Awake people, be awake.

Keeping the prayer of love alive.

Photo by friend, artist, and Little Courtyard reader Dale Rawlinson

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Last week, after the election, a friend (a reader here in the Courtyard) texted me a picture of the Statue of Liberty, weeping, and asked if I had any words to share. “I’ll sit with it,” I wrote. “Meantime, keeping the prayer of love alive.”

I’ve sat with it. Walked with it. I’ve set out into thickets of rumination, articulation, only to find myself deleting the words, returning to where I began. “Keeping the prayer of love alive” seems to be the only fuel that will burn clean for me in the dark right now.

But the dark, I have to keep reminding myself, is nothing new. We have been in the dark for years. Centuries. Millenia. The dark ages never ended, and this has always been the task—to keep the prayer of love alive—for those of us who are able, who are called. Clearly not everyone can attend to this task. Surely not everyone should. Maybe we take turns. Maybe, today, I am fit for service. Maybe, tomorrow, the darkness will come for me, in a specific way, a pointed and personal way, and I will have to go dark myself, to learn something there, and you will have to be the one to tend the fire while I am gone.

Another friend / reader recently sent me two books of verse by the Palestinian poet, Mosab Abu Tofa. This morning I checked out his Instagram and encountered a photograph of a body, burned almost beyond recognition, to the point that it took me five, maybe seven seconds before I realized what I was looking at.

What is there to say, here in the dark? What must be said? Different things at different times, surely, and by different people. This morning, for me, it’s these dozens of words that now seem to be burning clean enough for a decent fire, but mainly just those six words:

“Keeping the prayer of love alive.”

Not to convince or convert. Not because it’s the right thing to do in a world full of wrong. Just because it is a thing that simply has to be done. The trash has to be taken out on Thursdays. The seeds have to be planted in spring. Whoever is able to show up to the task, whoever hears that call to prayer, they, we, plant the seeds. Take out the trash. Keep the prayer of love alive.

What that means, for each of us, what love actually is, in any given moment—this then becomes another question. But not a question we ever answer once and for all. A question we live, while we can, as best we can, in the style and manner unique to each of us fire-tenders.

Tana and I made a fire last night. We prayed. Blessed. Laughed. Remembered. We sang a song. Hugged. It’s something I’d like to start doing with her each month. Our family fire. Maybe we’ll sync it up with the new moon, when the darkness is deepest.

Which leads me to a verse by William Stafford, from his poem, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” and I’ll leave you with him. It’s good to be awake, as awake as I can be, with you.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.