On wings of prayer

When I was a teenager in a rice farming community in California, one of my favorite activities was walking in the rain on cloudy, windswept days. Our town was on a regular flight path for migrating geese. I loved watching them sweep over the town in a V-shaped pattern. I loved to hear them calling out to each other. Somehow, the sight and sound of them was the epitome of freedom to me. High above me, they plied the heavens with their wings in full, strong motions, at home in the sky. I even wrote a poem about them, which ends:

Fast forward to the spring of 2011. Weighed down by chronic pain and an inability to eat and sleep normally, I wasn’t feeling like “the gray sky was my kingdom.” The difficulty hadn’t yielded as readily as others had, and I’d been feeling severely limited for some months. Though I was able to carry out most of my duties, I never knew when pain would hit. Sometimes I was so limited by the pain that it seemed wiser to stay home.

During this time, I had the help of a Christian Science practitioner whenever I felt that I needed the support. It was important to me to pray as much as I could on my own, to demonstrate to the best of my ability what I knew to be true of God’s care for me, but I didn’t hesitate to call the practitioner as wisdom dictated, and I always received loving support. This encouraged me to move forward with my prayers, and to expect healing as a result.

As I sat studying the Christian Science Bible Lesson one morning, I looked up to see a family of geese—four babies, a mom, and a dad—in a comical situation. My study window faced a pond with a fence surrounding it, with some rather narrow openings between the bars of the fence. Imagine my surprise (considering my previous estimation of the power and dominion displayed by geese) to see one of the parents running back and forth on one side of the fence, trying to fit his adult body through. The baby geese, who had been with him on this side of the fence, had decided to go through the narrow openings to see Mama on the other side, and to take a swim in the pond. Dad ran up and down the fence line, never finding an opening big enough, and he seemed to have forgotten that he could fly!

When the babies decided that they’d had enough of swimming, and that they’d like to have a snack of grass with Dad, they simply walked through the openings, leaving Mama running up and down the fence line on the other side. Sometimes my husband and I saw the whole family in the pond, but we never saw how it happened. We watched as the days went by, but Mama and Daddy both seemed to have forgotten that they had the wonderful power of flight. They stayed right on the ground with the babies in their attempt to protect them at all times.

This got me to wondering about my prayer life. Was I staying on the ground, trying to find my way through a constricting set of mortal beliefs, when I needed to spread my wings and fly? Did I already have the capacity to go a little higher, to rely on pinions that were more mature than my current practice would indicate? Was self-doubt getting in the way?

I remembered something from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures about using our wings. Mary Baker Eddy wrote: “Science reveals the possibility of achieving all good, and sets mortals at work to discover what God has already done; but distrust of one’s ability to gain the goodness desired and to bring out better and higher results, often hampers the trial of one’s wings and ensures failure at the outset” (p. 260 ). Wow! Would I really want to ensure my own “failure at the outset”?

I thought about the meaning of ability. Was my ability that of a limited mortal? Well, in that case, I might have a limited ability to achieve “the goodness desired.” However, I knew that since I am a child of God, the very image and likeness of the one perfect Mind, all my ability comes from God. This thought immediately strengthened me. I saw that it was God who was giving strength to my pinions of prayer. It was God who had given me dominion. I might be still in the trial stages of proving it, but I could certainly spread my wings and pray more deeply than ever, and feel uplifted by the Christ! I remembered another wonderful statement from Science and Health: “Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man” (p. 393 ). There it was again. My ability to “rise in the strength of Spirit” came right from God Himself, and nothing could weaken this God-given power.

With these encouragements, I began to pray with more diligence, and with more trust that my ability to pray was supported by God, the only power and truth there is. Trying my wings was strengthening them. My prayer life began to change, and is still changing. I began to realize more clearly that sincerity and putting God first in my thought is more important than any “format” to my prayer, or even how many ideas I could remember. You might say I started learning to let God take the lead in this conversation.

I began to keep a prayer journal. I didn’t write in it every day, but it served me well as a forum for my discoveries of “what God has already done,” is doing, and will always do.

Was I staying on the ground, trying to find my way through a constricting set of mortal beliefs, when I needed to spread my wings and fly?

After some months of prayer, I was challenged by the need for more humility, specifically regarding a challenge in a relationship. At that time I was railing against the pain, thinking there were plenty of people who needed to overcome issues similar to mine, but who weren’t feeling pain right now. That didn’t seem fair! However, I found that this was just another opportunity to spread my “prayer wings” and go higher. Was I going to stay with this material view of existence, or was I going to “rise in the strength of Spirit” and fly right over this fence of self-justification? This was really my opportunity, and it had nothing to do with what anyone else might need to work out.

The answer was clear. I had to go down on my knees mentally (as Matthew 26:36–39 indicates that Jesus did literally in the Garden of Gethsemane) in order to rise up and fly prayerfully. I became willing to do whatever God had for me to do, to put God first and to put my need to be “right” last. Guess what happened? The pain started to vanish.

This healing didn’t happen all at once—but over the next year I experienced more and more freedom. My ongoing prayer included the increasing recognition that God was the only true operative power in my life, and in the life of everyone. One day I realized that what had seemed so real and substantial the year before was no longer a part of my experience. The pain (which had claimed to be physical, but was really mental) was gone, and I had the freedom to live normally. Best of all, harmony, instead of discord, reigned. I was especially grateful when I realized that instead of having to leave a church service early because of discomfort, I was able to sit through the whole service in complete freedom. I was able to take walks again, and to move forward with necessary projects at home, with friends, and at church.

Recently I ran across a loved statement in Science and Health that would have been of some comfort to those geese that spring: “Fixing your gaze on the realities supernal, you will rise to the spiritual consciousness of being, even as the bird which has burst from the egg and preens its wings for a skyward flight” (p. 261 ). The oil of Love will completely permeate our “wings of prayer” as we preen (prepare) them through the consciousness of God’s care for us. This prayer will strengthen us, and anoint our thought for the healing that is sure to come.

And where are the baby geese? They have grown, and have flown. Now the sky is their kingdom truly, and the fence is long forgotten! Our “fences” will be forgotten, too, as we rise to claim God as the power that strengthens our pinions of prayer and lifts us in our “skyward flight.”