Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning,

Oberlin, Ohio, is a wonderful place that always seems to welcome me back. 

I’ve been in Oberlin for a week each of the last two summers, and in June of this past year, I stopped by the five-and-dime store. 

We found a few toys and other distractions for the kids for our upcoming car trip. But there were some used books on clearance out in front of the store. There, in the summer sun, one immediately called out to me: The Breath of God by Nancy Roth. 

I brought it back into the store and up to the register, and the young man working there and I struck up a short conversation about Nancy. Because of course, he knew her too. That’s just the kind of place Oberlin is.

The Rev. Nancy Roth was a prolific author, with several titles published by Church Publishing, the publishing arm of the Episcopal Church. She was an assisting priest at Christ Episcopal Church in Oberlin when I was an undergraduate. She was a sort of Renaissance woman who seemed to know quite a bit about most things.

Her book The Breath of God draws on some of her work with breath and yoga (another of her books is An Invitation to Christian Yoga).

The opening of this book seemed particularly apt for Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent.

Roth writes about how prayer is often seen as a kind of progression, like rungs on a ladder. (To get better at prayer, we need to keep climbing to new heights!) 

But she counters this assumption with a different image, one of expanding lung capacity, of breathing deeply. 

It’s God’s breath that breathes life at the beginning of creation.

And here, I should note that Nancy’s husband, Robert, composed ‘West Park’, the hymn tune found at Hymn 176 in the Hymnal 1982.

We are created out of the dust of the earth, and it is the breath of God that gives us life.

When we breathe (and when we give grateful attention to our breath), we join in with this same Spirit that created the universe and animates our being.

Seen this way, prayer isn’t something that we need to switch on; it’s something we are already doing. To practice increasing awareness of our own breath — a breath and life that is a gift from God — is to approach the Pauline ideal of praying without ceasing. 

On Ash Wednesday, we are marked with dust. But this year I received the dust not with morbid fascination, but with a grateful posture toward the God who animates my own dust and gives it life. 

This Lent, I am striving to breathe deeply in gratitude.
 

And when I breathe out, I am conscious of my need for this continued relationship. 

Of a soul that longs for God like a deer that longs for the waterbrooks. 

What then is prayer? It is, perhaps, part of the very essence of what it means to be alive. 

Until next week,
-David