Promise + Swear = Prayer
What a yoga teacher's slip of the tongue taught me about speaking to God
Key Takeaways
A promise is a covenant made to the future.
To swear is to pledge allegiance and fealty to truth.
Prayer is how we honestly and humbly communicate both in sacred relationships.
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Observation
We were in a Friday Power Sculpt class at Love Yoga in Whitefish. Our teacher Amanda was hyped up, building the roomâs energy, and reached for two words at once. She meant to say âpromiseâ and âswearâ and what came out instead was âprayer.â She laughed it off as we laid on our backs preparing for the sweat session to start, but the words stuck with me. It kept resurfacing while on the mat, so I turned to my wife and said, âpromise plus swear equals prayer. Help me remember that.â
A promise is an intention directed toward the future. To swear is to bind yourself to truth or responsibility. Prayer, as Iâve come to experience, is the act of offering both in communion with something larger than ourselves. It is not just a practice or internal monologue, but the conscious act of building a relationship. And like any meaningful conversation, it requires the right âpartnerâ to converse with as well as honesty, accountability, and a willingness to be changed by what you hear back.
Revelation
My relationship with prayer started shortly after traveling to Uganda. Tami and I spent a week in Kaihura with Will and Sandy Bredberg and the extraordinary community built by Faith Kunihira at Bringing Hope to the Family. What I witnessed there, and what I wrote about in an earlier piece, was joy in the presence of material scarcity. What was abundant was a spiritual richnessâgratitude without condition, connection without distractionâthat unified the community into a chosen family.
Coming home, I felt the weight of the âmodernâ worldâs discontentedness, insecurity, restlessness, and frenetic anxiety. The insatiable appetite for more alongside a persistent sense of lack felt even more present than it had before. As my pastoral mentor and friend, I asked Will about it and what to do. Our conversations in Uganda and after about life, spirituality, and faith reconnected me to something I had forgotten was absent.
I wanted to talk to God. As much as I was âspiritual,â I hadnât really bothered to talk to God since I left my inherited Catholic roots. I didnât want to pray because things were hard or out of desperation, but to try and connect to something absent in my life. Something that brought a level of contentedness, joy, and peace in those with limited material resources. My goal wasnât to communicate, but to connect. To open a bidirectional line from my heart to His. Like any relationship, what is neglected withers. What is ignored is deprioritized. A relationship without communication weakens.
This was a relationship I had been neglecting without fully realizing it. I wasnât yearning for religion; I was yearning for connection to a higher power; call it Love or God.
Meaning
My grandfather Emil J. Moos was a pious man. In his recliner in Lincoln, Illinois, next to the TV remote and his book of jokes, he always kept his rosary. The feel of the beads and smell of the leather bag that holds them still brings me back to the living room in his house. He prayed the way some people breathe, steadily, without announcement, as though it were simply what you did when you were alive and paying attention. Fifteen years after my grandpaâs passing, I was fortunate enough to be gifted his rosary by my stepmom who had been using it for her own prayers.
I started praying in the morning. Beginning around 5:00a with a daily devotional, my rosary, a cup of tea, my rocking chair, the fireplace and our dog, Daisy. I pray, about any tensions and joys in my life, my day ahead and those past, what I am grateful for, what I am struggling with, anything. I speak openly, humbly, and honestlyâthe way you speak to someone you trust or yearn to trust.
Meditation is the yin to prayerâs yang. Meditation is how we listen to God. Prayer is how we speak to Him. Together they complete a conversation that most of us never learned we were allowed to have. Trapped underneath or behind religious doctrine, prayer was a theological ordinance and not something accessible to secular lives.
The research on prayer is consistent: regular prayer reduces anxiety, lessens loneliness, and orients the mind away from rumination and toward presence. I know this firsthand as my existential distress around dying slowly disappeared anchored into a higher power. Similar to last monthâs series on âlaughterâ, prayer changes how we hold what we cannot change. It does not remove suffering, but it can reorient our experience and perspective of it. It can remove our distress around the things in our lives we can and cannot change.
Many of us define Love and God by the traumatic or wounding experiences around it. But these wounds are keeping us from connecting to the higher powers and intelligence available to us all. Prayer is one of the most direct paths back to accessing that sacred wisdom, bypassing the gatekeepers of doctrine or denomination. We need to uncomplicate our path back to a relationship with Love or God. That repair starts with an honest, clear, and humble pouring out of our whole heart.
What to Carry Forward
Prayer is part of a conversation that most of us never learned we were allowed to have.
You can pray to God, to Love, to Creation, to whatever you hold as larger than your own fear.
A regular practice of prayer prepares you for the joys and trials of the human experience.
Reflection Question
Who or what do you speak to when facing fear or uncertainty?
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