Phyllis Tickle Responds
In The Shaping of A Life, you introduce prayer as somewhere your mother went. So, where is it that one goes when one prays?
Aha! It seems I have been caught out at last. Good.
Originally, as I was first working on it, Shaping was titled Prayer
Is A Place. Your question would seem to indicate that that title still
appertains, and I could not be happier..or more affirmed, for that
matter, than
I am by your question.
As the work progressed--and books take months and months to mature
from idea to publishable manuscript--as the work progressed, Doubleday,
the publisher, became increasingly convinced that "Prayer" in
the title limited the audience for the book by limiting or inaccurately
naming what the book is actually about. While I was, and still am,
pretty sure that the shaping referred to in the title is the business of
prayer, Doubleday persuasively argued that literature and unusual circumstance
also enter into the thrust of the story. Probably both of us were partially
correct, and both partially wrong; but Shaping it was and has remained
up until about right now.
Prayer is a place, albeit a non-locative one. Especially for those
of us who observe the fixed hours of prayer and, as a result, move
in and out of the psalms and prayers of the Church on a routinized basis,
the shape of the prayers themselves becomes an architecture. One enters in through
the Call to Prayer and then out into an interruption in space/time,
a tesseract, if you will. For me, that perfectly sealed off place is
of polished
and transparent walls, as if I were inside a crystal chapel or
wayside chapellette filled with the murmuring presence of all the others
gathered there for these brief respites of praise and thanksgiving.
There are far more forms of prayer than keeping the hours, of course;
and all of them seem to me to occur in a different type of space. My
daily prayers of intercession and petition, for instance, and my time
of meditation as well, all seem to me to constitute a far more
private space and one that is almost comfortably dark, as if built
with the earth's scents and the browns and greens of fecundity.
Like all Christians, I too know, and from time to time may visit, the seamlessly
white place that is electric contact or, mayhap, sometimes is near
ecstacy. But it is the wayside chapel, the arched and curved place
of lead crystal walls and murmuring saints that I treasure most. It
is the place of the fixed hours that dwells in my experience as
most nearly the life toward which we are passing....the place that
we are as well as are in.
Phyllis Tickle
<<Back © 2004 Phyllis Tickle