I remember like it was yesterday, the very moment our eldest son entered this world, when the birthing nurse carefully placed him on the warming pad and our little infant belted his first cry. He breathed his first breath of the world. Then, less than a couple years later, our youngest son would repeat a similar scene, gasping his first breath, and resounding the hospital delivery room with his unique voice.

A few years later, my wife and I were poolside as each son was taught how to breathe float and swim freestyle.

Then, as they entered grade school, when they were experiencing challenges of friendships and competitive sports and piano lessons, they grew frustrated on those occasions as part of the growing pains of growing up, and we as parents taught and apprenticed them to the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles’ Creed. That was our nightly ritual for many years, committing them to memory and teaching them the Lord’s Prayer in Greek, Latin, as with English. In those times they experienced stress and anxiety in school, we would remind them to breathe, to pray.

Fast forward to the teen years: high school and college applications and the Advanced Placement exams and all the stresses that go with all of that, breathing and learning how to breathe were essential. It was about breathing in the Spirit, breathing through prayer.

The disciples in today’s Gospel text are being apprenticed in how to breathe, how to take a breath, how to swim. The Lord’s Prayer teaches them and us how to swim in the tides and whirlpool of life and faith. It’s the foundation, base language of communicating with God through Jesus Christ in the Spirit. It’s expressing our connection to God, as children who are asking God, who are knocking on our holy Parent’s door for comfort and a listening ear, we are the inquisitive child seeking the guidance and wise love of our Lord.

At the start of the COVID-19 epidemic our whole family, like yours and everyone else’s, sheltered in place and watched with horror the murder of George Floyd and his cry of 9 minutes and 29 seconds, “I can’t breathe” as he called for his mom. His cry was the cry of Black communities, of Black bodies, of the cloud of the ancestral witnesses who could not and cannot breathe because of centuries of subjugation, discrimination, of being regarded as less than.  How does one breathe? Give me breath.

As a person of color of Filipino descent, there is a strong sense of Holy Spirit and connecting with the sacred ancestors of my family – the living and those who live in eternal peace. The Spirit connect us, one to another and to the living Christ. Without faith, without the Spirit, we cannot live, move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). Without holy Breath, holy Wind, there is no life, there is no purpose.

When we pray, when our life is as a prayer – infused with Holy Spirit firepower – we are as little children who can dream big, who can swim long distances, who can cry loudly, who can sing to our hearts content, who can love like there’s no tomorrow. Walking in the Spirit is a daily breath. The early church communities understood that. Without the Spirit, the apostolic witness would be empty. But with the Spirit breathing and moving, there is hope, there is transformation, there is the prayer that girds children to want to go to the farthest stretches of the world.

We also well know that the weight of the world and the huge boulder on our prayer shoulders of the enormity of suffering, wars, death, injustice, greed, and so much more, leaves us breathless. And when we or a loved one takes their last breath, the Spirit still moves, the Spirit still lives.

The Spirit is still Spirit. God is still God. The request, “Lord, teach us to pray” is the childlike shorthand of asking, “Lord, how do we breathe?”