining complacent with injustice,” or “I want you to know I’m a good person but I can’t be bothered to accompany you in your suffering.”

There is a season for justice work, for helping others with effort and passion. But when you are truly defeated, when you are too depressed to leave your bed, when you are bereft past the point of picketing or serving food to the unhoused, what are you left with? In the dark womb of your bedroom, you can still wish others well.

Sending ‘healing prayers’ to a stranger on the other side of the world might feel false, until the compassion it elicits (whether you know it or not) seeps its way into your own self-regard.

Metta meditation has become my primary means of practicing this prayer for others’ well-being. I’ve written about Metta before in “Summer’s End” and “Guilt and Graciousness,” but I’m currently doing a deep dive into the Brahma Viharas (Buddhism’s “Four Flavors of Love”) with Frank Ostaseski and finding even more appreciation in the practice of love.

In my last post, I wrote about my final days spent with my grandfather. A week after I said goodbye to him in Texas, I was scurrying around like a chicken with my head cut off in the midst of a busy workday. I was nailing down what felt like hundreds of small tasks in time for a meditation retreat to open that evening. At 1:19, my dad texted to let me know my grandfather was in respiratory distress and “should die in the coming hours.”

I read it, stopped for a moment, and kept folding laundry. Kept replenishing flashlight batteries, restocking snacks, and making beds. Finally, at 4:50, there was a lull. I was helping people park, but there was a gap in arrivals. Waiting for the crunch of gravel, I snatched ten minutes to close my eyes and did a simple metta meditation for my grandfather.

May you be free from all physical suffering.
May you be free from all mental anguish.
May you feel how loved you are.

It was the only time I had to sit and be still with him, from a thousand miles away. I sat in the chilly sunlight and repeated it, holding my heart.

I never heard confirmation if he’d died. With no news, I’d half-believed he’d miraculously recovered. A week later, when I asked my dad, he apologized, “So sorry—he died last Thursday at 5.”

The serendipity of timing in his death and my meditation makes me hopeful. I hope that on a subtle level, he felt my prayer, my wish for him to be freed from physical suffering, freed from mental anguish, and that he fully felt how loved he was.

There’s a potency to prayer. A way to feel connected to something beyond oneself. Amidst the busyness of my day and minutia of hospitality, I needed to connect with the reality that, far away, someone I love was in his final moments.

I need, at unpredictable intervals, to connect to something deep, true, still, and warm—something life-encompassing. So I pray. And maybe it is to the sun.