On cold mornings when I sit on the sofa to pray I’m grateful for the blanket that’s sitting there. I wrap it around me and huddle in its warmth as I sink into prayer. It’s as though I’m in my own cocoon, like a butterfly in its chrysalis awaiting transformation. O, that I would have wings.
Let me be the first to admit how my mind wanders a million different ways when I pray, settling here, flying there, coming back again and again to the divine, letting go, putting my worries and fears in God’s capable hands.
Sometimes a phrase from a psalm or two floats through my early morning brain. I was just thinking how often wings appear:
“O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest,” said the Psalmist (55:6). Prayer is something like that, giving me a means to go where I need to go.
But then wings also offer a refuge in the Psalms, a safe haven, God’s shelter. “Keep me as the apple of thy eye; hide me in the shadow of thy wings.” (Psalm 17:8) What better place than that?
Angels, of course, have wings. In the book of Isaiah there’s a wonderful image of the seraphim, “Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew” (6:2). Makes you think of all the things a wing can do.
Finally there are the powerful eagle’s wings later in the same book. “But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40:31).
Mount up with wings like eagles. That’s pretty good.
READ MORE: FROM CATERPILLAR TO BUTTERFLY
When I talk about prayer to others, I sometimes struggle to describe what I do. Maybe if I just said, “It’s like putting wings on your life and wings on all your desires and letting them fly.”
The other morning, as I was finishing up my prayer time, opening up the blanket, coming out of my cocoon, I stretched my arms out, the ends of the blanket in my hands. It occurred to me that indeed the blanket was just like pair of wings. I was spreading them out and was now letting go.
Who says we earthlings can’t fly?
