A Prayer Story

Franciscan Sister José Hobday (1929–2009) was a Seneca elder, an author, and a storyteller.

She writes of how she learned to “pray always” from the Native American spirituality of her mother, which honored this sense of being in constant communion and harmony with God in all things. 

“My mother prayed as a Native American. That meant she saw living as praying and praying as living. She tried to pray her life. She expressed her prayer of gratitude, for example, in the way she did things. She told me many times, “When you stir oatmeal, stir it slowly so you don’t forget that oatmeal is a gift and that you don’t take it for granted.”

“She made a prayer out of the way she stirred oatmeal. Doing things prayerfully. That reflected her approach to prayer. She always did that. She even did it in the way she walked. She taught me and my brothers to walk with our hearts high and to walk softly on the earth because the earth is our mother. As we walked, she said, we should be ready to enter into every movement of beauty we encountered.“

  —  José Hobday
Stories of Awe and Abundance (Sheed & Ward, 1995)

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Sister José Hobday was an influential spiritual lecturer, author and storyteller. She had master’s degrees in theology, literature, architecture and space engineering. Her stories are drawn from her own experience growing up as a Native American Catholic in the American Southwest.