An Actor's Prayer

I had a wonderful dialect coach when I played Lady Macbeth. She lived within Shakespeare's world for decades as an actor and dramaturg.   As we sat quietly doing text analysis at her dinner table, she listened patiently when I chewed up the text and spit it out.  The text was bitter, hard to get my mouth around, like eating a mouthful of squid. 

I was nervous.  I was playing the wife to be reckoned with in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  So many actors had left their indelible interpretation of her words and I had to make them my own. I felt the pressure to be good.

My coach leaned across our dinner plates and touched my hand.  I stopped speaking. She pressed me to not talk until I could know and feel exactly what I was saying.  She said, "...read the words silently, see the words in your mind, say the words in your head. Only say them aloud when you mean it."

I had been skimming the words, picking fresh ice off the pond. Her direction was incredibly simple and technical. 
 
As I struggled with my many tentacled lines, my white haired teacher stared at me too deep for comfort.  My lack of commitment to my own words was glaring.  Lady Macbeth was a powerhouse of loss, grief and will.  I had to push to find her outrageous drive. I had to learn to command when I spoke. 

Dinner turned into weeks of rehearsal;  I continually repeated my silent mantra, "Find what you're saying, know it, feel it."

Eventually the focus it took to speak Lady Macbeth's words became a form of prayer.  Moment by moment my attention sank into each syllable and vowel sound.  I found the weight of my character's emotional truth was carried in between consonants. The punctuation held my breath.  The words carried me if I let them.  And I spoke when my soul connected with the archetypal energies of the words.

This is what we do when we pray. 

Each prayer has it's own cadence. We read others words, willingly,  blindly at times uttering the rhythm of another until we sink into the prayer's truth. Or we begin our own prayer and with patience our inner landscape finds it way to the surface. The right words resound on our tongue.  We say what needs to be said. We ask for what we truly want. 

We can change a prayer and make it our own. Being alert to our words brings us into the present moment. Sharing a story or a prayer is a form of communion.

Here is a version of the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic, Jesus' native tongue.  Make it your own. Rewrite it if you need to. Pray for what you want.  Friendship, sharing kindness, pleasure...

O Birther! Father- Mother of the Cosmos,
Focus your light within us- make it useful;
Create your reign of unity now-
Your one desire then acts with ours, as in all light, so in all forms,
Grant what we need each day in bread and insight,
Lose the cords of mistakes binding us, as we release the strands
we hold of others guilt.
Don’t let surface things delude us,
But free us from what holds us back,
From you in born all ruling will,
the power and the life to do,
the song that beautifies all,
from age to age it renews.
Truly- power to these statements-
may they be the ground from which all my actions grow:
Amen.