God's Breath in Man
Trinity is about to end and I find my prayer practices are limping feebly toward its conclusion, just as they have limped feebly through most of Trinity. When I reflect on the expanse of the last twenty-something weeks I see, in my mind’s eye, a desert landscape. It is a dry, rocky expanse. It reminds me of the Coachella Valley: bordered by low-lying hills, roughly textured by boulders, sand, scrubby sagebrush, sheer sandstone cliffs, and little green-trunked trees that bloom with bright yellow flowers.
This image resonates deeply with me in these waning days of Ordinary Time. It just feels right, feels like the perfect encapsulation of Trinity, a season that has yet again felt long and tiring even though it has also been a beautiful season for me, one rich with life and hope.
Deserts are objectively beautiful places. I have noticed that many people who like to complain about California claim they are not, but these people are wrong. There is nothing quite like the long, graceful lines of desert hills and mountains, or the lives of the sturdy little creatures that make their homes there, or the exquisite hardiness of so many plants adapted to not just survive but flourish in drought-stricken places. Deserts are warm, bright, flooded with sunlight. They are colorful and expansive. You can see a lot of the sky when you’re in the desert. Absent a road or trail to guide you, you can lose your sense of location enough to finally submit to the moment and just be where you are. When I visit the desert, I am reminded again just how precious water is.
Trinity confronts us with that aspect of our prayer that is, or at least will always feel, like a desert. In other words, in Trinity we are confronted with the vast expanse of Ordinary Time, with the ordinariness of time—a reality we often take refuge from in school schedules and holidays and penitential seasons like Lent, but which we choose to face head-on when we enter Trinity.
Once confronted with time’s ordinariness, we are confronted with our own weakness in its expanse. For we are not strong enough to actually manage time. My prayer practice inevitably falters and weakens after just a few days or weeks of Ordinary Time. Having been confronted with my weakness, and with the seeming endlessness of the disciplines I have to practice for so long, I start to feel like I am trudging through sand toward a mirage that may or may not be water, or an oasis—or just any destination at all—and which seems to just keep moving away from me no matter how long I walk toward it.
Prayer is, as George Herbert puts it in Prayer, “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” and “the soul’s blood” (among other things). But prayer often feels the way we might imagine wandering in the desert to feel: toilsome, boring, lacking in destination. Given that it is as essential as our breath and blood, prayer is and must become just as present, common, and mundane. This does not mean it is not beautiful, interesting, or alive. Like the desert, it is all three of these things. But I am weak, and I therefore find regular prayer boring, difficult to maintain.
All of the Trinity season collects are or include pleas that God will help us live and flourish in our daily lives. A few examples:
“We can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace”
“We beseech thee mercifully to hear us”
“Pour into our hearts such love toward thee”
“Make [thy humble servants] to ask such things as shall please thee”
These collects teach us to relentlessly plead with the Lord for help in everything. Not just to do good, but also to want good. Not just to hear our prayers, but to directly influence our prayers. To make us love him. To give us better desires. To “grant … that we may so faithfully serve [him] in this life.”
Each year, we are sent into Trinity and quickly find that it feels like a desert. We are sent into Trinity to find ourselves confronted with unavoidable need for God’s help in literally everything. Our confrontations with our imperfections, then, are just as much opportunities as they are failures. They create space for us to become more sweetly aware of the help of God, which is always with us (even when we cannot see it).
Water, after all, only looks as precious to our eyes as it is when we are in the dry places of the desert.