Lord, Increase My Bewilderment*

That is the entire prayer, as far as I have been able to discover. I came across it in a work of fiction by Kaveh Akbar, with no way to track it down. All Akbar said was that it came from Sufism, a mystical school of Islam.

Lord, increase my bewilderment.

What a petition! What a verb! To ask for more bewilderment, not less, from a higher power who must hear billions of prayers for more certainty, more conviction, more proof, more faith. I wrote the prayer down, then realized that wasn’t necessary. It was only four words long, with such good news in it that I memorized it before the ink dried. My increasing bewilderment wasn’t a problem after all. It was an answer to prayer.

You would be right to ask what kind of bewilderment I mean, since there are many forms of it, including some that belong in a trash file, not a prayer. The bewilderment of figuring out how to file a claim for services by a health provider who doesn’t accept insurance, for instance, or the bewilderment of planning a trip that will involve two airplanes, one train, a subway, a ride share, and a small boat. Those may be good for me since there’s a chance they’ll plow new neural pathways in my paved brain, but they don’t take me anywhere outside myself, which is what bewilderment does with such ease.

Have you ever wondered how scientists can figure out something as intricate as the human genome but still can’t explain how human consciousness works? How the smell of Mentholatum triggers a memory of your mother leaning over your sickbed when you were five? How the thought, “I think I’ll move my hand” results in you moving your hand?

Once you’ve studied the latest photos from the Webb Space Telescope—or spent some time looking up at a clear night sky—what do you make of “space”? Is it really space you are looking into, or is it time? Whatever you decide, does either one ever end?

If you’ve ever watched a baby being born, what happened inside of you? If you’ve ever given birth to a baby, same question.

These are big generators of bewilderment, but there are others close to home. Every time I walk the loop of the fence line, I see a new tree down, a new mushroom coming up, a new sandbar in the creek, a new burrow in the bank. Walking the loop now is different from walking it in the beginning. The surprises are more subtle, my steps less measured since I know the way by heart.

When I pass the old Sun Dance grounds, a whole stack of slides (volume up) flash across my vision. First the field full of tents and trailers in July twenty years ago, with drums beating from dawn to dusk and kids splashing in the creek. Then a freshly mown field in the fall, with crows and hawks diving at anything that moves. Dormant in winter, hibernating like the black she-bear in the woods. Grass flying out of the ground again in the spring, giving deer soft places to bed down at night.

In my most recent slides, the field is—I almost said “empty,” when nothing could be further from the truth, so let me try again: the field is verdant and lush, full of life that calls from trees, runs across branches, rises in the shine of insect wings over the stream, bends underfoot and springs up again, soaks my pants with dew, blows my hair out of my eyes, and has such a complex smell that I can only call it “the fullness of the field.”

When the power of that fullness stops me where I stand to stare, the slide labeled “pretty scenery” melts in the projector, and what I see through the burnt hole is abundant life that goes on with or without me, allowing me passage as a short-lived visitor but not as a god or even a head of state. The center of the universe is somewhere else, as it turns out. I’m out of a job. That may only last until it’s time to start supper, but it’s the most welcome belittlement, the most grounding bewilderment: to be awed for a moment in the presence of the fullness, to lose myself in the Presence that keeps everything full.

The Sufis’ name for that presence is the Beloved, to whom they pray for an increase in the dizziness that comes over them when they gaze upon the beauty long enough for the fullness to take over, burning through every prayer they might have had for more power when all the power is in more love.

That level of devotion isn’t in my reach, but the prayer alone is enough to steer me in the right direction. The only problem is that I want a blessing on the bewilderment I already have without asking for more. Don’t I have enough? The prayer thinks not. The prayer has faith that anyone who asks for more has already stepped through the door, and the One who hears the prayer can be trusted to take it from there.

*From Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, page 290.