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I’ve been thinking about this video lately. I learned this prayer, this poem, this heart cry in my very early 20s, in a church basement in north-west Calgary. It was written by a man named Pete Greig who founded a movement called 24-7 Prayer.

I learned to love talking to God in that church basement, and then in the basement of a no longer existant coffee shop in the Kensington neighborhood. I fell in love with prayer, with intercession. I remember laying on my stomach next to a friend, as we flipped through photo albums we’d brought with us, pictures of our nearest and dearest, sharing a little bit about each person before praying for them, lifting them up in front of our heavenly father.

And then life happened. I went on a mission trip, and I learned how prayer could be twisted, mean, manipulative. I learned these things in the aftermath of a trip loosely connected with 24-7 Prayer.

And in that aftermath I learned new lessons in prayer. If you’ve known me long enough, you’ve probably seen me talk or write about “banana bread prayer”. I learned to pray with my hands and with my body. I learned about prayer beyond words, prayer in groanings and cries. And I never wanted to see a 24-7 prayer room again. I kept praying, but it was private, and often wordless. I’d be desperate, unable to pray, so I’d put it all in front of Jesus and bake banana bread.

And then, a few years back, I read Pete Greig’s book “Dirty Glory”. It’s an inspiring and challenging read, full of stories of how God had moved in the 24-7 prayer movement, in prayer rooms across the world. And I was moved to read that the movement had become somewhat ecumenical, even celebrating a major anniversary in a cathedral in Vienna at the invitation of Cardinal Schonborn. I’d become a Catholic but didn’t know how to make the life of prayer I’d cultivated in those prayer rooms, and in the aftermath of my mission trip fit the life of prayer that other Catholics around me seemed to want me to have.

I’ve quietly kept tabs on 24-7 over the years, buying new books when they release them, following leadership changes both in England and in North America. And lately, lately my heart has been longing to be in one of those prayer rooms again. To pray creatively, with my hands, with my body, with my spirit and mind. To engage in worship that is embodied and whole. To see different generations come together in prayer. I’ve let my heart heal from that mission trip, and I’ve gotten curious again, at the way 24-7 Prayer keeps popping up in my life – in the ways the Lord has been using to speak to me.

And so today I pulled up this video again, and let my heart remember what it felt like to hear this rallying cry for the first time all those years ago, and what it might be like to respond to that rallying cry in a new way now.

I’m in a weird headspace tonight. What I want to do, quite selfishly, is write the kind of long, rambling, ranting blog post that I wrote regularly in my early twenties, when blogs were a new thing, and my filters and consideration for others stories or privacy were no so developed as they are now. But I’ve learned that I’ll probably regret that sort of post when morning comes, so I’ll just say a few things tonight.

First, the stigma around mental illness is real, and lasting. I’ve experienced it in the last few days in a variety of ways, always in situations where assumptions were being made. The reality is, that while parts of me are fragile, and maybe always will be, my psychologist and I agree that right now I’m in the healthiest place I’ve been in several years. That said, over the last week or so, a couple of areas that need some attention have been revealed in my life. They feel raw and prickly, so I’m giving them the attention they need.

The artist Frida Kahlo once described women as not fragile like a flower, but fragile like a bomb. Someone else, I’ve forgotten who, maybe Sue Monk Kidd, wrote about all the women we are in our lifetime. The truth is that the things I’ve endured over the last three to five years with my mental and physical health have turned me into a new woman. I’ve leaned into healing and found new strength. And while I’ve actively pursued an exploration of what it means to be feminine, these days I’m far more bomb than flower.

And yet, I’m flower too – in healing I’ve become more open, more fragile, more exposed. Strong back, soft heart (which I think might be a Brene Brown line, but I’m feeling lazy about googling the quote fragments floating in my head tonight.) I cry more easily, hurt more deeply, feel more fully.

It’s a weird paradox, one of many I’m holding right now, that to be strong and fierce I must also be soft and fragile.

One of the things I hate most is when assumptions are made about me. It’s partly my personality type – I hate being pigeonholed. I relate a lot to that other quote fragment about containing multitudes.

Almost every time I see my therapist, we encounter another place in my world where the answer seems to be holding two things in tension – another paradox to hold.

Recently I said yes to something that I knew would likely cause some pain, and it was the easiest yes in the world, because it was a question posed by someone I love, someone who has loved me well in return, someone who fights to include me, even when they know it might hurt. But here’s the thing – they always give me the choice, and they trust me to know my own boundaries and limits. That trust makes it easy for me to make space for them, makes it easier for me to lean into strength in my fragility, and do the big, hard things.

I’d been thinking about a passage in Ian Morgan Cron’s stunning 2011 memoir, “Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me“, off and on when I hunted the book down on my shelves on Friday night. A friend was coming over and it promised to be an evening of great conversation, as it always is when she and I are together, and I wanted to share the passage I’d be thinking about with her.

I want to share just the smallest portion of that passage with you. Only about a page from a multi-page piece, describing the preparation for and misadventures leading up to Cron’s first holy communion. The last portion, actually. I feel a bit like I’m ruining a delightful joke by telling you the punchline first, but I assure you that the entirety of the passage, and indeed, the book, is worth reading, or better yet, getting on audiobook, so that you can hear Cron himself read it to you.

After a wild lead-up to this moment, Cron is in line to receive his first communion from the bishop, at a chapel with a giant image of the Virgin Mary at the front, and he is teary from the weight and gravity of the moment. He writes:

It wasn’t until I was within four or five kids of the bishop that I could really see his face. He was corpulent, his cheeks and jowls glazed with perspiration, and he was lightly wheezing like Kip Merriweather, a kid in our class who had asthma. The bishop looked like he would have paid a hundred bucks to get out of his clericals, go home, put his tired feet up, pop open a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and watch a Notre Dame basketball game. As I stepped forward and stood before him, he saw the tears running down my face. For an instant, his pasty white face softened, his eyes sparkled just like the Virgin Mary’s, and the corners of his mouth turned upward in a smile of deep knowing. I suspect he knew that I was one of those strange kids who “got it” – who was hungry and thirsty for God, who longed to be full. Maybe he’d been one of those weird kids too. He placed the Host on my tongue and put his hand on the side of my face, his fat thumb briefly massaging my temple, a gesture of blessing I did not see him offer to any of my other classmates. And I fell into God.

I have spent forty years living the result of that moment.

I am told that, in years past, when a blizzard hit the Great Plains, farmers would sometimes tie one end of a rope to the back door of their farmhouses and the other around their waists as a precaution before going out to the barn to tend to the animals. They knew the stories of farmers who, on the way back to the house from the barn in a whiteout, had become disoriented and couldn’t find their way back home. They would wander off, and their half-frozen bodies wouldn’t be found until spring, when the snow had melted.

That day, Bishop Dalrymple, sweat dripping from the end of his bulbous nose, tied a rope around my waist that was long and enduring. How did he know the number of times that I would stretch that rope to its breaking point or how often I would drift onto the plains in a whiteout and need a way to find my way back home?

Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, Ian Morgan Cron, 2011, pgs. 44-45

I am so struck by that image of the invisible rope, fixed around a young boy’s waist, pulling him ever back into the depths of faith. I feel the image viscerally, because I know that same rope. Mine was fixed around my waist around age 11 or 12, the first time I received communion as a protestant, sitting in a pew on the left side of the sanctuary, in the old campus of Center Street Church here in Calgary, on a snowy Good Friday. It was strengthened nine years ago when I received my first holy communion as a Catholic, in the front of St. Michael’s parish, from a visiting priest, at the end of a lengthy Easter Vigil mass.

I was thinking about this passage before my friend came over on Friday because I feel the tug of that rope still today. Sometimes it has felt like a noose, sometimes a welcome life-rope, but always it is there.

I find myself again in a season of sorting out my life of faith. Evaluating where and when I fit in the larger body of Christ. Questioning all sorts of things that will make for other posts at other times, I’m sure. But that rope tied on at the Eucharistic table of both of the Christian traditions that have been part of my life; that rope that I would argue my parents tied first when they named me with a name that means “consecrated to God, a Christian” speaking over their newborn daughter their hopes for her life – that rope is one I’m clinging to right now, even as I sort and evaluate and cull. Because walking away isn’t an option, only walking deeper, further, more fully into God.

I’ve been blogging in various locations off and on for nearly two decades. Recently, I find myself in the midst of a season of transition and missing having a space where I can show up, just as I am, and express myself in my favorite way – through words. A place where I can chronicle my life. Lisa From Canada is born out of that desire. I imagine it as a place where I can talk about all of my diverse interests, ranging from mental health to books, and anything and everything in between. Welcome to my new space on the internet.