VI

Why Do I Sing?

"I will sing of the Lord's love forever; with my mouth will I make
known your faithfulness to all generations..."
Psalm 89:1

Love is stronger than death, gentler than a mother's care, more powerful than hate and its destructive force, enduring beyond measured time or place. Our songs attest to its timelessness and splendor. The purest stronghold of love will outlast the mountains and reach beyond the edges of the universe. We sing our songs to those we love, attempting to share our hearts and our lives as generously as we are able, giving as much as, often even much more than will be received. Indeed, mature love seeks not reciprocity, but, instead, creative manifestation. Love, in its infancy between those who commit to building and maintaining its vitality, may begin as emotion without logic or analytical focus; with conscious awareness and a clear sense of reality it becomes intentional, directed, active. Love is a verb. Its power in our lives changes our vision, directs our sight, melts the self-protective shells we wear to shield our vulnerabilities, realigns our priorities. Love brings us to life and awakens us to our unity with all of creation. Love awakens our voices and our hearts and demands to be expressed.

The painter who loves draws with new energy and brighter color; the writer who loves becomes lyrical and poetic. The potter who loves finds new sensitivity in skilled fingertips and molds vessels with added depth in newly discovered hues and enhanced grace of form. The glassblower who loves blows the breath of creative life with enhanced vigor into new shapes, new designs with subtler color variations. The conductor who loves evokes the pathos and the glory from his orchestra, drawing each musician into the passion and miracle of united harmony love creates. The musician who loves lifts the instrument or sits down before the harp or piano or organ and summons the sighs, the laughter, the opening of the heart with each note. Love's call for life awakens each of us to new possibility, often hidden from sight until the strength of the creative energy blows open the windows and doors, revealing the hidden opportunities.

We sing love songs for no other reason than to sing love, to express our wholehearted participation in living. A song with significant meaning for many, "You Light Up My Life," speaks absolutely of the difference love makes, the light in the darkness it brings, the sense of coming home those who experience love realize. Often, there is no other means by which we adequately can describe how love affects us than by singing the words, playing the music. Because love is creative energy, life-giving power, we find any way we are able to sing or speak it. It is a force to be articulated through our music and our living, by the books we write and the beauty we create through all the arts.

We long to give all, to share with those we love. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet "How Do I Love Thee?" enumerates in timeless delicacy the poetry of the soul who loves, speaking from the place of eternal love. Magnolia and Ravenal ask each other in the Jerome Kern musical, Show Boat, why each of them loves the other, why they sing to each other. We love because we are loved; we sing our love because we hear it sung to us through music of our souls and the gifts of our hands and committed lives.

The love songs we hear, those we sing to express our experiences of intense involvement, whether for dear friends, children, parents, those beloved to whom we commit intimately, are songs we sing often because therein is opportunity to express the full range of our passion. Those gifted with the genius to articulate the adventures of the human souls who love bestow on all of us the ability to declare our love, whether through the playing of an instrument or with our voices in song or through reading the poetry of the heart.

Often, it is possible the music world's focus on romantic love overlooks the loveliness of friendship and reverence for another, the agape of loving in a spiritually committed manner beyond the physical. This love, too, can inspire music to feed our souls and delight our ears. Mozart had enormous respect and admiration for Handel. His tribute took the form of a magnificent transcription of The Messiah, while true to Handel's style and majestic glory, imbues new richness with a lightness of approach and the additional use of organ and woodwinds only Mozart could achieve. He spoke his love for Handel and his music with his finest talent, such is the impetus of love.

We sing our songs of love through our active participation in a wide variety of community activities, voicing our commitment to the value of human life and the dignity of each person with whom we share this world. While there has been considerable controversy concerning public legislation over what many believe to be personal choices (i.e., smoking in public areas), our lawmakers who have demonstrated responsiveness and a sense of responsibility to the physical health and well-being of their constituency have sung a song of love by their courage in passing often unpopular laws. In this county, no one may light a tobacco product in a public building; and the gift of clean air in which to eat or shop or congregate for a variety of purposes is a gift of love and thoughtfulness.

The often expressed adage, "Love is blind" takes on new significance when we realize love in action does involve a certain amount of deliberate inattention to if the action love inspires will be wholly understood or accepted. Love expects process and movement to demonstrate its being, the playing of the concerto of its existence. Mohandes Gandhi began the journey to his death with his sonata of love, his commitment to human dignity and worth, in South Africa and into India, bequeathing a legacy of nonviolence inspiring scores of others who followed him. One of these so moved to sing his unique song and, in the end, also to give his life for his passion for human freedom and civil rights was Martin Luther King. Cesar Chavez blessed the silent, powerless world of the migrant farm laborer in the Southwest, as he worked tirelessly and sacrificed his longevity through frequent fasting and physical sacrifice to bring justice, to sing love with a ringing challenge to the established agricultural society. Love calls to accountability those who exercise power and the manner in which they execute their responsibilities. Love often may exhibit a certain blindness, but love expects justice, respect for human dignity and compassion.

We sing the songs of our love, contributing to the cosmic harmony, because we long to share and to pay tribute to the beauty as it lends enchantment and meaning to our lives. Tony, hero of West Side Story praises his lovely Maria, expressing his longing to bridge the cultural chasm in Leonard Bernstein's and Steven Sondheim's 1950's musical response to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Anton Dvorak composed the mighty, moving New World Symphony with its power, its magnificence, its moving tribute to love of country and his people. My grandfather wrote his love song in a few paragraphs following Grandma's sudden death at the age of sixty-six. His articulate, honest pain in the farewell to his love through the words he wrote brings tears even now, over forty years later. He sang new stanzas of his love song as he preserved her flower gardens and shared her love of beauty with each of his grandchildren.

Love for the physical world in which we live and continuing, dedicated effort to preserve and protect its beauty and health induces new music of protective legislation, companies formed to study effects of construction projects on various aspects of the environment and to recommend procedures designed to safeguard the proposed locations of such projects. While there often are instances in which the balance of environmental issues meet in opposition to commercial enterprise and, occasionally, ability of some to carve out a sufficiently economically sound way of living, the song of love for Shekinah's gift of our beautiful world remains one of gratitude for the loveliness in which we find ourselves.

Love songs echo across the canyons of time and place, unrestricted by physical limitation, weaving an exquisite tapestry defying description, playing the music for no other reason than the reality of love. The power love exhibits to move our souls and our minds has no comparison, for nothing is stronger. Although Teilhard de Chardin wrote, in the end, hope has the final word, I believe love will add the period to the sentence hope speaks. Love will add the harmony, the descant above the staff.

I am convinced love gives rise to hope; without the perception of love in one's life there is often reason not to hope. There is sound supporting evidence demonstrating the destructiveness to the human spirit when one believes themselves unloved and unlovable. We find the strength to move forward into uncertainty, to believe in ourselves and in those with whom we share life because we love and know ourselves loved. We sing our songs through the often otherwise unrewarding toil of each day because we care, because we love those for whom we work, because we find purpose in apparently empty activity to transcend the moment. As love creates a frame for the sketch of a simple life, it emphasizes the delicate, almost unnoticed detail of quiet gifts of self. Love adds color to the drawing, harmony to the single line melody. We sing it because we must sing; we draw the picture of love because it is there to be drawn.

Thwarted love sings with plaintive dissonance and incomplete chords, still requiring expression, always seeking resolution and creative purpose. Love eliciting no response or, even sadly, receiving not acceptance but rejection plays out a dark symphony of discordance and pain, demanding release through performance of its music. Resolution of incomplete chords, fulfillment of unfinished harmonic design, searching out the path through the maze of uncertainty unanswered love creates is a difficult aria to sing, at best. At its worst, the vocal range covers the breadth of possibility the singer possesses and demands the voice sing when there is no breath left in the lungs or strength to push the diaphragm just once more in the effort to reach that elusive last note. How we respond to the less welcome effects of unfulfilled love in our lives is the love song either ending in crashing chords of agony, or through the storm of unresolved dissonance we will hear a sweet melody of peace from the pain-carved channels, echoing with greater resonance and power. We sing such love songs by our choice.

Pain and Longing Lead Us to Pray

It is often during the moments of such pain, of the loss of love in our lives through death or betrayal or through its death by inattention when we turn most readily to prayer. For so many of us, prayer is a last-ditch resource when every other means of resolution and understanding appears to fail. All too often, though, the prayer is little more than an upraised appeal of "Why?" even when we are aware there is no answer we will accept in that moment.

Moments of pain, times when we remember to pray because the stress has become unbearable, have the power to remind us our love songs can be somewhat self-centered and shallow; our spiritual resources, our ability to find harmony in the dissonance of our lives is limited by our lack of practice on the soul's instrument, positive use of prayer. The test of the music and the often stumbling performance in moments of severe trial is if we accept the challenge to master the music and its demands upon our resources before we must perform it before a critical audience. Can we come to the comprehension prayer can have significantly increased power in our lives, can resolve the incomplete harmonies, if we learn to use it as the love song for any moment, not just the lament of pain?

Without doubt, prayer as a lament is certainly appropriate and necessary. Prayer during the most difficult moments, the dark nights, has the power to bring relief from the buffeting wind and battering seas of life's challenges. Prayer in the face of misunderstanding, betrayal, loss or illness can often restore perspective, reorder our vision and priorities. Many of the psalms are little more than cries for Yahweh to strike against enemies, wails of anguish and anger regarding defeat and loss, uncertainty and pain. Jesus Christ, suffocating from the weight of his body hanging from only a nail at the base of each hand, holding him on a cross, echoed the lament of David, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Even so, we may stand with upraised fists, shouting to Creator Spirit our frustration, anger, fear and pain. We may demand, plead, cry, scream the wail of one who loves but does not hear the answer of a loving God, that almost inaudible voice whispering beyond the storm.

How many of us who are parents have listened to the frustrated anger of a child who was convinced our inability to respond acceptably to his or her demand, knowing concession in the expected, desired way would bring unpleasant results? That child may accuse the wise parent of lack of love and a host of other terrible characteristics, yet will return years later and thank the parent. Somehow, I believe our good Mother, Shekinah, looks with loving indulgence on our tantrums in prayer, loving us all the more as we choose to demonstrate our freedom to be angry and demanding, understanding what we cannot until much later.

While most of us pray through times of severe stress, how many of us remember to pray when the storms end, when we have found resolution to the difficulty of the moment? There is more than one story in the gospels of ungrateful recipients of Jesus Christ's healing power. One of the more vivid is of the ten lepers whom Jesus cured. The term leprosy is used for a large number of physical conditions in the scriptures contributing to isolation from society and family, denial of community to those who were considered unclean and undesirable. Such a designation, still practiced well into the twentieth century through leper colonies on Molokai and in Carville, Louisiana, must have created terrible pain and a belief one was not only unacceptable, but, even worse, unlovable. The despair created by a sense of unlovableness and unacceptability would do nothing to alleviate the physical suffering, let alone enable an atmosphere in which one could find healing and hope. Yet, of the ten lepers who were freed by the love of an itinerant Jewish teacher, only one returned to thank Jesus. That one man was a Samaritan, despised as a half-breed and treated as less than human even when healthy by the Hebrew people.

Prayers of Gratitude

Prayers of gratitude have incredible, underestimated energy. When we pray for no other reason than to speak our thanks, we see through new eyes; we hear new music. We sing love songs with a profound beauty when we pray our gratefulness, asking nothing and seeking only to be in the presence of our loving God. For any of us, the happiest moments of our lives are those in which we share ourselves, our gifts and our time with those we love. Family celebrations of births, marriages, graduations, holidays and, even, deaths reinforce our love for each other; but those times we seek out those we love for no other reason than to be together seem to have even more significance.

I  recall many Saturday mornings with young children when all of them joined me in an early gabfest on the bed, sharing laughter, questions, concerns and plans. Moments of fun, often apparently frivolous conversations leave bright memories I cherish still. I wonder if our loving heavenly Parent does not also find great enjoyment in those Saturday morning visits of our prayers of the simple sharing, the chat sessions for no purpose but discussing events of the day, our hopes and dreams, our concerns and reactions to the moments in our lives.

Probably one of my more poignant memories is of three young children on a Saturday afternoon several years ago. By this time their father and I were separated, and my time with Ross, Brendan and Margaret was often severely restricted. My ability to provide entertainment or treats was even more curtailed from lack of resources and the desire to keep a roof over my head by continuing to pay the rent on my small apartment. One weekend they asked to go to a nearby park, telling me with gentle acceptance of my circumstances they would rather have time playing with me in the park than spending money doing other things. Their young, aware generosity remains a forceful reminder how sharing time with those we love without expectation of return is a song of love without equal.

That moment taught me vividly how Creator Spirit loves us even more generously than any parent can love a child and how our God longs to be with us, especially in the moments when we have nothing to offer. When we choose to be in God's presence for the joy of being there, when we choose to say "thank you" for all the love gifts of family, friends, health, and all the beauty of the earth on which we live, we begin to see even more beauty, to know more love, to hear sweeter music.

It is far more difficult, though, to be thankful for the adversities we face, for loss and pain. How often do we stop in the midst of an anguished moment to realize what we might be learning through the acceptance of the experience? How much less do we express any thought of gratitude for the learning, painful though it is? Yet, it is through the emergence of pain we know we must grow; it is time to change. It is in pushing our limits we find we have only those limits we accept as real. It is in singing the song of thankfulness, whether we are sure we mean any note of that peculiar song, we begin to assess the value of the difficulty in which we find ourselves.

Over the last few years I have had ample opportunity to practice this symphony, to sing the arias, to whisper the single note of courage I did not recognize I had in me to sing until the moment called for it. There have been instances when I have echoed my daughter Catherine, who while in her teens wailed, "Mom, doesn't it ever get better?" Through the prayers and the patience learned through long, dark nights when the music was barely audible over the wind and thunder of the storms of my life, I have only one answer, born of gratitude for the hard-won understanding. Often, the challenges do not get easier; the pain sometimes never goes away. What alters through my effort to thank God, weak as that attempt can be, is my perception. I see the value finally of the pain, the worth of living every moment fully with its attendant joy or sorrow, laughter or tears. I am grateful because life as a beloved child of God is rich and meant to be shared.

Prayers of Praise

We pray from desire to honor the Sacred in our lives, in recognition this God who hung the stars, fashioned the mountains, whispered the music of a baby's laugh, put the incomprehensible universe into motion with all its diversity and magnificence, is One who loves each of us so completely that every cell in our body merits loving attention. We are created for joy from Love wanting nothing more than to share with us; and we pray in recognition of the gifts. With the psalmist we say, "Oh, God, our God, how wonderful are your works..." Awed reverence brings us to our knees with discernment Great Spirit is exalted beyond our comprehension, yet loves and cherishes us, honors us with trust as we share in God's redemptive love. We pray to express our response to the marvel of the good and beautiful in the world around us. With understanding and acceptance of the good and beautiful within ourselves we pray as we use those gifts and share the beauty of our souls.

Songs of love often are filled with questions, concerns, confusion, doubt. We sing from need to understand, to clarify and reorder our perceptions. Our prayers rise from bewilderment, uncertainty, misconceptions. When we reach the place where we understand our lives are designed for purpose, there is specific vocation for each of us, we seek to know what that place is. We pray to search God's heart and desires for us, to discover elusive answers arising from unexpected resources and unplanned moments. The challenge of asking the questions is to listen for the answers, to be open to the moment when the resolution falls into place, although it may be quite different from what we expect. We stand in the confusion of broken dreams and shattered hope with Tevye as he lifted his hands in pain over the shambles of his daughter's wedding feast, destroyed by the Russian soldiers. We ask, often in despair, "What is it that you want of me?" to the God who shares our pain, who knows we suffer and who longs to bring clarity to our vision as we learn what we must from the difficulties through which we struggle.

Prayers of Surrender

These are the moments in our lives when prayer of acceptance and surrender may be the most honest prayer we will ever speak, when our love song will echo from the depths with a resonance that reveals a soul grown stronger and purer through the perplexity and anguish. We face our limitations at such times, recognizing our need for tenderness, understanding, wisdom. We search in the darkness for some light to brighten the fog and help us to see the path a little more clearly. We feel so empty, so powerless in the face of the conflicts in our lives and we cannot sing at all, we cannot pray. To stand at that moment offering nothing but our emptiness is a love song of surrender in which the gift of ourselves goes far beyond what we give when we sing to others in our lives. We only can wait in silence, knowing the only love song there is to be heard is the one that Creator Spirit sings in the stillness. We stand at the opening of the cave with Elijah as the storms blow, the fires rage and the earthquake moves the mountains; we hear the love song only when we cease listening for it where it does not exist, once we let the confusion of the storms pass and listen only to the quiet. When we stand with open, empty hands recognizing we have nothing to offer, we are empty, we allow God to sing, to give love in new ways, to fill our needs and desires.

There is a tendency, a very human propensity at such painful moments of our lives, to search for someone on whom to place blame for the difficulties through which we struggle. Our prayer easily can sink to the level of shouting at the deity we think has caused all the trouble. In the turmoil of emotion, often forgetting our feelings have no logic, we attempt to find order in the confusion of our hearts and minds. Many older religious traditions have taught truly terrible attitudes towards such painful moments of our lives, even so far as suggesting we might deserve and thus receive our difficulties as punishment. While we all must accept responsibility and results for our choices, many pain-creating events occur over which we have no control.

It troubled me enormously through much of the pain in my life to hear well-meant platitudes about what God "sends" and I felt more anger than comfort at the words I heard, for they were not lyrics of a love song corresponding with my understanding. One time stands in memory quite vividly when I staggered through the emotional maelstrom of a miscarriage, attempting to deal with the pain of loss that was made sharper by some of the words I heard from friends. There are no facile responses to loss, grave illness, injury, other severely challenging issues of human living. However, I know the God who creates from love is good and does not create evil or cause the pain we suffer.

Prayers From Our Freedom

More than any gift we enjoy from the hands and heart of Shekinah, our creative Mother, we are blessed with complete freedom, a birthright upon which God never infringes. Often, the result of such freedom entails working through severe challenge because our vision is restricted to the little we know or perceive. Frequently, we make decisions and act based on insufficient, incomplete knowledge, or we choose a course without adequate consideration and must accept the results. Since human freedom is universally true, we must also accept our vulnerability to the choices and actions of others, often to our dismay and frustration. Should we attempt to sing an aria, such as that delightful to hear but devilishly difficult to sing Queen of the Night role from Mozart's Magic Flute, without adequate training, rehearsal or, even worse, ability to do so, we risk offending our audience, at the very least and damage to our voices, as well.

Prayer, that rehearsal and study time for wise use of our freedom, prepares our minds and focuses our sights in such a way that we can work through the all too frequent difficulties of our lives with an attitude in tune with the Master Conductor. There is no score from which we play or sing the love songs of our lives including directions we must always enjoy performing the music; it is our attitude, the love with which we live and respond to Love who is God creating the harmony and attuning our spirit's ears to the complicated interweaving of melody and dissonance in our lives.

Prayers of Intercession

Paul's letter to the young church in Corinth includes the poetry of love, written in the timeless glory of words reminding us love seeks not its own, love is kind. Love, first and always, seeks to give. The songs of love we sing through our intercessory prayers are gift of generosity and selflessness of love in pure form. I am convinced such prayer oblivious to selfish interests has significant power, particularly when joined with similar prayers of like-minded people. Although I am sure God does not interfere with the natural order put in place with the creation of our world any more than with the expressions of human freedom, there is a rhythm within our lives set in motion through united, focused prayer for one another.

There is a vast amount to be said for the strength emanating from positive attitude, from faith and from the love as it unites attitude and faith in prayer. No more than I can describe what lies beyond the last galaxy in our universe can I articulate how the power of intercessory prayer affects our lives beyond itemizing events as they have streamed from the prayers. My son Bill lives because Creator Spirit chose to return him to me as my prayer enabled me to release him completely to God's love. David, my Burmese friend, tells of the numerous gifts of financial assistance keeping him enrolled as a candidate for a doctorate in theology, some of which were certainly miraculous, from sources about which he knew nothing until the money arrived.

David and I discussed this phenomenon in detail one evening; and his description is as appropriate and accurate as any I have encountered in reading or from discussions with others. His analogy begins with his experience as a teacher of physics in Burma and the use of a magnetized bar of iron and a non-magnetized bar. The molecules of iron in the magnetized bar are aligned in the same direction, thus the magnetic force attracting other iron materials. The peculiarity of magnetic energy is its tendency to magnetize other iron segments with which it comes in contact, thus aligning the molecules and forming another magnet.

Intercessory prayer, particularly the prayer uniting one person to another through focused attention to the needs of another, seems to have much the same effect. The energy and alignment of the spirits and hearts of people joined towards seeking God's best for another often has the effect of bringing that person into a new frame of reference, with the soul's vision affixed towards new possibilities. While God does not interfere with our freedom to choose for ourselves, some miracle of grace often nudges us to view situations and difficulties in other lights, to open ourselves toward possibilities and opportunities we otherwise might never have noticed.

John Cobb, theologian who teaches at Claremont Graduate School of Theology in southern California, addresses this phenomenon of God's love in action in a book, now out of print, a story of the effects of intercessory prayer. David's magnet would find a perfect fit in Cobb's discussion of the effects intercessory prayer has on those for whom we pray as well as on we who pray for others. We are beings of energy and spirit, held to this planet through physical limits of time and place, but with our spirits not limited beyond those which we accept for ourselves. There is a power in the unity of shared prayer seeming to bring us together in spirit as nothing else does. Together, as we focus our love and our desire for good to manifest itself in the lives of others, we seem to form a positive field of energy affecting attitude, possibility, even the atmosphere through which we move and live. Goethe wrote, "That moment one definitely commits one's self, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred..." We cannot explain the power of shared focus and prayer; but it is an undeniable force revealing love and its effects uniquely and unmistakably.

Prayers Are Songs of Our Love

Just as we sing love songs to articulate our passion, our commitment, our longing to be united to those we love, just as we sing for no other reason than to express our love, we pray, seeking to unite ourselves to God's love as fully as we are able. We pray when we at last begin to comprehend how beloved we are and we long to know more of that love, to spend more time with Creator Spirit. We pray because we live, because our spirits turn towards God as naturally as a plant turns its leaves towards the sun. "As a deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, oh God." (Psalm 42:1) There is within each of us the deep-seated recognition of the Source of our lives, the composer of our souls' music. We know always, while we live in a beautiful world and many of us are surrounded by love, while some of us are successful at obtaining material gain or fame for our achievements, none of these accomplishments, none of our gifts and talents, none of our toys satisfies the longing in our souls for the unanswerable, unknowable, mysterious Life, our beginning and to whom we shall return.

There is no argument powerful enough to convince the doubting atheist except what we all realize lies within our hearts, that truth which many of us seek to escape by any means we can devise. All of us pursue the significance of our lives on this planet, looking for something to assuage the yearning so strong it can be physically painful. We are manifestation of Shekinah's creative energy, fruit of love, designed for relationship. Intentional, focused prayer opens our hearts to the eternal realities, allows us to touch the Sacred, to discover that print of divine life within our souls. To sing the love song of prayer is to fasten our gaze on the Master Composer/Conductor who wrote the eternal symphony and now lifts the baton to bring forth the harmony, the music, the love.

To watch a gifted conductor at work is to catch a glimpse of God. I watched as Leonard Bernstein stood before combined orchestras and choruses of Europe in East Berlin, conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with its masterful "Ode to Joy." The maestro's passion for this glorious music and for the event its playing celebrated translated itself into energy evoking the beauty, talents and passions of each musician as the music sang freedom and human dignity, joy and gratitude. As I remember watching how Bernstein's slightest movement on the podium inspired and unified the musicians and brought forth the desired musical responses, I consider how God's love for us, that passionate desire to inspire us to live fully in the glory of our freedom, has the power to bring us to full realization of our human magnificence and creative majesty. We may approach such dimly understood possibility only through the conscious, deliberate awareness of Creator Spirit's presence in our lives, through our intentional efforts to pray, through our deliberately active desire to place ourselves in God's presence.

Quite simply, I live with prayer as the foundation of my being because I do not know how to live any other way. I sing, I play instruments because often music is a language more powerful, more evocative of my being than even spoken or written language. Prayer is the song I sing to the Love who gives me life because I have no concept that another way of life is any more imaginable than not playing the music. The many hours I spend on hiking trails, alone with the beauty on which I feast, are my prayers on foot, sung with the movements of my body. As I sit before a computer, writing of my beliefs, I pray through the words I devise and the effort of bringing cohesive thoughts into being. Yet, all the theological texts, the books of philosophy, the ongoing discussions and searching which add to my knowledge and understanding, which serve as springboards for further thought and exploration, do not touch the one reality, the core of my soul's very existence, the truth requiring no argument. I know the God who is, first and always, Love; and love always desires intimacy and relationship: prayer.
 

Return to the Aerie

Back to Contents Page