Finding Comfort in Prayer
Exercise: Individual Prayer. Take five long breaths to settle. Call to mind some of the areas from which you would like to find comfort. Perhaps a recent loss, perhaps some of the pain and brokenness in the wider world. Imagine a loving energy penetrating those hurt areas, soothing, healing, comforting. Breathe once again and then say Shma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad.
Community Prayer: Come to services in person. As you sit and sing with others, imagine that each person in the room is sending you an energy of healing and comfort. Embrace that, accept the comfort. By the same token, begin also wishing comfort and healing to all the people around you. Notice how the giving and the receiving becomes ever more impactful.
Background. Each of us has our own ways of finding comfort. I want to suggest that prayer, especially communal prayer, belongs in all of our toolboxes. Prayer creates an opportunity to invite comfort into the self. I believe in a God who comforts. Prayer is a vehicle that enables that comforting energy to be more easily and directly experienced.
God is the examiner of the human heart. Prayer can only be prayer when it is honest and vulnerable. Naming the comfort we seek and then finding the humility and courage to seek that comfort is an act of true prayer. The integrity of the prayer means it has effect even if we don’t believe in God. That effect is magnified when we allow ourselves to hope in God and open ourselves to the possibility of faith.
Further, prayer in community has impact greater than individual prayer because there is something nurturing and healing about singing with a like minded community. When we are surrounded by people who care for us, when we join our voices together, something marvelous happens. We discover comfort and joy beyond anything we could have imagined.
When you are in a face to face prayer experience, each person contributes to the community and the community becomes stronger than each person individually. We offer and receive comfort from each other. Song and silence are the tools that carry that comfort from one person to the next. There is something about offering comfort to others that increases our own capacity to in turn receive comfort. Being a source of comfort is also comforting!!
In such experiences, we become more than sum of the community because our faith acts as an amplifier. Faith can mean faith in God, but it can also mean faith in each other. It can mean faith in our connections as humans. All those beliefs amplify, extend and strengthen the feeling of comfort.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Booth
