Adventures of The Incredible Shrinking Woman

I’m a substitute teacher in the public school system, a fact that people who know me well find hilariously ironic because I don’t like kids all that much. Or at all. I sort of fell into the job three months or three years ago, depending on whether you’re talking about how long it’s been or how long it feels like it’s been. Right around the time I started the job, my spiritual director (who also came up with the name for this blog) recommended I read a little devotional book called The Cry of the Deer, a meditation on the hymn of Saint Patrick, that introduced me to a celtic prayer called the caim. I began praying the caim nearly every morning when first entering whatever classroom I was going to be in for the day, in hopes that inviting the presence of Christ into the environment would make the day go more smoothly. The caim is prayed while turning slowly in a circle and pointing the arm outward to encompass the whole room, and my school teachers’ version goes something like this:

“Lord Jesus, Your presence is inside me.
Lord, Your presence is in this classroom.
Lord, Your presence is over these students.
Lord, Your presence is peace.”

I noticed that some days the recitation of the caim helped, and I had a better day with calmer students. But it seemed that just as many days were chaotic and anything but peaceful. This caim thing doesn’t really work, I decided.

One morning I was driving to school and praying that the day would be peaceful and the students quiet and obedient. I thought of the caim and wondered why it didn’t seem to be effective, when it occurred to me that I’d been using it like some kind of lucky charm to protect me from wild student juju, rather than praying it from a place of trust and dependence on God. It had become a talisman rather than a prayer of faith.

I had missed the real purpose of the caim. Like most of our prayers, its purpose is not to change God–it’s to change me. Could I trust the Lord to give me peace, rather than giving me peaceful students? Would I rely on Him to calm my heart rather than begging Him for a calm classroom? Once I began to understand the caim in these terms, I realized it “worked” after all…if I let it. My drive-time prayer switched from asking God for a peaceful classroom to asking Him to transform me into a person of peace.

I still say the caim most mornings, but with a different expectation–that peace will reign inside first and outside second, rather than the other way around.