TW: grief, death, pediatric trauma.

I once arrived to a pediatric ED where, again, the worst had happened. Resuscitation efforts on the baby had just ended. The social worker met me at the threshold and said they needed to excuse themselves; they could not stay in the room because of the nature of the trauma the baby had endured. But could I go in and say a prayer to help the family find “closure?” Inwardly, I flinched. I said something about how I understood why they could not go in but there was no prayer I could offer that could bring closure.

When I entered the room, the family were so bereft they were physically ill. The sounds of retching and wailing filled the Emergency Department. I said little except to let them know who I was and that I was there. I waited a long time before saying anything more.

For almost an hour, I stayed with them, bearing witness to their unmitigated anguish, sometimes moving closer and sitting near them, sometimes giving space. There was nothing to be said out loud. Something within me kept telling me to stay quiet, not yet, it is not the time. Being a chaplain in those moments sometimes feels like agreeing to be the person in the room who will simply stay as long as is needed. Mostly, I feel as helpless as the situation is; yet, I work to pivot within myself to trusting in some higher power—by whatever name we may call it—to hold even this pain, this horror.

After a long time, and only after I heard the family began to individually lift up their own words of lament to God, and not immediately after then even, I inquired whether there was a prayer they would want together in this moment and they affirmed there was. Moving slowly, we all gathered together around the little body. My own voice was caught in my throat and I could barely find words. Yet my body did something without my conscious participation: my arms rose, nearly to heart level, and my hands opened with palms facing up. Then, simultaneously, the family did the same.

I genuinely don’t know if my words brought solace of any kind. But the energy palpably changed as the family turned towards their sorrow together with hands open. A moment of stillness happened although I would not dare call it peace or closure of any kind. Rather, the stillness felt like an opening, a moment of surrender to reality itself. No peace to be found there but maybe a little bit of mercy, even refuge. A minute or two after the prayer ended, a police officer arrived to conduct their interviews and the small wave of mercy returned to the ocean.

I imagine there are other chaplains who would have offered a prayer sooner than I would in that moment and perhaps there was a path to that decision I could not see just then. But in the years I had spent as a hospice chaplain, before I started working in hospitals, I had become practiced at holding back from prayer. I half-joked I was the “least praying chaplain” I knew. At least, I was careful to never lead with prayer. I never wanted prayer to be used as a “tool” of closure or spiritual bypass. If prayer happened, I wanted to make sure it was happening because it was truly wanted and not because we were in some kind of unconscious power dynamic, religious role-play.

So when I did pray, it was often in the intimacy of a home setting after a one-on-one talk with a hospice patient or with their family present, too. Sometimes we would hold hands in a circle or rest a hand on the patient themselves. I often knew something about their spiritual lives, their hopes and questions, their language for the Divine, their relationship to prayer itself. My prayers would often serve as an amplifier or mirror to the prayers that were already being held in heart, mind, and community for that patient and their loved ones.

But when I began to work in hospital settings, I noticed my prayers began to change. I was no longer establishing the kinds of relationships with my patients and their loved ones that had helped me craft prayers relevant and personal to them. Instead, I was meeting people only once and often on the worst day of their lives. That day in the ED was one of the first times I noticed how my own body guided the shift. My hands opened to something before I could find the words to express it.

When I was reflecting on this shift with a couple of colleagues one morning, one of the other chaplains, who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion, let me know that what I was describing with my hands was an ancient form of prayer called “Orant.” Having a word to describe the motion felt like a gift and I thanked her for it.

Having the word helped me to learn more about the tradition of Orant. I learned it was a common representation of prayer in early Christian art as well as Greek and Roman art with deep and persistent roots in Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic liturgies and even more ancient representations in Egyptian and Sumerian cultures. Notably, though the meaning might have carried different resonances across cultures and traditions, the person artistically represented in the posture of this outstretched, open-handed prayer–the Orant, themselves–was often a woman standing in some sort of intercessory role for her community. Before learning about the history of Orant or orans, I had primarily associated the gesture with the charismatic and expressive forms of worship I had encountered in evangelical Christianity, a place I experienced as excluding women in leadership and centering a woman’s body only to control it.

Given the various religious associations with orans, it was surprising to me then that it was in a scientific research article that I found the language I most needed to help make sense of my own body’s response that day in the ER. In a study of pre-Christian, nomadic Central European burial practices, which showed careful attention to the cardinal directions but without apparent evidence of the kinds of deeply sophisticated navigational systems and tools that were known within ancient Asian and Polynesian cultures, for example, the image of the Orant itself became a clue to how these peoples may have navigated in unfamiliar lands.

Because the image of the Orant is older by far than Christianity, the study hypothesized how its appearance in pre-Christian Central Europe might have had practical value before it became ritualized. In the absence of the evidence of navigational tools, the study demonstrated that the body itself could be used to determine the cardinal directions in a method of marking the sun rise and sun set with the person extending their arms, opening their palms, and then halving the angles with their body. The resulting posture in this somatic navigational tool is the same as the Orant’s.

“The gesture of orant,” the author of the study writes, was “originally used for orientation in the unknown terrain.”

A gesture used for orientation in the unknown terrain.

These words landed on my heart. as this: Our bodies know something about how to find our way in unknown terrain. That day in the ER, sitting with a family in the most gut-wrenching pain, my body responded in a way that was unfamiliar to me and yet I could trust as the prayer itself when I could barely find the words. I do not know if or how this family will endure their loss. I am sensitive to this being their story of grief, not mine, and not wanting to assume or expect anything from anyone in the unknown and devastating terrain of grief. We did share in that prayer together, seven or eight Orants, reaching for something to hold even this horror. Yet, ultimately I cannot know whether my judgment was accurate or what my part in their story will mean to them, if anything.

The part of this that is my story then is bringing attention to what happened in my body that day and what prayer might become within it: a gesture used for orientation in the unknown terrain.

I still think of myself as the “least praying chaplain” I know. But as a stance towards Life, I find myself turning more and more to this practical, navigatory wisdom of the Orant even I am a long way from being able to hold this posture of guidance from within as daily I am in a fight with my own sense of anxiety and encroaching despair for the future of this world and heartache over these present times. As I write this, we are in another record-breaking heat wave with no apparent means of ready escape or remedy.

In 2020, I formally left the church of my childhood. Though I had been inactive from the Seventh-Day Adventist Church for over 15 years, actively de-constructing my Christian faith through a scary, rage-inducing, grief-heavy process even while working as a chaplain, the vestige of my connection to the community I had once called my church family had been hard to sever. The SDA Church, like many religious communities, protects a belief that it carries special revelation and purpose in the world. I grew up believing that salvation was only to be found inside the teachings of the SDA Church and, with time being short in this world, that it would be an exacting path to keep that salvation secure in the End Times. Needless to say, the chance of becoming “lost” was the worst possible outcome in this life.

Yet in all the de-constructing work I have done out of my own experience of apocalyptic American Christianity, I am still feeling in our American political terrain how deeply the posture of “being right at all costs” still lives in my body and how my fear of being wrong overwhelms my ability to do my best. The reactive rigidity I can still express in a moment’s notice or the heat with which I think I know the right answer or the way I can still feel righteousness without compassion or humility all feel dangerously familiar. Simply because I have left the church I was raised is not a sign that I have healed the injury of separation and “rightness” within me, the fear of being wrong and “lost.”

The idea then that within my own body (somehow it is easier for me to believe that this is true already within yours) there is both an invitation to accept that I do not know the way as well as wisdom to be unknown terrain still feels radical to me. Dr. Laura Anderson, the author of When Religion Hurts You, writes “A marker of healing from religious trauma is not simply the process of deconstructing one’s worldview and identify and rebuilding a new one; it is also the willingness to remain open to shifting and changing over the course of one’s life.”

Again and again, re-orienting in unknown terrain. The profound meaning of one gesture, held in the posture of the Orant, is this: the invitation to re-orienting in unknown terrain. It may be a crude first step to simply locate myself in this moment, this world, to find my bearings before I take the next step. It is admittedly not enough to navigate by alone nor able to save us from the risks inherent in the terrain itself. And it takes time–the practice of locating oneself to the cardinal directions requires you note where the sun rises in the morning then waiting before noting where the sun sets in the evening. That pauses in-between requires us to be in the “not knowing” in faith that we will find our bearings. Yet, reconciling one’s location in unknown terrain is where there may also hope for something new. From that place, perhaps I can learn what else is possible when I simply listen and pay attention to where I am. In the writer Rebecca Solnit’s contemplation on hope, she writes: “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. . .Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable.” This is the posture of hope I feel in the Orant and the prayer I want to practice not only as a chaplain but as a whole human being here, now, always.

In the poem “Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda, the first stanza begins:

“Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.”

The poem continues, imagining what might happen if the whole world could take that pause together just to the count of twelve and what we might come to know about ourselves and our responsibilities to each other in that brief pause.

Now when I read this poem, the image of the navigatory Orant comes to mind. I think of that ER room on that day and how many other families will be forced by accident or circumstance to live their own version of that nightmare or, even more cruelly, how that nightmare is being intentionally inflicted on a mass scale on peoples in places like Palestine and Sudan and how privileged and protected I have been as a white American, both personally and professionally, to be able to sit as a bystander to the catastrophe of others and to mostly not feel the heat scorch me, to be able to work in a hospital that is not being bombed in a community where I can live that is also not being bombed or my own body constantly policed within it. It is not enough to simply pray about it. “Thoughts and prayers” mostly serve to give solace to the conscience of the bystander.

Still, I imagine a moment like the one in Neruda’s poem, a moment of “not moving our arms so much” yet. Perhaps we could take a moment to raise our arms in such a way as to be mindful of where the sun rises and sets where we are in our own unique position on the Earth. What would happen inside that practiced pause of “not knowing”? What if that gesture were itself the prayer on the days we needed it? What space might open in our hearts to see every person and creature likewise situated in their own story of movement through Life? What pain might we be better able to hold together? How might we collectively chaplain and protect each other from the terrors of being lost, opening our hands as if to say: I do not know the way forward either but I am here with you in it. What might we heal in that open-handed posture of unknowing?