Krista Tippett: What is prayer? In your journaling, and perhaps in conversation with others, too, this is such an interesting thing that we don’t speak about often. But everyone has stories. Answer the question, “What is prayer?” through the story of your life.

And take up the adventure of imagining, refreshing, exploring that practice in the time ahead.

Here is some sustenance from Pádraig Ó Tuama:

Ó Tuama: “Prayer, like poetry, like breath, like our own names, has a fundamental rhythm in our bodies. It changes, it adapts, it varies from the canon. It sings, it swears, it is syncopated by the rhythm underneath the rhythm, the love underneath the love, the rhyme underneath the rhyme, the name underneath the name, the welcome underneath the welcome, the prayer beneath the prayer. So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.”