A Note from the Author

T. Adamson

When I was a child- as a final ritual before tucking me in and turning off the light- my mom always led me through two bedtime prayers. The first was a prayer of protection/blessing for my friends and extended family. The second was a prayer of gratitude, thanking God for at least five good things that happened each day. I really enjoyed praying these prayers. Not only did they make me feel closer to God, they also made me feel closer to the people around me and to the good things that happened.  They did, however, take a very long time to actually say.

As I got older, I started trying to speed through what I felt was the boring yet compulsory obligation of prayer by reciting a kind of meta-prayer that went: “Dear God, please say all my prayers for me. Thank you! Amen.” Eventually I phased out regular prayer entirely, and now I only pray sporadically, when I am overcome by pain or uncertainty or other emotions that feel too big to handle alone and/or too intimate to confide in another person. When I am compelled to pray now, my act of prayer is often accompanied by a series of thoughts that might be broken down like this:

-I need to pray very badly.

-Prayer is useless and does not do anything.

-Although I know that prayer is useless, I still feel the urge to pray anyway because I am convinced on some level that prayer does do something to the person praying. Prayer is, after all, a languaging of our internal conflicts and emotional landscapes which helps us to better understand ourselves and the complex network of forces we live within. In this way, the ritual of prayer resembles the ritual of theater, since both acts set aside spaces and times of exception during which the participants step away from life to more carefully examine it. Both acts, prayer and theater, trouble the unstable boundary between doing and not doing, between the useful and the useless, in order to bring those concepts into sharper clarity.

I always knew that prayer would be an essential part of Usus. Not only because it is an activity that fills much of the time in any monastery, but also because I imagined these monks as people for whom every moment of life is a kind of prayer- an ongoing search for goodness and authenticity in the face of doubt and ridicule. What compelled me about the Spiritual Franciscans was that they were people for whom it was insufficient merely to feel and profess a conviction, they were compelled live it. I was thrilled by the notion that the characters in this play would live through every moment of their lives in conversation with an invisible and silent scene-partner, benevolent yet mysterious, unceasingly remote yet all-seeing and ever-present. That they would be, to borrow a religious phrase, having an audience.

Thank you for being part of that audience. Blessings and gratitude <3 T.

See Usus at Summerworks – May 16 through May 28, 2024