Breathing in Prayer: Slowing Down before Christmas

My Christmas Tree 2020. Picture by David Russell Mosley

Dear Friends,

Christmas is nearly here and the days are now, slowly, getting brighter. Jupiter and Saturn have met in the sky, and now we hope that Saturn has made way for his son. What's more, I am officially on Christmas Break and having a chance to relax.

Everyone keeps telling us how unprecedented this year has been, how uncertain the times have been. But time, in one sense, is always uncertain. We are not guaranteed the next breath we're about to take, let alone continued good health or the ability to avoid the plague that has run rampant the world round. I don't mean to minimize the importance of how hard this year has been for us all, some more than others. I merely want to make sure we keep our hope, that we remember that now we see but in a glass darkly, but that one day we will see our Lord as we are seen by him. For now, we have to keep breathing.

Breathing is an interesting action. We must do it to survive, and yet most of us don't need to think about it in order to do it. Thanks to my high school choir director, I've even learned to "breathe properly" by breathing deeply, using my diaphragm and not just the upper part of my lungs. Owen Barfield, often called the Last Inkling as he survived them all, excepting Christopher Tolkien, gave a lot of thought to the words for breath. He believed that peoples like the ancient Greeks when they used a word like πνευμα, which can be variously translated as breath, Spirit, or wind, had all those ideas in mind at once. We breathe with the winds that move the clouds and give breath to the earth itself, and what we breathe in is not simply air, but spirit. Our final breath being the moment our spirit leaves our bodies. I think about this when I pray the divine hours or read poetry in a space occupied by others. I still like to say the words, but I whisper them. And sometimes, in order to keep the momentum, I will whisper the words both as I'm breathing out and as I'm breathing in.

It struck me the other day as I was praying that I'm trying, and sadly often failing, to breathe in the prayers, to bring them so inside myself that they become a part of me. I think this is what prayer is, something like the spirit or the wind that we breathe into ourselves, to inform ourselves, and yet breathe back out again into the world. So as the days to Christmastide wind down, remember to breathe, find prayers and poems to breathe in so that you can breathe them back out again into the world.

Sincerely,
David Russell Mosley