Who I am

While walking with my mother one warm afternoon in the San Francisco Zoo, she took my hand and said, “You know, giving birth to you was the most creative thing I didn’t do.”

I was in my early pre-teens, coming of age, not realizing it yet, and I squeezed her hand. I liked what she said, especially in the midst of the miracle of so many newly born animals. Maybe I was a miracle, too. In our touch, I felt a different kind of knowing, a different kind of being within a Hand holding me as special, as unique, like a gift. I liked the feeling.

Today, as a Christian, as an Episcopal priest, I am reflecting on 30 prayers I started to write during Ramadan 2020. As Rector, alone in my study, trying to do the best to keep my church community together in the midst of so much COVID-19 death, isolation and fear, I read Qur’an, Torah, Psalms, Gospels, and poetry and I wrote prayerful responses to these holy texts. Writing these prayers was the most creative thing I didn’t do.

We need prayers. As the dismantling of an America I know and love continues to move at a rapid rate, I pray every night one of my traditional prayers, like a plea, as I imagine all of us connected, pod by pod, like a string of baroque pearls:

“Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.”

Since 9/11, as a teacher of world religions, I have read and studied the Qur’an as a source of wisdom. Yet in 2020, for the first time, as a spiritual discipline, I embraced the Islamic tradition of reading the entirety of the Qur’an from the opening verse to the final one, over the 30 days of Ramadan. As I was reading Qur’an, I was also preaching from my biblical texts, and I felt connected within monotheistic communities of different languages, land-living, and liberties as One. We were all suffering then, as we are suffering today. 

Each day, after my daily reading of holy scripture, I chose a few verses from the Qur’an’s daily reading, or maybe they chose me, and I responded by writing prayers, poems, and psalms. It took a while to claim, but as the days went by, I felt more hopeful, looking more fervently for the ‘good news’ of faith. The Qur’an was repeating that God’s guidance was in the heart of the believer. God was the Light of the heavens and the earth, like that of a niche containing a lamp, enclosed in glass, shining like a radiant star, lit from the oil of a blessed tree, neither of the east or the west, light upon light (Surah 24:34-35). 

I wondered, “Is my heart also a niche, like a lamp guiding me in prayer? Surrender to the Light, Jamie, and embrace more fully the Easter promise, darkness will never overcome the Light. Stop fighting, stop resisting. Tear down the walls that keep you from giving over.”