Chaplain David Fries on praying while looking up

Ceiling Prayer

I wonder; how can prayer be made more natural and more often practiced and more enticing? Why? Anything delightful and immediately gratifying becomes more desirable and rewarding. Prayer could be like that. I often imagine seeing my prayer on the ceiling when I am on my back looking up. That is “Me the Artist,” I suspect. I began doing this as a child. Not so strange since curiosity and seeing are instinctual to both child and artist.

A patient recently told me that she prayed whenever she was looking up. As a little girl, her mother told her, “When you find yourself down, and you are looking up, pray.” Illness and being in a hospital bed fulfilled these two requirements for prayer. But normally, she said, she prayed infrequently. So we talked about prayer and need and frequency.

As we talked, I remembered a trick/tool from the television show Location Location. It is a BBC show about finding new apartments. The clutter in one apartment being viewed was too great to see the potential. Kristy, one of the hosts, suggested to the client that she lie down on the floor and look up at the ceiling. The ceiling duplicates the floor. So they both laid down on the floor, looked up, and the whole place opened up to ideas and possibilities. It was the same space seen afresh by looking up.

“I never heard of that before” this surprised patient said. She then did the same with the ceiling, over the bed, in the hospital room. I told her, “I am an artist as well as a chaplain. One is the ceiling. One is the floor. So I can, from experience say that just as painting never fails, prayer too never fails. Artists might not like the results. They might have to paint over what they have just painted. But they always, absolutely, get results when they paint. Something that needed to be voiced from inside came outside and was communicated. For me it is always the same with prayer. Prayer never fails. Prayer does what paint does. It speaks.” Then she looked up. “I understand.” She said that she was going to pass all this along to her mother.

The only draw back to seeing prayer on the ceiling is that it is a ceiling and that it will always return to that. Gladly though, when it returns to being a ceiling, I always experience an added delight. I see how the ambient light, both natural and artificial, washes over the ceiling like watercolor. It is, under certain conditions and at certain times, a sea of light washings. While lying on my bed I can walk on the sea-ling when I look up and pray. The ceiling becomes inspirational art when I desire/pray to see it that way.

Any ceiling anywhere is for me a sea for praying on. It makes me more attuned to the space where I am. Patients appre-sea-ate this use of the ceiling.

Do you have thoughts about spiritual development you’d like to share with your colleagues? Send an e-mail of any length to info@PlainViews.org.