prayer for the first week of Lent

Dear...God,
I told a friend about praying and she said, "To Who? The Universe?" and laughed (though not unkindly) because she knows about my latest trouble with names and I know she would feel so much better if I could just use the Name we're used to because something like "The Universe" feels too big, too uncontainable, I think, which is kind of the point for me, but I understand that it might be scary when what you really need is a friend on the other end of prayer and not some un-nameable Being or Force or Love-Who-Always-Reaches, which is the shape you have taken in my mind lately.  There are those pictures of the Milky Way - you know the ones? with the velvet sky and the scatter of stars across that rumpled skein of color? - which always make my heart stutter a little because I think that is where you are but also above it and around it for billions of miles, maybe an eternity of miles, and also below it and close, close as the space between one heartbeat and the next, close as the threads between my thoughts, plucking them every so softly, till they tremble, till they resonate with the goodness that is you and is always recognizable, always knowable,  even though I cannot, maybe don't want to, name you.