Puzzling Over Prayer
The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville
Asheville, NC
September 14, 2008
PRAYER
O, love, gather us here in sympathy and in hope.
We arrive from so many different places
with so many different states of being.
Some of us are buoyant and bright, expectant and happy.
Some are weighed down with worry, with illness, with grief.
Some of us are new to this place,
antennae quivering, wondering what we will find.
Some return here each week as if coming home
finding good friends and comfortable familiarity.
Some arrive amid the busy buzzing of family,
with children to settle.
Some arrive alone, looking forward
to the welcome embrace of community.
Together we are one people with common hopes
covenanted with good intention and the aim to uphold each other
as we seek to deepen our understanding
and connect with that which is deeper still.
Let us feel your tug.
Help us open our hearts and minds,
that in this place we might begin to realize
the hope that lives within us all.
SERMON
I begin today with a confession of sorts: throughout my life I have never been a praying sort of guy. I grew up active in church life, but prayer was never particularly part of my experience: not in my family, not in my church. Oddly, the only experience of prayer I can remember from my childhood is standing with my class in public elementary school to recite “The Lord’s Prayer” together with the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the day.
This was, of course, back in the late 1950s before the US Supreme Court declared school prayer unconstitutional – at the instigation, I might add, of a Unitarian family who challenged the practice. I know that there are those who still lament that decision, who believe firmly that a bit of enforced prayer at the start of the day would do us all good. I can only say that as one who experienced such a thing I never especially felt that effect.
The language struck me as strange – What were “trespasses,” anyway? – and while I am aware that the words are still buried in my subconscious, they amount merely to rote memories that had no effect on my life then and have no emotional valence for me today.
In my later years growing up, if I had any impression of prayer it was a negative one. Prayer seemed to me just a fancy way of projecting your wishes, and what exactly was that supposed to accomplish? The whole business of expecting whatever we might understand as God to give you what you sought simply for the asking seemed to me a kind of simplistic, magical thinking.
In truth, I never gave prayer much thought until I got to seminary. By then my attitude toward it had softened a bit. Prayer was fine for some people to do; I just didn’t get much out of it. It wasn’t until my summer as a hospital chaplain in Milwaukee that I was forced to come to terms with prayer in a way I never had before.
Up to that point in my life I had never had any experience with or as a chaplain in a hospital setting. To be honest, I wasn’t sure exactly what they did. I assumed I would greet patients on the floors where I was assigned and listen sympathetically, but I hadn’t really worked out how the religious part would work. It turns out that by and large what the patients expected was that I would pray.
My colleagues of other faith traditions had come with little pocket-sized, leather-backed books filled with prayers for all occasions. I, on the other hand, had nothing but my wits and no sense of how this would work. My first few attempts were awkward, and as I stumbled for words I was surprised by what came out of my mouth. Lacking any sense of what I wanted to say, I tried to guess at what I thought they wanted to hear. They endured my clumsy constructions as I struggled in my off hours over how I might frame these prayers in a way that was true to myself and yet meaningful to the person in the hospital bed.
My first crisis came on my first night on call. As the only chaplain on staff at the time, I would be called whenever the staff felt a chaplain was needed. The call came at around 8:30 in the evening from one of the hospital’s intensive care units. Arriving there I found a group of young men and an older woman, who I assumed to be their mother, gathered at the end of a bed while hospital staff was giving CPR to a man, ostensibly the woman’s husband and the men’s father. I walked in, identified myself as the chaplain and asked the woman if I could stay. She nodded her head; I took her hand, and we simply watched.
It was a chaotic scene as one nurse after another took turns giving violent chest compressions while others scrambled to inject medications in intravenous tubes, or to suction the man’s mouth. What was obvious to everyone, though nobody said it, was that none of this was doing much good.
Finally, the doctors cleared the room to give the man’s heart a couple of last jolts from a defibrillator, to no effect, and then simply began switching off machines. I realized it was time for me to do something. I asked a doctor if the family could come in. He said, yes, so I led the grieving family members back into the room. It was the first time I had ever been present at a death or had watched the first crest of dawning grief break across another person as their body convulses with sobs. After several of them had kissed the man and said good-bye, I asked if they wanted a prayer. They nodded, yes.
I realize now that at that moment I needed that prayer almost as much as they did. I don’t remember the words I spoke, and to be honest I don’t think it mattered. I was not invoking any particular deity or clearing this man’s way to heaven, even though one of his sons urged me at the start to “send him to the right place.” I was looking for a way to fill this pregnant moment with meaning.
And this, it seems to me, is the true meaning of what some people call “the power of prayer.” It is not that I was somehow seeking to bend the forces of the world or whatever one might conceive God to be to my will or uttering some magical incantation. I was inviting us to pay attention, to be present to each other and the feelings that that traumatic moment of separation evoked in all of us and to call us back to our best hopes and best selves.
My colleague Sarah York, our assistant minister for pastoral care, in her book, Remembering Well, describes this process as a way of “creating space.” There are moments in our lives when we simply need to stop and pay attention. A loved one has died, a child has been born, or long-time friends have gathered. We may find ourselves frightened, embarrassed, sad, or happy, grateful, wanting to celebrate.
If, rather than letting our lives carry us forward headlong, we take a moment to stop and create a space for that moment, we are in a better position to make meaning out of it, to place it in the context of our lives and move forward. We also reduce chances, especially in moments of pain, that the feelings around it will kidnap or consume us.
There are many ways of making space. It can be as simple as sitting in silence and being present to the moment. It could involve lighting a candle, joining hands with another, or bowing in thanks. It could involve going to a meaningful poem or bit of writing and even reading it out loud. And it could mean doing something that we could call prayer.
Many of us grew up with the understanding that prayer needed to follow a certain format, that it should invoke God or some image of the divine, but there’s no reason that it needs to if that’s not true to your beliefs. When I am asked to give a prayer, especially in a setting with people of different beliefs, I like to open by invoking some sense of that which connects us all, but I try to use words that signal the widely diverse understandings in our movement of what the holy might be:
Spirit of life and love that lives in each of us . . .
Confounding mystery in which we make our lives. . .
I personally have no sense of a transcendent one that guides all things, but I do reflect often on the abiding mystery at the edge of our understanding, and I believe that love is a transformative force that lives in each of us, and that by naming it, by invoking it we make it all the more likely that we will live in its light.
Your prayer, should you choose to make one, need not be long or elegant. Sometimes the most eloquent prayers are the shortest. The writer Anne Lamott says that all her prayers come down to just two phrases: help me, help me; or thank you, thank you. Your prayer could be as simple as “this is so wonderful” or “I am so sorry.”
There are many circumstances that could occasion prayer, although traditionally prayers are grouped in four categories: praise, confession, supplication and thanksgiving, or, as Gary Smith of our church in Concord once put it: “Wow! Oops! Help! Thank You!”
It can be worth creating space to acknowledge the wonder of the moment and the joyous fact of our existence. To my mind, the hymn that opened our service today qualifies as a prayer of praise. “The leaf unfurling in the April air, the newborn child, the loving parents’ care, these constant common miracles we share.” What a wonder it is to be alive and to experience all this. And it ends with that ancient word of praise, “Alleluia,” derived from the Hebrew, “Praise God!”
The prayer of confession comes when we acknowledge our errors and seek atonement. Creating space within our own consciousness to own and accept what we have done gives us room to take stock of ourselves and our connections to others and so helps us conceive of a way forward.
As an example of such a prayer I’d like to offer the following, written by Mark Belletini as a different reading on the famous 139th Psalm.
To be present to the life of this place,
and to the deep that calls unto deep,
it matters only that we know there is no place
to flee from what presents itself to us here.
We can imagine flying to dark green islands
far away in a teal sea bronzed by sunset
but still the questions and answers
will dance within us, knock at our doors, haunt us in the dark.
We can imagine pulling up the corner of the autumn morning sky,
and slipping away into a place too strange to name
but still the questions and answers will glide within us
pound on our doors, call to us in the dark.
We can imagine running away to the dark side of the Earth
where spices float in the rivers
and children nurse at the midnight breast,
but still the questions and answers will circle within us,
Rap at our doors and touch our shoulders in the dark.
For there is no place to flee
from the presence that presents itself here,
the face we each recognize in the mirror of our lives,
the yearning that is the breath in our own breath.
Last year we heard from Carolyn McDade that she wrote the hymn that often closes our silent meditation, as it did today, “Spirit of Life,” as a prayer, a prayer in many ways of supplication, seeking help. She had returned late one night, weary from what seemed an endless and pointless meeting of peace groups. McDade said she felt a need to reach beyond her frustration to the deeper grounding of her work.
And so she wrote a prayer that she set to music, invoking the most fundamental force she could imagine, the spirit of life that infuses every one of us and all things, that she might find in it hope and renewal and the courage to stay true to her values and her vision of a better world.
The prayer of thanks is the one that I find comes most easily to my lips. Filled with gratitude for even the simplest of reasons I find myself wanting to say, “thank you.” I don’t even know that I have a particular subject to whom my thanks are directed. More, it is a moment when I am reminded of the web of relationship, human and otherwise, in which I live.
I rest in the shelter of family and friends whose love buoys me up. I rest in the shelter of the society of humankind whose ingenuity, wisdom and care over millennia and up to the present day has made possible all of the bounty that I enjoy, from the food I put on my table to the technology I take for granted to the poetry, music and art that soothes my soul. I rest in the shelter of this good earth, green and fertile, so finely and improbably calibrated to ensure the flourishing of life. And I rest in the unfathomable mystery of being.
There is so much to be thankful for. I could fill my days with prayers of gratitude. When it comes to prayers of gratitude there is probably no more beautiful example than that of ee cummings:
I thank you God for most this amazing day:
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;
and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.
(I who have died am alive again today,
And this is the sun’s birthday;
This is the birth day of life and of love and wings:
and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any – lifted from the no of all nothing –
human merely being doubt unimaginable you?
(now the ears of my ears awake
and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
My purpose today has not been to convince you to make prayer a part of your spiritual life. As a practice it may not recommend itself to you, and that’s fine. But I invite you to reflect on how you might create space in your life at important times or even on a regular basis as a way of centering your attention.
I must fess up that for myself, while I have gained a deeper appreciation of prayer in my years in ministry, it remains something that does not come easily and that I rarely turn to in private. But I wonder. In recent months I have made a practice of going out to sit on our deck to meditate in the morning after I rise. I’m an early riser, so the landscape before me is only beginning to lighten. I begin by simply quieting myself, ridding my mind of stray thoughts and appreciating the day before me. After some time, I turn my thoughts to people I care about, simply bringing them to mind and perhaps some circumstance they are facing. I don’t do it for the purpose of trying to fix anything, but as a gesture of appreciation and love.
Should I call that prayer? Perhaps. It’s not important to me what I call it. What’s important is the way that it keeps me connected to them and centers me at the beginning of the day. And I am grateful for that moment as I am grateful for the connections that make it possible.
May you, too, know such gratitude.