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| June Sunset in Ohio |
I've kept them all over the years, even the ones I never thought I'd read. Prayer and meditation books of all kinds, from pagan, to New Age, to Christian. Yesterday someone posted on Facebook that this month was Ramadan. I get other-than-Christian religious holidays confused, especially Jewish and Muslim ones. I grew up a Christian, after all, and although I have tried to educate myself over time, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan are interchangeable enough that I still have to look them up to remember what they are about.
Fasting is a bad idea for a nurse who works 12-hour shifts, especially night shifts during middle age of a woman. The body is going through all sorts of subtle metabolic and hormonal changes in which the lack of any certain kind of food can unexpectedly throw one of them into overdrive. I recently found this out, profoundly, the hard way. But there is a quiet pull to honor a holiday that is not mine, somehow. If I am going to sacrifice something, or even to observe something, I like doing it for short periods of times. Lent is about six weeks long. Ramadan is a month long. I haven't been making it to Quaker meeting often lately. For personal reasons, some of my usual venues for personal fulfillment have some blocks in the road. What to do, what to do. It occurred to me that I might try a small devotion, or meditation each day of Ramadan.
Most, if not all of them, are on my bookshelf. My daughter put them there when she unpacked the boxes after we moved here, and my nieces rearranged them when they helped me clean. I found the small prayer and meditation booklets of like size in a row together. The most appealing is "Celtic Prayers," by Alexander Carmichael, spiritually, personally, and aesthetically. I have long forgotten who gave this one to me, or whether I bought it myself. I don't know who the author is. I Googled him, and he became even more appealing - a Celtic folklorist and scholar. I'll begin with that one.
In the same little pile is "Wings of Prayer, Baha'i Prayers for Women," "A Selection of Baha'i Prayers, Holy Writings," and "The Hidden Words, selected writings of Bah'u'llah," given to me by the sister of a former significant other. There is "A Little Journal of Devotions out of Quaker Worship, An experiment with 104 entries across two thousand miles," by Francis D Hole and Ellie Shacter, and "Expectant Listening, Finding God's Thread of Guidance," by Michael Wajda. I haven't looked these people up yet, but the 104 entries sounds interesting. Then there is "Bible Puzzles, Quizzes and Games," by Helen Pettigrew, that I've been carrying around without actually using since I was a teenager. There are a lot more, but these are the ones that jumped out at me today.
The problem with me and a meditation time is that my schedule is so upended, and energy levels so unpredictable, that personal commitments, especially those geared for self-support and self-healing, generally work for only a few days. It is pretty predictable, however, that I will get on Facebook every day, since that has become my primary means of communication and self-expression. So why not type out an entry every day in a post? Then I will actually read it. I am going to give it a try.
