Sweep with a Prayer Broom to Open the Prayer Room
“Old man Fools Crow would pray in the basement of a metal shanty and it would be like praying in the middle of the most beautiful place in the middle of the prairie. We should never forget that wherever we pray, that spot becomes the center of the universe for that moment.”
– Gary Holy Bull, Lakota Yuwipi Man*
“Building the big room involves clearing away whatever blocks your having an intimate encounter with divinity. As always, this requires taking action—asking for a higher helping hand to bring a broom and help you sweep. This special combination of human action and divine assistance is assembled in prayer, the core activity of nearly every religion.”
– The Keeneys**
Brad went to a visionary spiritual classroom where he was given further instruction about using prayer to find your way to the “big room”:
I was handed what was called a “prayer broom” and shown that the first step of the Sacred Ecstatics recipe should include repetitive sweeping of the sacred kind. An unseen teacher instructed: “Make sure you sweep the ground before each step you take. Use a prayer broom and sweep while repeating a simple line of prayer such as, ‘Thy will be done,’ ‘Help me Lord,’ or ‘Have Thine own way, Lord.’ Each utterance is a sacred sweep, pushing everything away except a focus on your relationship with the divine.”
After sweeping with the prayer broom, I suddenly noticed a closet in the room that I could not see before. When I walked toward the closet and opened the door, I saw the luminous rope to God hanging inside it. While the closet walls made the space small, there appeared to be no ceiling. The rope stretched high into outer space, past the Milky Way. As I gazed upon the rope, music began to play. A beautiful choral rendition of “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” filled the air. The more absorbed I became in the music, the more it seemed the walls around me began to dissolve. All of this cosmic immensity was paradoxically revealed in the closet, the smallest space within the room.
The suggestion to pray in a closet is found in Matthew 6:6 “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet . . .” Here “closet” refers to the inner rooms of a Hebrew house. When there was no inner room available, Jewish men wore a prayer shawl garment called a “tallit.” This “little tent” provided a portable inner room or closet for prayer.
The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, had a mother who raised 19 children. In order to have her special time of prayer amidst the family circus, she’d sit down at the kitchen table and throw an apron over her head. This household version of the ancient prayer shawl enabled her to enter a special closet of prayer in the midst of daily chaos. Whether the closet is taken literally as a physical place or metaphorically as an orientation of the heart amidst a maddening crowd, a small and private setting fosters momentary respite from the hustle and bustle that often surrounds us.
Before you can find your way to the big room, you must first go to what appears as a smaller space, one even tinier than the cramped quarters you are trying to escape. Spiritually speaking, however, the prayer closet is actually vaster than your everyday dwelling place. This threshold to the spiritual universe is only revealed once the room has been swept clean with a broom that moves to the rhythm of a recited prayer line. Once you enter the little sacred closet, you will see and hear the music of the rope that leads you all the way up into the heavens.
A Mystical Prescription for Prayer
Why not actually move your daily prayers into a closet? Alternatively, find or make yourself a prayer shawl and drape it over your head. Even an old apron will do. Make sure you sweep the clutter from the room around you (which is also the inner room within) before you begin. Consider this sweeping action—done while reciting a short prayer line—a way of making you small and tender enough to cross the threshold into an even smaller space that leads to the biggest joy.
Wondering how you’ll find time to enter the little prayer tent with your busy workday schedule? There are a million or more creative ways, but here is one: Cut a tiny square of cloth and put it on your desk. Consider it to be your prayer shawl. Next, choose one finger that will serve as the ambassador of the whole of you. If you like, draw a little face on your finger so that it becomes your head. Several times throughout the day, slip your praying finger under its tiny prayer shawl. Then turn on the juke box inside you until you feel absorbed in the sound of inner music. While it will appear to anyone passing by that you are sitting mundanely at your desk, in reality you will be standing in the vastest, musical cosmos. In this way you become an undercover, under-the-cover agent for holiness with a license to spiritually cook.
Whether you conduct this experimental prayer in a closet, under a prayer shawl, or with one little finger under a piece of cloth, don’t forget to first sweep the room with a prayer broom—a tried and true line of prayer. Once you find your way inside the closet, prayers must be sung to bring down the walls and open the dynamics of ecstatic transformation and mystical transportation.
Into the prayer closet you must go, protected from trickster distraction in order to feel closer to divine benefaction. Inside that room the rope to God is found singing, ready to take you wherever you need to go, including a destination you do not yet know.
-The Keeneys, August 28, 2019
*From Bradford Keeney,1999. Gary Holy Bull: Lakota Yuwipi Man. Philadelphia: Ringing Rocks Foundation and Leete’s Island Press.
** From Sacred Ecstatics: The Recipe for Setting Your Soul on Fire, 2019.