I never really understood prayer.

I can hardly believe it’s taken me 69 years to finally understand why

I never really understood prayer.

Growing up, my mother took us to the local Presbyterian Church. I learned to say “Now I lay me down to sleep” and “Our Father who art in heaven …” and to sing “Jesus loves me this I know” (in two languages because Millie Madden, who was from Finland, taught me to sing it the way she did).

Prayer was boring; listening to ministers on Sunday tediously droning words out of books that made no sense to me. I tuned them out. Prayer was sitting in the congregation with everyone repeating somber phrases parrotted in a group monotone; things they’d say at every service because that’s just what you did before you could get to the good stuff … the cookies and homemade desserts which sometimes included brownies, if you were lucky, and time to run around with your friends.

I was taught that prayer is when you talk to God. But God always felt so far away as to make me irrelevant and definitely unworthy, and Him unreachable. I felt invisible, a nobody, approaching this non-entity who lived somewhere far beyond any place I could imagine, to say thank you for everything and ask that He fix things that weren’t going well. And it was always a crapshoot that could go either way, so why bother? Was He listening? Or not? God scared me.

I felt like a prayer failure. Prayer was a lot of work with not much return, so I stopped even trying.

But music …

I always understood music.

From the time I was a young girl, music and especially singing, enchanted me. It was my happy place. It lifted my spirits and brought me joy. Music gave me a place to keen my sorrows and grief. A safe haven to channel my anger and frustration. A way to lose myself in beauty and open to taste freedom.

Long before I understood what it really meant, I hung a plaque in my music room: “Singing is praying twice”. It’s taken me decades to finally realize that music is my prayer.

When I sing, when I play crystal bowls, piano or harp and the sound is flowing in and through me, I am alive in pleasure, peace and joy. That kind of sound awakens the cells in my body. In these moments, I can feel my heart nearly explode to overflowing with love.

Singing and music can fill your soul like an ocean on the rise and take that prayer in your heart you never knew you had and put it on steroids. The prayer to feel loved and to know what love is. The deep longing to feel whole and connected. The ache to forgive and be forgiven. The prayer to feel peace and joy. To be heard and understood. To share your heart with truth and genuine honesty. Oh my goodness, sound so sacred that it fills the universe with the allness of everything you are in an ecstatic wave of bliss.

The other day my team and I were tweaking the description of my latest video on youTube, “Jesu Dulcis Memoria”. We were tweaking because I dearly want this beautiful song to be heard far and wide and for all kinds of reasons that stymie me, the algorithms weren’t sharing the video as I had hoped.

The team and I were scratching our heads, so on an absolute whim I popped the problem into ChatGPT and asked it what to do. What did we have to lose?

I asked it to create a great title for the video because we thought the problem might be in the title. It machinated for a minute and then out popped these words: “Sacred Vocal Prayer / Jesu Dulcis Memoria / by Ashana” whereupon in a nanosecond, everything in me just stopped.

Seriously. The Divine starts talking to me through chatGPT like an old friend whispering into my ear: “Honey, you’ve been praying all these years, all this time. You’re praying every time you open your mouth to sing. Do you get it now?” I’m writing this and the tears are flowing down my face. I can hardly believe it’s taken me 69 years to finally be at peace with prayer. I didn’t realize how much unworthiness I’d been carrying connected to the word itself, how the narrow definition I’d accepted in my childhood had subtly defined me. Spiritual? Nope. I don’t think so. I don’t pray. I never passed the prayer test. How much guilt I had carried, because deep down I thought I was never good at prayer, just a prayer phony that mouthed the words.

We hear enough phony prayers these days.

With all the gun violence, war and conflict in our world, far too often when the unspeakable happens, the politicians and the pundits trot out words like “our thoughts and prayers are with the families/people/community,” or more blah blah like that.

But what are those kinds of prayers, really? You mouth the conventional platitudes with a serious face, hope for the best. and then you go on about your business as usual. Offer prayers, check.

Real prayer, honest prayer changes you from the inside out. Prayer can send a vibration of love, of joy, of the spirit of light, directly into your heart so you can see, feel, touch, taste, know possibilities beyond the limited scope of your thinking mind. Real prayer, honest prayer, can move an entire people. Think Martin Luther King “I have a dream.” In truth, it can and does move mountains and dismantle old paradigms. It can shake the very foundations of where we are and inspire us to actions, we never dreamed possible. It opens us to miracles.

I can now, from a place of complete peace, own that my music is sung prayer, offered through the sound of my voice, shared from the very depths of my heart. My gift to you, to everyone, are the waves of love and illumined light that come through bowls and harp, lyric and melody, inspired by the angels that compel me to sing and play.

If you are reading this, and some part of you is longing for deep peace and remembrance, to go into the stillness, to touch joy and open the heart “Jesu Dulcis Memoria” may be a gentle touchstone for you, a moment of answered prayer. The ancient Latin text comes out of the 11th century. Some monk, somewhere, went into a state of ecstasy and out spilled a love poem so transcendently beautiful, so sublime that I can only imagine if even a small percentage of us experienced such a state, the world would be completely and irrevocably transformed.

After I’d recorded the lyrical part of the song, there emerged a long meditative portion, a journey deep into the heart where you are carried into the intimate, transcendent mystery of spirit. This is my prayer for you and for us.

The world needs our real, honest prayers right now. Each one of us has our own unique, magnificent ways of tapping in and bringing them through. Prayers that come through poetry, music, writing, dance, art, sound and song. Prayers of divinely inspired action, compassionate touch, or words of kindness. Or prayers like the steady step-by-conscious-step of monks walking across the United States, calling for peace, a faithful dog by their side.

Mother Theresa once said, “I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us, and we change things.”

You have real prayers, honest prayers inside of you. Listen for them. Let them change you so they can change the rest of us.

Let’s co-create the miraculous through our juicy, full-on, big-hearted prayers, in whatever way, shape or form suits you. I’m right there with you.