Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, October 13, 2002
Unitarian Universalists don't talk about prayer very often with one another. Some people are under the impression that UUs don't pray at all, either together in worship or in our solitary practice, and among the many jokes told about us is the one that says that when UUs pray, it's "to whom it may concern". There are many among us who don't pray at all, and haven't done so for many years -- or at least, as they'd say in the south, "not so's you'd notice".
But among those who do pray, the joke may still not be far off. Those of us who have come to Unitarian Universalism from other traditions nearly always leave behind our earlier notions of God as a person. In our attempts to find a better notion of the Ultimate, we're left with more questions than answers. If we were, in fact, drawn to addressing a prayer "to whom it may concern", we surely would be no less accurate than the more conventional titles for the Transcendent. But we'd have to admit, it's a less than satisfying way to begin a prayer. It's much more satisfying to say a prayer to "our Father" or to Jesus or to Yahweh -- someone with a name, someone linked to a concept intimate enough to make us feel we are not just muttering away to ourselves.
But what if we no longer feel comfortable with God as Father? What if we came to believe that Jesus was a great teacher, not a person within the Trinity, and therefore no one to whom we could address prayers? What if it has come to seem to limited and anthropomorphic to think of the Mystery out there as a person?
As we develop more complicated ideas about God -- ideas that reject the intimate images of God as person and may even reject the word itself -- we also complicate any attempt to pray. For those of us who still feel a desire for some sort of prayer life, the dilemma is one I've heard mentioned in all the UU congregations in which I've been involved, including this one. The dilemma is this: there is a strong, and at times even passionate, desire or impulse toward prayer, and it comes along with just as strong a censorship from the mind: how could we be longing to pray when we don't really believe in God?
That contradiction is a familiar one to me, not just from listening to other people but from my own experience of prayer. Like Suzanne Myer in our reading, it feels a little like confession to admit that I sometimes pray. My regular spiritual practice is Buddhist meditation, and in that practice I rest in silence. But there are times when prayer arises spontaneously from that silence, and there are other times completely outside of any spiritual context, when I am moved by the sorrows of the world or shaken by its beauty, and I find myself in prayer. There was a time when I would ponder that spontaneous impulse toward prayer and feel a certain mild embarrassment along the lines of: "What am I doing?! I don't even believe in God!"
This embarrassment seems common among those of us with an impulse to pray, and it follows that common thread. If we don't believe in the God of our childhood any longer, then why do we still sometimes feel the need for those practices that don't quite fit into our adult notions of ourselves, our more sophisticated theologies? And yet this strikes me as peculiar and a little sad. As we have developed more sophisticated concepts of God or of the mysteries in our universe, why can we not : deepen also in our understanding of prayer?
What should embarrass us in turning a clear and passionate attention on those things that most concern us in our lives? Because, after all, that's what prayer really is. Whether or not it looks pious or feels the way it did when we were children; whether it happens in words or silence, in solitude or in company; whether it happens on a train or in the woods or in a church or in our offices: Prayer is the conscious turning of our attention inward, in order to lift up for scrutiny that which most concerns us. Some have defined prayer even more simply than that. Thomas Merton, for instance, once said, "Prayer is the desire to pray". Not a form, not a set of words, not a right way and a wrong way. Prayer is the desire to pray.
Sometimes the desire to pray comes like a tidal wave and overwhelms us, usually in a time of extreme crisis. It is unforeseen, unthinking and irresistible, and our theologies become entirely irrelevant.
The former President of our denomination, John Beuhrens, tells of a man he met while working as a hospital chaplain. The man's teenage daughter had been critically injured in a car accident, and John, although knowing the man to be an atheist, asked whether he would like to go down to the chapel for a while. To his surprise the man answered that he did. When they arrived there, the man hesitated, then approached the simple altar and fell down on his knees in front of it. And what John heard him choking out was a fragment from that oldest of childhood prayers, "Now I lay me down to sleep..." It was all the language of prayer that man knew. But what he said was not his prayer: his prayer was the overwhelming need to pray.
A prayer born out of great need is the kind Wallace Robbins referred to when he wrote that "the ecstasy and the agony of life find their own sounds and cry out in irrepressible prayer." Or, as theologian Frederick Buechner writes, "In essence, prayer is the breaking of silence. It is the need to be known and the need to know. Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness. I am thinking not just of formal prayers that a religious person might say in church or in bed at night, but of the kind of vestigial, broken fragments of prayer that people use without thinking of them as prayers: something terrible happens, and you might say, 'God help us', or 'Jesus Christ' -- the poor, crippled prayers that are hidden in the minor blasphemies of people for whom in every sense God is dead except that they still have to speak to him, if only through clenched teeth."
But for many of us, the desire to pray rests on nothing quite so drastic: there has been no crisis, no major life change, no catastrophe carrying us up over our logic and theology into the heart of prayer. We don't believe that God is some great, patient being waiting at the other end of the phone for us to call up. And yet we have a yearning to make connection. We don't know what kind of God we might still believe in; all we know is that we have the desire to pray.
The best we can do with that desire, that illogical, unreasonable and embarrassing desire, is to relax our self-consciousness a little and simply begin where we are, with all our doubts and uncertainties. It can be a playful process: I read about an actor once who described his journey toward prayer: "I used to have this impulse to pray, just before the curtain went up and I was on, but since I didn't believe in God I didn't know what to do. Then something shifted for me, I relaxed or something; and now whenever a play is about to begin I say, "Dear God, let it go well tonight", and then this voice always comes back to me, "Stop talking to yourself, you fool! And get out there and act!"
C.S. Lewis, in a letter to his friend and mentor Malcolm, reminds him, "You first taught me the great principle, 'Begin where you are'. I had thought one had to start by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and 'all the blessings of this life'. You turned to the brook and once more splashed your burning face and hands in the little waterfall and said, 'Why not begin with this?' And it worked..."
If we can begin where we are, with all our doubts and self-consciousness, prayer can hold some real gifts for us -- even for us, the people of the terminally rational mind. Prayer can be, for instance, a way to speak out and thereby crystallize our heart's desire, however small or large that desire may be. There is something in this, as simple and even mundane as it sounds -- something important that can happen for us in the speaking, the articulation, the willingness to be honest and specific about our longings.
Unitarian Universalist Greta Crosby writes, "I [found] that talking in quest [and] listening in silence...were helpful in time of conflict and sorrow, fruitful in time of peace and joy....It is important to find out what we want and to ask for it in so many words. Sometimes, as we hear ourselves saying those words, our wanting changes. Sometimes, steps toward our heart's desire become clear, and strength wells up to take the first one. Sometimes, we realize no answer is possible. Sometimes, the answer is no."
Another kind of prayer is one of the earliest that many of us learned as children, if we grew up in homes where prayers were said. As children, it usually ran, "God bless Mommy, and Daddy, and Grandma and Grandpa..." and on down the list of people important in our lives. Today we might not say any words, if we were to hold up someone in prayer; or we might simply say their names, imagine their faces, and honor what we feel: our hope that they might get well and live; our deep missing of them now that they're gone; our sorrow at the breach in our relationship; our longing for their safe return.
It isn't necessary to believe that this careful honoring of those we love will in any way change the course of their lives, or ours. But it can nevertheless stand on its own as prayer: the careful honoring of those we love. There is something peculiarly touching about having someone say to us, "I'll remember you in my prayers", or "we'll be holding you in prayer".
Many years ago I had a remarkable experience of being prayed for, and feeling all the way down to my core the power of that concentrated caring. I was about to embark on a ten-day trip to El Salvador, at a time of great tension in that country shortly after six Jesuit priests and their housekeepers had been murdered. I had been to Central America before, but this time I was more nervous than I'd ever been about such a trip. On the Tuesday before my departure, I attended the regular weekly meeting of the Ministers' Association of Winston-Salem; this was one of two ministers' groups to which I belonged, and except for me and one or two others, this one was all black ministers. I had been a member of the group for over two years, and had grown to feel quite accepted despite the distance posed by race, religion, gender and age. And I told the group what I was about to do.
One of the members asked that when the meeting was over, the group take an extra few minutes to pray for me. When the time came, to my surprise and initial consternation, I was asked to come up to the front and have a seat facing the sixty or so black male ministers who were still there. Then someone started singing a rich and resonant hymn that spoke of resting in the safety of Jesus, and as they lifted their tenor and baritone voices, these ministers trooped up and gathered around me and performed the ancient ritual of the "Laying on of hands", lightly touching me as they sang and then as they prayed. I have never felt so cared for, so charged up, and, to be honest, so brimming full of the Holy Spirit as I was in that moment!
It may never be in quite so public a way, but this praying for each other is a practice we might consider making our own. It is a gesture of great love, to take a quiet moment and lift our images and names of those we care about up into conscious, tender caring. If nothing else, it reminds us of the deep ties of affection and history that bind us together. If nothing else, it might help us to notice one another more consistently, instead of taking our time together so much for granted.
There are other kinds of prayers as well. There are, for instance, prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving. Sometimes these arise from an overflow of amazement, when for no reason at all we're struck with the miracle of being alive on so extraordinary a planet. Prayers of gratitude can also be a small and disciplined gesture of the will, as when we cultivate the habit of saying grace before a meal. It is again a way of simply making us more mindful, making us pay attention to the fact that food is not a given for everyone, not even for most of the people on the planet; and that we are fortunate to never have to wonder where it will come from. For years and years now, if I am asked to bless a meal before we eat, I say two sentences that have come to be a simple way of reminding myself that the food before me did not appear with the wave of a magic wand, but is rooted in the connections that build our lives. I say, "Blessings on the many hands that planted, tended, harvested and prepared this food. May it make us strong for the work of compassion and justice." The mystic Meister Eckhart said, "If the only prayer you say in your entire life is "Thank you", that would suffice."
And then there are prayers of complete silence and inner stillness. Some hold that these are the prayers of deepest communion with God -- whatever we hold God to be. Kierkegaard wrote, "In proportion as I became more and more earnest in prayer, I had less and less to say, and in the end I became quite silent." Catholic teacher and theologian Thomas Keating says, "Silence is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation."
Whether our prayers be silent or spoken, fluent and at ease or halting and self-conscious, when we feel the inner need or invitation, I hope more and more of us will give ourselves permission to turn to prayer. There are many kinds of spiritual discipline and practice, many sorts of tools that can help deepen our awareness and our living. Prayer is only one of these. But it's an important one, and is a practice rooted in our history, our religious tradition and our culture. We do ourselves a disservice in believing we must leave it behind just because we've left behind a certain notion of God.
Prayer is the language of the heart, not the mind; and it doesn't require our logic in order to fit into our lives. As A. Powell Davies wrote, "It is neither desirable nor possible that prayer should be literalistic in construction or constrained to abide by the strict rules of logic. It is the language of the heart, akin to poetry. Its concern is not with exact description...but with reality itself and with the power to evoke our spiritual resources. Prayer goes on where other language leaves off: it has to do with what is least known and yet most deeply felt..."
And so it seems fitting to close these reflections with a poem, this one by Czeslaw Milosz:
On Prayer
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word is
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we: there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
They will walk that aerial bridge all the same.
AMEN.