Three Ways to Pray

Unitarian Universalist Church Reading, MA

I once read about ways of prayer that brought back a memory, gave understanding to an observation, and offered new awareness of prayer and personality. The three ways described were: expressing creatively, making a sign of respect before something holy, and looking at a lit, white candle.

By my teens, Reverend Brandoch L. Lovely, not long a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, became the minister at our Unitarian Church. His wife was a dancer and an influence for a spring service when he asked us teen girls to come down the center aisle of the nave in slow, graceful dance movements while holding flowers. Waiting my turn I felt nervous until my first step and then once down the aisle—thrilled.

For years I had noticed that a friend, in driving past St. Madeleine’s Parish, always lifted his hand off the wheel and with a glance at the church made the sign of the cross in an act so natural and gently done that his hand seemed not to stir the air.

Months after the passing of my second husband, I was directed by my new spiritual teacher to light a white candle and look at it for twenty minutes over three days of the full moon then on the first three days of full sun. I remember that I had felt more peaceful.

My realization is, “Prayer lives beyond formal rituals in ways that we do not think about.”