The Gift of “Ash & Starlight“

Prayer can be a tricky thing in our lives. Whether we're meditating on world peace or hoping for an open parking space, we often stumble our way into prayer, and, for many of us, end up feeling we've done it all wrong somehow. Enter "Ash & Starlight." Arianne Braithwaite Lehn's new book is a thoughtful revelation of what prayer can look like on the page and in our hearts. The book offers prayers for perspective and prayers for pain, along with a healthy helping of seasonal and liturgical prayer offerings. Arianne stopped by the SDPB Studios in Sioux Falls for a conversation about the role of prayer in our day-to-day living and how we can allow ourselves to be more vulnerable in prayer.

Lori Walsh:
Welcome to In the Moment. I'm Lori Walsh. Pastor and author Arianne Braithwaite Lehn says every person is a pilgrim journeying to a sacred place. Her own journey has included both celebration and loss. She grew up in Sioux Falls and decided to go to law school, that is until God nudged her toward ministry. Now she celebrates the launch of a new book. It's called “Ash and Starlight: Prayers for the Chaos and Grace of Daily Life.” In it, she offers prayers, both contemplative and honest — prayers for centering, prayers for waiting, prayers for struggle. You can also find her writing on her blog. It's also called Ash and Starlight, and she's joining us here inside the Kirby Family Studio in SDPB’s Sioux falls studio. Arianne welcome. Thank you for being here.

Arianne BL:
Oh, it's such a gift to be here. Lori, thank you so much for this privilege.

Lori Walsh:
This is a book with grounding material at the beginning and the end, but largely the content of it is prayer.

Arianne BL:
Yes.

Lori Walsh:
The book has meant so much to me, because prayer is one of those things where it’s kind of easy to pray for, say, a safe journey. Or we’ve got a storm coming through, so we pray for a loved one. “God please watch over them.” But there's a lot more possibility to prayer. Talk to me about prayer formation. Is that something you first came upon in seminary? Is that something you've always thought about: “How do we pray?”

Arianne BL:
My understanding of it has changed and grown throughout the years. But the writing of prayers started about eight years ago when I was in my last year of seminary and was doing some work at a church in northern Chicago. I started every week writing a prayer that I would send out to our congregation on Fridays.

In this prayer I would include the different prayer requests that people had given me during the week and would incorporate those into a longer prayer to guide and hold our hearts for the day. My hope was to both cultivate our prayer life as a community, but also create a little bit more vulnerability with one another.

An unexpected gift for me in writing prayers was how that uncovered my writing voice and my inner voice in fresh ways. I started to see how prayer can be a way to simply hold what we're already feeling in the presence of God, just to be aware of the ways that God is holding us and our experiences and our raw and messy emotions, right in the moment. So this practice of writing prayers is something that just stuck. I continued on with that when my spouse, Jeff, and I moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana, and started serving a church together there.

I continued to write prayers with the congregation. When I stepped away from my parish call in 2015, that's when I began my blog and continued to write prayers there. It's interesting for me to look at my prayers over the years and just see how the experiences I was having at the time of writing them are embedded in them. (The prayers) were a way for me to make some meaning and to find some integration and wholeness in what seemed to be the great paradoxes of my life: Great joy and great grief.

Lori Walsh:
Most of us who have grown up in church (or have glancing familiarity with the Bible) see people in the Bible raging against God, celebrating, honoring God, and also saying, "Why did you do this?" But we sometimes can forget that they're real people. These are human beings having an intensely human experience and connecting with the divine. This book from Chalice Press is part of a series featuring young female clergy and bringing those voices out into the world. Current writers are expressing their prayers, and their prayerfulness. Why do you think that's important right now?

Arianne BL:
Well, going back to what you said about the biblical writers, the Psalms is my favorite book of the Bible for that very reason because it's getting to the heart of expressing what's most authentic and what's within us. I think we need that type of writing and expression right now because that is what is going to keep us alive and awake to the spirit of God at work in our world and within our own hearts. I think we're in a time of division, and what I see prayer doing is bringing things together in wholeness … stitching it together, saying everything belongs. My anger and my rage belong. My pain belongs. My questions belong. I think remembering these people from the Bible are human can really free us in our own connections with God as we see that we are part of a much larger story that began before us and is going to continue after us.

Lori Walsh:
How did the process of keeping a notebook and showing up on the page and in your busy life work? You're a mother, you work, you have to eat. You have to do the things that the rest of us have to do; you have to pay bills. Tell me about the process of keeping track of what you wanted to say. Did that translate into more prayerful living because you were paying attention?

Arianne BL:
Yes. That's exactly it. The paying attention is what writing helps me do. For as long as I can remember, I've kept a notebook. They're all in a Rubbermaid. I hope nobody discovers them! I have just jotted down thoughts, things I hear, things I'm thinking about. And the way that I've done that has changed, but especially right now, in this season, when we have a two and a five-year-old at home and we're totally in the weeds. Now I keep a notebook in our kitchen. I just jot down sentences or single words that come to me during the day and then when I do have more space to string together a few thoughts, I can go to that place, that notebook, and expound upon some idea that's resonating in my heart at that time.

I really think that writing things down is what helps me stay alive and awake to what's happening. That helps me keep meaning or find meaning, even in places that it's hard for me to find meaning. It helps me to realize that there is always something happening in my heart, even those times when I might open up my notebook and think I don't have anything to say. It's amazing what can bubble up when we simply just be still.

Lori Walsh:
How do you think people will use this book? How do you anticipate this book being part of people's lives?

Arianne BL:
I've heard from people who have used it in personal devotion, and a number of parents I know have used it with their kids. It's been used in small groups and in church studies. I hope it is a book that can be a springboard for people in expressing their own prayers. It's a place to rest when you're feeling an emotion and trying to find words to express that. But then also in the back of the book, we've intentionally created some pages, some space entitled “My Ash and Starlight.” These are blank pages that give room for a reader to write down what they need to express and what's the “Ash and the Starlight” in their own lives that they're wrestling with.

Lori Walsh:
What's your advice to those people who say, "Well, I couldn't, how do I start?" Where would you start writing your own prayers down?

Arianne BL:
I think you start with what you're feeling in that moment, and it can be as simple as, “God, I am feeling this,” or “God, this happened.” And of course God knows these things. But the act of naming it has such power. And when you start with just a simple emotion or experience, I think you can be surprised with what you're able to say about that. Even if it's one sentence, start there and write that down and see what that loosens in you.

Lori Walsh:
We should talk about the title of the book, “Ash and Starlight.” Do you want to tell that story now?

Arianne BL:
When I was 31 weeks pregnant with our first child, my father Tom Braithwaite had a sudden and very serious relapse of his cancer. What we didn't know was that he was going to die very quickly after that. I was ministering and living in Indiana at the time and came back to South Dakota to help him get hospice set up. It was a quiet Thursday afternoon, and I'm with my dad in the living room of his home. And he starts transitioning. He starts describing for me the colors that he sees. And he says, "I see blue and red and orange and green, and there are trees and leaves and flowers." And I said, "Oh Dad, that sounds beautiful." And he said, "It is, but it's bizarre."

You know the critical thinker my dad was Lori. In that moment, what I imagined was the Garden of Eden. We ended up naming our daughter Eden, in light of this experience. But what happened in that moment was with one hand, I'm holding my dad's fingers as he's seeing glimpses of heaven and taking his last breaths here. And then with my other hand, I'm holding this pregnant belly where new life is literally kicking inside of me. It was this experience of death and life held tandem in such a tangible, physical way.

Following my dad's death, my uncle, his brother, commissioned a choral piece in remembrance of my dad. And he asked me to write the text for the piece and to make it a prayer, a prayer my dad might offer. I ended up titling the piece, Ash and Starlight because within the first stanza of the piece is this line about how the ash in my mouth and the Starlight and my bones weave together in wholeness.

It alludes to the poetry at the very beginning of scripture in Genesis where God is creating the world and creating humankind. The text says that God takes the dust and the ash of the earth. God blows this divine breath into the human, the same force that created these transcendent and pure and powerful stars beyond us. And then humans become this seamless entity that contains the dust and the ash as well as the starlight. It's woven together in one complete thing. It reminded me of this experience of holding my dad's hand and feeling my baby and how we are made of earth and we are made of heaven. This is true too of our lives, that we have our greatest sorrow and our most ecstatic joy that can be held together at the same time in this strange way.

And yet that is the way we were created to be and what we were created to hold. It really ties to my theology of how I understand God, that God is a both/and creator. Not an either/or that's separating things, but that God is bringing things together. With the title being Ash and Starlight, my hope in this book is to help people find wholeness and connection in their own lives and in their own hearts and in the places where it's hard to put things together, where it's hard to put the grace and the chaos together.

Lori Walsh:
You had a million moments with your dad and now you’ll have a million moments with your daughter, but that moment had to be life changing for all three of you, even though you're the one who's holding the story of it. Do we all have those moments where we stand in those thin places? How did you come to process something that huge and become the keeper of that story in your life instead of being steamrolled by that moment?

Arianne BL:
I love that you brought up the thin place, Lori, because from the Celtic spirituality, it's that idea that heaven and earth, there's just this paper thin veil between them, and that we're experiencing that more than we realize. Some people think of these as goosebump-type moments. But getting to your question about being steamrolled by the overwhelming emotion, especially when it's very, very painful. I think that it's an invitation. Pain can be a time when we shut down, when we block, when we numb it out. And there's plenty of times when I've done that myself in my life and still do.

But there's another way to see pain as an invitation to wake up and to feel. I didn't write about all of this right away. I didn't try and make meaning of this right away. I think the best gift we can give ourselves is to simply hold it and to be awake to the experience and to name the things that we're feeling. The story will come later. But for now, just holding the emotion and not trying to push it away, I guess, as tempting as that is, is the gift that you give yourself in these experiences.

Lori Walsh:
Tell me about this cover because listeners can't see it, but it is a beautiful illustration by an artist you admired, and it has a great backstory. Tell about how this cover came to be.

Arianne BL:
Well, years ago a dear friend of mine gave me this gorgeous print of a girl's shoes standing with a very starry shadow, and underneath was a Mary Oliver quote. I’m a huge Mary Oliver fan. Her poetry has heavily influenced my own prayer writing, but over the years I'd had this dream that maybe the artist Penelope Dullaghan could create a cover for this book. I knew it was just a dream because Penelope is a well-known artist and has done incredible work for Oprah and other places. When I was given the opportunity, really an unexpected opportunity, from my publisher to have some say in the cover, I decided, on a lark, to send Penelope an email and ask if she would be open to designing the cover of my book.

Of course she was backed out with assignments for months and months and months. Even as she said she would love to, the timing was not going to work and I was crestfallen. I took a picture of this favorite print in my home and sent it to my publisher and said, "Well, we can't have Penelope, but this is the type of artist I'm looking for." And I get this response from my publisher saying, "Do you realize that this print is actually perfect for Ash and Starlight?" I looked at it and it was just this incredible light bulb moment. I wrote Penelope back asking, "Is there any way you can make this the cover of my book?" And she said yes, and so literally one of my favorite pieces of art in our home became the cover of “Ash and Starlight.”

I had a friend over at our house the other day who didn't know this story about the cover and saw the print hanging up in our dining room and said, "Wow, you already got the cover of your book framed." Little did they know. And now it shares a connection with Mary Oliver too.

Lori Walsh:
So many people connect with Mary Oliver’s work. I think so many readers are going to connect with your work and find a deep connection too. What is it about her poetry that serves as a touchstone for you? Because once you fall in love with Mary Oliver, she becomes part of your life in this really interesting way. When people come into this space and say they love Mary Oliver, their entire countenance changes. And you can see that not only do they love her work, but they have been changed by her work.

Arianne BL:
Mary Oliver is a model for me and how to pay attention. She uses those exact words, and so many of her poems are instructions for living a life: pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. You know, this idea that the world is marvelous and there's so much to take in and that begs for our awe and our wonder. We can so easily lose that because there are so many things clamoring for our attention. We become distracted and we lose touch with what is really around us and lose touch with being present. I think that that is the gift that Mary Oliver gives so many of us.

I heard once that we become what we pay attention to. What we pay attention to is what receives our power. Mary Oliver and her work are life changing because it's such a gift that she's offering us.

Lori Walsh:
In that vein, as we talk about a devotional context, a prayer context, especially as it fuels your own writing, if we become what we pay attention to, talk a little bit about going deeper into your own heart to find the heart of God. Expand on that theologically for me.

Arianne BL:
Getting back to that creation poetry, this idea that God breathes God's own spirit and life and breath into us. And so I believe that we have the spirit of God. We have the life force and the heart of God within us. The deeper we go into our own hearts, I believe the deeper we go into God's. I use this term especially in the introduction of pilgrimage. Because a pilgrimage is basically a journey to a sacred place.

I think with a lot of faith traditions, there are physical pilgrimages that people can take to holy sites, but I think there is this personal pilgrimage that we take spiritually every day where we can journey into our own hearts. By that I mean go into what you're feeling, go into what you're thinking about, go into what you're experiencing and find in that God's heart as well. I think that there's always this conversation happening inside of our hearts, whether we're paying attention to it or not. Prayer and paying attention is an opportunity to become aware of that and to engage in that. It's both listening and receiving as well as it is expressing and sharing.

Lori Walsh:
At the very end of this book you have copied an email from your father, Dr. Tom Braithwaite, with his philosophy of prayer. I’ve lost my own father, and I have his letters from when I was younger. But I have no emails. I just was thinking about what a delight it must be to have those. Do you have many emails from your dad? Do you have many ways to remember some of his thoughts and his messages to you?

Arianne BL:
I do. It’s the gift of modern technology, really. He was a beautiful writer. He expressed himself in amazing ways. I'm very grateful to have to have his words and to have some recordings of his voice singing.

Lori Walsh:
He was a remarkable singer.

Arianne BL:
That is such a gift.

Lori Walsh:
He was a remarkable physician who touched the lives of so many people in this area and beyond. He was so passionate about that work and brought so much of himself to it. What a gift he was to us. What a gift this book is. What a gift this time has been. Arianne, thank you for stopping by.

Arianne BL:
Thank you, Lori. Thank you so much.