I'll put you on my prayer wheel

I'll put you on my prayer wheel
Wed 18 Feb 2009 12:27pm
While I was a divinity student, I spent a year as a student chaplain at a rehabilitation center. Those of us on the chaplaincy team had as our "congregation", every patient, every patient's family and friends and every staff person.

Most patients cycled to rehab after a routine surgery (such as total knee replacement) or a life-altering surgery (such as the amputation of a limb) or perhaps after a traumatic illness or injury. Some came for help in dealing with chronic, debilitating pain. Their stories were often dramatic and painful to hear. But, remarkably, this was not a scary or sad place. It was filled with hope and optimism and a shared spirit that cannot really be explained. It was a joy to work with these people. I always felt as though I got as much as I gave. Day in and day out, the chaplain's job was to wander from room to room and just talk. Talk about whatever the people in that room needed to talk about. Motorcycles. God. Medicines. Kids. Their kitchen curtains. Their family of origin. Every day someone new. Every room, something different.

The center's Chaplain, my mentor and colleague, was and is a remarkable minister. She listens more deeply than anyone I know. She is able, day after day, year after year, to hear peoples' stories as if theirs was the most important story she had ever heard, as if they were the most important person she had ever seen. Very often, after a conversation, someone would say to her. "Please pray for me." Of course that someone may have been Catholic or Jewish or an evangelical or Pentecostal Christian. She may have been a Muslim or, he, a Unitarian Universalist. Naturally, they all "prayed" in different languages. Some would say they did not pray at all and certainly not ask for another's prayers. The Chaplain would always say: "I'll put you on my prayer wheel."

Of all the things I learned that year — and there were many — nothing has served me as well as that one line: "I'll put you on my prayer wheel." Thanks to her example, this is how I hold the needs and hopes and dreams and despairs of so many in my heart. And this is how I honor someone's request for attention. A prayer wheel is a device used in Tibetan Buddhism. It is a cylinder containing a scroll of mantras (sacred texts). The wheel is rotated; the act of rotation is thought to increase the power or effectiveness of the prayer, and, perhaps, to send those prayers out into the larger world.

Until recently, I had been borrowing a real Tibetan prayer wheel, a gift to the Steel family from one of the foreign students who had become like extended family. But this year, for Christmas, I received my very own prayer wheel — made by hand by the Dalit women (untouchables) of Nepal.

But my real prayer wheel is a kind of nest in my heart. There, I store the names of people and hopes and needs. There, I commit their prayers — and mine — (regardless of the language that they or I might use) to that place in my heart. I do this, knowing that, in the very act of going about my day, of living, of my beating heart, I am on some level of consciousness, committing my spiritual energy to all that is stored there. More than that, I imagine that the very act of breathing in and breathing out is a process of breathing in the needs and breathing out spiritual sustenance and nourishment. I am sending the needs spinning out into the cosmos. I do this every day for all of you.

Now, as I take leave for two total knee replacement surgeries, it is my turn to ask you: "Please put me on the prayer wheel."

~ Katie Lee

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