Promptly: Me & My Prayer Closet
A prompt built on prayer closets, mushroom trips, a lie, and a wordlist
Welcome! I’m Lex Orgera——poet, essayist, gardener, herbalist, editor——and this is Promptly, a creative prompt every week.
Prayer Closets
I wonder, do you have a prayer closet?
Let me back up. In my childhood days in the Church, prayer closets were a thing. People were encouraged to have them in their homes and to use them to pray in. I remember my mom praying in her large walk-in closet a few times.
[In that same closet, my brother and I plundered Mom’s amazing fleece-lined high heel boots and dresses for playing dress up. I once found four hundred bucks in a pair of socks. An exciting closet.]
My prayer closet is a tiny box with no light that houses my and Aaron’s clothes. Sometimes a cat will nap on a suitcase in the back.
Basically, in Matthew 6:6, Jesus tells folks to pray in a closet to keep it a secret so that you’re not just praying to seem pious.
Not bad advice. We should never do anything to seem anything, but of course we do. And the more we put on that act, the less authentic we come off. Ironic.
But here’s why I have a prayer closet. It’s obviously not to keep it a secret because I’m telling you about it. First, my prayer closet is for meditation, and I’m kinda being tongue-in-cheek when I call it a prayer closet. But not totally. A prayer closet signifies a holy place.
But the prayer itself is a hope, a request, a thank you, while what I do is sit, listen, feel the blanket of darkness around me——let go of any volition at all.
Once, high on mushrooms and prostrate on the cement road of an abandoned housing development, I felt the Earth breathing. I saw it too, actually, and heard it: in-out-in-out. That’s the place I go to in my prayer closet.
Our breathing planet.
That place where chaos and randomness reign (quoting Gregory Orr here). Threshold. Sometimes I’m afraid of ghosts in my closet, the way I’m afraid of sharks in the deep end of a pool at night.
The Prompt
Go to whatever space, physical or emotional, where you feel the Earth breathing, whatever that means for you. Write from that place.
Think of something you definitely believe in, and then start your poem, story, doodle, whatever with the exact opposite. Yes, you are telling a lie.
Use these words (from the Ol’ Bard Poetry Club last week):
believe
conman
rearrange
armor
crayons
sights
project
Another Ghost Story