Sighing as a Form of Prayer
The ultimate sound of surrender
A couple of years ago, my pastor suggested sighing as a form of prayer.
Yes, sighing.
Like, ahhhhhh.
Since then, I’ve totally adopted it. Especially after noticing that I’d been doing it unconsciously for a long time.
You know what I mean… There’s nothing like a good sigh when the soul is heavy, right?
Anyhow, the other day, I was happy to come across this Frederick Buechner quote…
“We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The odd silence we fall into when something very beautiful is happening, or something very good or very bad. The “Ah-h-h-h!” that sometimes floats up out of us as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the skyrocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds we use for sighing with over our own lives. These are all prayers in their way.”
Sighing is a sound of trust. And in my spiritual life, that’s what I’m trying to foster — or, I should say, what God is trying to foster in me.
The sigh is the ultimate sound of trusting the very ground of our being.
