Memo to: God.

Pushing pins into heaven's bulletin board helps a congregation pray

For the past three years or so, our church has set aside a chapel where people come at all hours of the day and night to pray before the consecrated Eucharist, which is lifted up and exposed in a gold monstrance. A white statue of Jesus with upraised hands stands above the tabernacle as a buttery light flicker softly from the row of votivec candles at his feet.

This is a great place for quiet meditative prayer, which is why I spend an hour there every week. But a anyone who has ever attempted to focus on silent prayer knows, it's not always an easy task. I start out with good intentions: head bowed, hands folded, eyes squeezed shut in silent determination to capture that elusive butterfly that is my prayer. I manage to follow along for a while as it flits here and there, but too often I get distracted along the way and suddenly find myself holding a list of things to do the next day rather than a conversation with God.

But a recent addition to the chapel has changed the way I pray there, helping me avoid the "butterfly syndrome" and joining my individual prayer with the prayers of our wider parish community. It's nothing more than an ordinary cork bulletin board hanging on the chapel wall, the sort that families use to post school schedules, grocery lists, and phone messages. This bulletin board is papered with small, handwritten notes, too--not memos to family members, but memos to God.

The prayers on those scraps of paper are not, for the most part, much different from those spoken aloud during church services; they're petitions for sick relatives, for the recently deceased, for an end to abortion, for help finding a job, and they're occasionally notes of thanks.

Beginning my time in the chapel by writing out short prayers of thanks giving or petition has been helpful in jump-starting my conversation with God. The process of writing keeps me focused on my prayer and forces me to be very specific in what I want to say. And just as the practice of keeping a journal can be a source of special insight, I often find myself surprised at the words that spill out onto the paper. They come from a different place, it seems, than the words that I form in meditative prayer and lead me to a deeper awareness of myself and my relationship to God.

In a way, that we would dare to leave notes for God on a bulletin board in the same space that honors the divine presence with royal trappings of gold, marble, candlelight, and red velvet is beautifully audacious. In such a setting, you'd expect petitions to God would at least be in Latin, if not some Gregorian chant. But these are notes for an incarnated God, a God as real to us as anyone else we leave Post-it notes for on a daily basis--family members, co-workers, friends. If Christ and the 12 apostles walked the earth today, they might leave messages for each other on a bulletin board in Martha's kitchen in Bethany: "Gone fishing. Back by 9."

There's something viscerally satisfying about putting my words to God down on paper. The Jews know this; they have a more formal version of our bulletin board in the Western Wall, or Kotel, in Jerusalem. For centuries they've been writing their prayers down and sticking them between the stones of the wall--the only remains of the Second Temple of Jerusalem--which gained its significance from its proximity to God's presence in the Holy of Holies back when the temple was still standing.

Coincidentally, the bulletin board in our church is hung on the western wall of the chapel. I can take my note to God to the bulletin board and stick it there with two pushpins for the edification of the real presence of Christ. That's one prayer that's not about to get away.

The prayer board is more than just a place to hang our notes to God. It also serves as an interface between individual and communal prayer, drawing on the strengths of both forms. By displaying our notes to God on the bulletin board for all to share rather than hiding them in a dark box, they become prayers of the community. Like the intentions offered up during Mass, these are public prayers, borne to God on the lips of the entire church.

But the bulletin-board prayers are usually not as quick and guarded as the intentions spoken during Mass. These notes to God are more heartfelt, honest, and direct, leaving their authors as vulnerable before God and the church as the psalmist crying out in anguish or fear or joyful thanksgiving--perhaps because the anonymity of the prayer board makes people feel safe enough to express themselves fully. That, I think, makes for strong prayers.

When I come to that chapel now, the first thing I do is scan the bulletin board, occasionally joining my own spontaneously whispered prayers to those jotted down on the notes. I know, too, that when I leave my written prayers there, others are doing the same for me. This is the heart of Christian community: all of us gathered together, helping each other along the hard journey to God. And in that way, our simple bulletin board papered with notes for God is perhaps a more accurate representation of church than the bricks and mortar that surround it.

By Jerry Daoust, a freelance writer active in the Catholic Worker movement in Winona, Minnesota.