We laugh together like we never have before. Her face radiates pure joy. She's a good little dancer, music in her blood...maybe a word from God. She's so happy and strong , despite her world crumbling around her, that I can only gaze in awe. She leaps into the air, giving shape to the music that reposes in all matter, just waiting to be released. She liberates the music and, in her innocence, cannot know what she has done and thereby is all the stronger. Is God speaking to this tired old heart? Is God saying, "Look — don't you get it? She's as marvelous as a galaxy. You have nothing to fear. If I can call her into being, there's nothing I can't do. Now dance. Dance!"
The following prayer-poem was written by Ernest L. Brown III when he was a teenager many years ago. Our gratitude to Mrs. Fredi Brown, his mother, for sharing it with us:
Why do I pray? Why do I breathe?
Why does my heart propel the blood through my body?
Why, indeed?
I pray because I must ... because prayer is thought,
because prayer is the Nature of God.
What else can be compared to that peculiar comfort,
that indefinable calm that comes stealing over me when,
perplexed and confused, I have turned to God,
simply dropped my burdens and problems,
and flung myself into the Creator's protecting arms?
There is a spirit in us, I am told.
No one with human eyes may see this spirit;
no one may touch it with flesh-and-blood hands.
Yet when I pray I can feel it,
and then it may be said that spirit has talked with Spirit.
Not with words, for there is no need of words.
The spirit in us has touched, recognized and accepted the Lord.
All else has been lost, dropped, forgotten.
No need to remember, to fret and strive after remembering.
I have touched God -- not with my intellect,
my twisted straining thoughts,
not with human-trained logic --
but with something within me which is the spirit in us,
the Christ Indwelling.
Thus it is that I pray -- because I want to be comforted ...
because I want to be strengthened, directed, led ...
because I want to be healed, happy, solvent, loving, loved.
Because I believe that God can give me answers
when I have none of my own, I pray.