Drumming Prayers

"The song and the drumming were like this: Behold, a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling."— Black Elk, Oglala Lakota Holy Man

Mothers Ileana and Ara praying at the waterfall during Forest Church

Over the last decade or so, I’ve been studying various methods of prayer and ancient traditions that have been lost to so many of us in the colonized American West.

Throughout Mothers Iliana and Ara’s residencies with Loto this summer, drums have appeared everywhere. Around fires. At Forest Church. In ceremony. Sometimes accompanied by singing, sometimes by movement, sometimes simply by the steady rhythm of the drum itself. I even joined a local women’s drum and singing circle in Crestone.

In the process of all this study, I’ve been discovering how many ideas I’ve inherited about what prayer is supposed to look like.

Prayer, in the Christian tradition I grew up in, was mostly verbal. We talked to God. We thanked God. Asked God. Praised God. Confessed to God. We even sang to God. And I still do those things. Christianity is my spiritual mother tongue, and I don't have any desire to erase the language that first taught me how to commune with the Sacred.

After years of intellectual and spiritual curiosity, I'm realizing I have a much larger vocabulary now.

One of my daily prayer practices at the prayer waterfall

I’m learning the languages of prayer that predate Christianity in other cultures and traditions—drumming, chanting, dancing, fire, breath, silence, grounding, and the rhythm of bodies gathered together in Union.

There are ancient and Indigenous traditions that have understood this kind of embodied communion far longer than the Western religious traditions that formed me. I'm approaching those traditions with curiosity as a learner, not pretending they are mine (aka culturally appropriating).

They are helping me question programming I learned: the idea that encountering God through another tradition somehow threatens the integrity of my own. I'm finding the opposite to be true—It enriches it.

The women’s drum and singing circle in Crestone, CO

I'm unlearning so much about prayer—It isn’t a performance. It doesn't even have to sound or look beautiful. Prayer is communion. And communion can happen through words, certainly, but it can also happen when someone strikes a drum, creates art, or moves their body. And something inside my body recognized this truth before my mind found language for it: Boom…Boom…Boom…Heartbeat…Prayer.

This is becoming one of the unexpected gifts of opening myself to the Wisdom of traditions beyond the one I inherited: they aren't taking God away from me or me away from God—They're helping me encounter God everywhere and in everyone. After all, we are all One.

With Love, unconditionally—

Jennifer

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