Asked by the officiant of the morning service,
would you be open to the offering of healing prayer and blessings?
I’d said yes.
Found myself holding the small container with the holy oil,
watched as people processed toward where I stood,
listened to requests for healing, many,
words struggling to get through their masks, many
not audible to me, so prayers intended for one’s family
sounded rather like an invocation to pray for Camelot, and
prayers for the good of the community became, to my ears,
prayers for immunity.
Whatever had been offered up, I took and sent along
and up to higher powers. I asked if I might anoint the seeker with
this holy oil, sometimes feeling my wordless touch
could offer more than any prayer might. And so,
my thumb pressed onto brows the sign of grace, again, again, and then
once more as I continued praying for those present and not,
my marking one more time a forehead symbolizing all the
beings needing healing in the world.
It’s only now, later that day, my thumb still softly shining,
oil remaining in its creases, I begin to feel the healing
move from thumb to heart to soul,
the healed returning healing to the healer,
all of us better because our lives
had touched another’s, sensing wholeness
in the moments beyond the holy oil,
whether I’d gotten prayers right or not.
_________________________________________________________________
Barbara Simmons is a Wellesley College, Santa Clara University, and The Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins) alumna. A retired educator, she writes to wonder and hope. Publication include... NewVerse News, DoubleSpeak, Soul-Lit, Capsule Stories, Writing it Real Anthologies, Walt Whitman 205 Anthology, All Your Poems. Her book, Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums, was published in 2022.
would you be open to the offering of healing prayer and blessings?
I’d said yes.
Found myself holding the small container with the holy oil,
watched as people processed toward where I stood,
listened to requests for healing, many,
words struggling to get through their masks, many
not audible to me, so prayers intended for one’s family
sounded rather like an invocation to pray for Camelot, and
prayers for the good of the community became, to my ears,
prayers for immunity.
Whatever had been offered up, I took and sent along
and up to higher powers. I asked if I might anoint the seeker with
this holy oil, sometimes feeling my wordless touch
could offer more than any prayer might. And so,
my thumb pressed onto brows the sign of grace, again, again, and then
once more as I continued praying for those present and not,
my marking one more time a forehead symbolizing all the
beings needing healing in the world.
It’s only now, later that day, my thumb still softly shining,
oil remaining in its creases, I begin to feel the healing
move from thumb to heart to soul,
the healed returning healing to the healer,
all of us better because our lives
had touched another’s, sensing wholeness
in the moments beyond the holy oil,
whether I’d gotten prayers right or not.
_________________________________________________________________
Barbara Simmons is a Wellesley College, Santa Clara University, and The Writing Seminars (Johns Hopkins) alumna. A retired educator, she writes to wonder and hope. Publication include... NewVerse News, DoubleSpeak, Soul-Lit, Capsule Stories, Writing it Real Anthologies, Walt Whitman 205 Anthology, All Your Poems. Her book, Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums, was published in 2022.
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