“What’s with Prayer if there is no Decider?”
September 9, 2007
Rev. Peg Boyle Morgan
READING:
Reading “Singing in the Night” by David O. Rankin
I love to pray, to go deep down into the silence:
To strip myself of all pride, selfishness, and
coldness of heart;
To peel off thought after thought, passion after
passion, till I reach the genuine depths of all;
To remember how short a time ago I was nothing,
and in how short a time again I will not be here;
To dwell on all joys, all ecstasies, all tender
relations that give my life zest and meaning;
To peek through a mystic window and look upon
the fabric of life—how still it breathes, how
solemn its march, how profound its perspective;
And to think how little I know, how very little,
except the calm, calm of the silence, and the
singing, singing in the night.
Prayer is the soul’s intimacy with mystery [god], the ultimate kiss.
…
SERMON:
Some of us pray. Some of us don’t. Some of us used to. Some of us never learned.
Since Wayne and I got our puppy Angie, I really like the prayer: “God, make me the person that my dog thinks I am.”
Another of my favorite prayers:
“Dear god, so far today, I haven’t lost my temper, I haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent. I’m very thankful for that. But in a few minutes, God, I’m going to get out of bed; and from then on I’m probably going to need a lot more help!”
Some of us think we don’t pray, but we do. Some us only turn to prayer when we are really really desperate, like this story that we get from Anthony de Mello, an Indian Jesuit priest:
One day the Master was at prayer. The disciples came up to him and said, “Sir, teach us how to pray.” This is how he taught them...
Two men were walking through a field when they saw an angry bull. Instantly they made for the nearest fence with the bull in hot pursuit. It soon became evident to them that they were not going to make it, so one man shouted to the other, “We've had it! Nothing can save us. Say a prayer. Quick!”
The other shouted back, “I've never prayed in my life and I don't have a prayer for this occasion.”
“Never mind. The bull is catching up with us. Any prayer will do!”
“Well, I'll say the one I remember my father used to say before meals: For what we about to receive, Lord, make us truly grateful.”
I had the classic Catholic upbringing. Anthropomorphic God, rosary, confession with assigned prayers for my “consequence.” That was in the old days, before today’s more high tech confessional—seems as though few people are going to the actual confessional but some are confessing on line, selecting their sins from a list of possibilities, and with a click of the keyboard, their prayer assignments come back to them.
But I liked my childhood experience. I liked it all. I loved it actually. Everything was so clear. But that was before life starting happening to me.
Timothy was a sweet and loving person. I met him after he left Catholic seminary in Oregon and returned to his family home in my neighborhood in Puyallup. So while I was finishing high school we dated. It was a time of poodle skirts and bowling. When I went to a Jesuit university in the fall of 1964 he went into the army as a medic. When he left for Vietnam, I would slip into the chapel each morning and pray for him. “Keep him safe God, you know he loves you, and you know he’s a keeper.” One day my mom was outside my apartment when I got home from class. She didn’t want to just tell me over the phone. Tim had been killed by a land mine. I guess that was the day it all started to get murky for me. I guess that was the day I stopped praying to God, the day I began questioning that concept of a decider God.
…
You have had your own life experiences that have led you to religious questioning. These are times of holy quaking. As the certainty ends something else takes its place, something I think brings us a deeper spirituality—an awareness of not knowing. Theologian John Shea has said that “When order crumbles, mystery rises.”
And it is mystery, not dogma, which is, I have come to believe, the realm of prayer. As I have moved through my questioning since those days in the 60’s, the time between the Vietnam War and now this Iraq war, I land right in the middle of the mysteries of life, and I now understand prayer not as a subject to object kind of relationship, not a me to God idol relationship, but rather prayer as my response to life—life in all of its full catastrophe as Zorba the Greek said.
Matthew Fox, the former Dominican priest who was silenced by the Vatican for his spiritual teaching, has written a book entitled Prayer: a Radical Response to Life. In it he talks about the mysteries that all humans experience—mysteries that unite all humanity with common encounters. Those mysteries he names are:
Life Itself: with each newborn among us as an amazing occurrence; Yes we know how a lot of our biochemistry works, but where did it come from in the first place?
Death: the inevitable ending of this breathing life, moving on to what? Where does the breathing life energy go? We have our hunches. Will we ever know for sure? Is it not arrogant and short sighted to believe we know for sure?
Nature and cycles of rebirth: of which Goethe has said, “do you not see God? Under every bubbling spring, under every blossoming tree…” One of my colleague’s father in law has Alzheimer’s. She was sitting with him at their family lake cabin. He was smiling. She said, what is it that makes you smile? Being here to observe this beauty? No he said, not observing it, being it. Many of you have had moments in nature when you have felt an overwhelming feeling of oneness with other life.
Another Person: in the encounter with another person, Fox sees another mystery. We slowly get to know another through conversation: “where are you from?” “How do you spend your days.” Slowly the mystery of a new person unfolds, as a rose in its time and under the proper safe conditions, and so we behold the beauty of another.
Love: the experience of discovering the beauty of another, which demands of us a response—not always or ever a very logical experience, but one that takes us by surprise and will not let us go without a struggle. These experiences can come out of the blue; they are some of the best highs of life; and in my experience have nothing to do with my intellect or free will; Free will? Ha! You know the limits of free will when you have been obsessed by the presence of another.
Evil: a fact which continues to haunt human kind, despite efforts to combat its consequences-- of racism, poverty, limitations on freedom, killing for ego, war for profit. We seem never to overcome the problems of humanity. As Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you.” Evil then demands love to respond and interrupt the cycle. Evil calls out love.
…
These mysteries: life, death, nature, another person, love, evil—are experiences that when we experience them we often have difficulty expressing to another, the full extent and depth of our experience. Which is why we rely on our artists—musicians, painters, poets—to help us out—with metaphors that take us to universal places of understanding. Like this poem by Mary Oliver about standing in the midst of the mystery of life:
I'd seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night
under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I
got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under
the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even
nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.
This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them — I swear it! —
would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like
the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees.
I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.
How DO we pray then, without a decider God; how DO we pray if we give up our deity, or WHY should WE?
These questions spark my sharing this morning of how I now understand the purpose of prayer, …which is not to get a decision made. I believe the reason to pray is to know ourselves and our place in the universe better; and to change ourselves for the better; to remember our connection with all of life, and to remember what this all means in our day to day life.
I would suggest that a prayer session might start by reflecting on gratitude, then move through a couple kinds of personal reflection in which you look at yourself honestly and in which you listen for wisdom, and then finish by turning lovingly outside ourselves towards others. Let me describe each of these prayer steps.
Gratitude: A good way to start any prayer is with gratitude. We pray by quieting ourselves and moving into a consciousness of gratitude— you may do this by ringing a bell, listening to the sounds fade, quieting your mind, and slipping into a litany of naming of that for which you are thankful— Meister Eckhardt said if we say only one prayer thank you would suffice.
So yes, if we do nothing else in prayer, let us simply let gratitude surface in our hearts—and most especially for the gift of life itself! As in one of our hymns: for all life is a gift, which we are called to use, to build the common good, and make our own days glad….
Reflection on Self: And then there is the next step of prayer—being aware of what you are feeling proud of, what you savor about your life, …but also being aware of the broken and wounded parts of our souls. Here’s the part where we get to know ourselves more. Paying attention to yourself, how you are feeling, …where you feel hurt, …where you have tried and failed, …where you have hoped but never really tried, …who you have hurt either on purpose or by mistake or oversight. In 12 step programs they speak of progress not perfection. This part of prayer helps us seek our own understanding, forgiveness, and resolve.
I was taken with Nichole Brodeur’s column this week (Sept 7, 2007) in the Seattle Times. She went to Bumbershoot, and entered one of the “confessionals” that some non clergy people set up. She said:
I stepped behind the curtain and took a seat in the dark.
In front of me, a round speaker. It was stuffy. Familiar. And yet, there would be none of what I knew from my Catholic upbringing.
No "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." No "It has been 400 years since my last confession."
Just ... "Hi."
"Hi," a man's voice replied.
I had stepped into one of three "Portable Confessional Units" set up at Bumbershoot ... The units were an installation by 3 Seattle artists …
After a … trial run at a bar, … the men made 6 foot booths. They put a curtain over the entry and sat behind a partition. The booths weren’t artful, but what happened within was.
I started by confessing that I really had nothing to confess. Except that I was worried that I was not living up to my potential. And that I put up a big front, when what I really needed was to let people in. I'm a fortress, I said. I don't like that.
We were both quiet for a moment — me a little surprised and embarrassed that I had so much to say. And the voice? "Those are common issues," he began, and I could feel a smile of relief cross my face.
This was no holy man, no licensed therapist, but he was helping nonetheless. The act of confessing could be open to everyone, if the Bumbershoot installation was an indication.
That’s why sometimes the people of my congregation talk to me about things they are feeling blue about. Without a decider God from whom to ask forgiveness, it helps to be with another who can hear your confession in a compassionate and understanding way. So sometimes this kind of prayer is done with another human being.
Listening—a third part of our prayer life can be a deep listening. Humanists among us may conceive of our inner wisdom as the wonder and power of our being human. Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “There is guidance for each of us, and by listening, we shall hear the right word.”
Emerson is famous for his concept of the oversoul—a divine connection linking all of life—… so if you are more inclined towards the mystical, you may conceive of what you hear during deep listening as a holy voice inside, a divine connection—but for both humanists and mystics we cannot hear wisdom unless we turn off the volume of the hustle and bustle of our daily lives.
I’m not the best one to testify to turning off the volume of life, being a person who always sees more good things to get done. Being idle doesn’t come naturally to me.
Another Unitarian, Henry David Thoreau asks us “Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?...I wish to live deliberately…I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived…I do not wish to live what is not life…”
This listening part of prayer life is part resting our spirits, part reflecting on the meaning of what is happening in our life in order to know what life has to teach…and part to listen to what our hearts have to say to us. This resting, reflecting and listening hopefully leads us to a place of tranquility.
Remember how UU minister David Rankin described it in our reading:
And to think how little I know, how very little,
except the calm, calm of the silence, …
Do you see the connection between prayer, calmness, and humility?
Loving The last part of our prayer life I would mention today is the loving part. This is the part that takes our reflections and moves us to contemplate and hold in our hearts those for whom we wish good things. Those who are going through hard times, those who are suffering, in grief, or sick. In this part of our prayer life we can name those people who especially need our care. Is this to make a difference to them? If they know we are including them in our reflections it does make a difference to them emotionally and spiritually. Does it cure them? Some say yes, some say no. But it does change us. by reminding us of a deeper capacity we have for being a loving presence as we walk through our days with others.
When we pray, we contemplate how we want more love in the world—in essence love is justice, and so we may also resolve in our hearts our wishes for groups of people who suffer for lack of justice—gay and lesbian people, people of Iraq, people of Darfur. From this loving, centered part of our prayer life we gain the stability we need to sustain our work in this world, work to transform the world into a more just and loving place.
…
There is plenty of room for prayer for those of us who have no belief in an anthropomorphic decider diety. Contemplating the gift of life in this most amazing universe, savoring the world, reflecting on our experiences of relatedness, quieting, resting, knowing ourselves more honestly, forgiving ourselves, resolving, and holding in our hearts those who need special care. All of this prepares us to go into the world more clearly and confidently.
It is when we let the mysteries of life and death into our awareness that we let in the ultimately important, the holy. They are one and the same thing. To live our lives in awareness of the holy, to know ourselves more authentically and deeply, to turn down the volume of our lives to listen, and to pray and act for the betterment of others, seems to me to be a rich prayer life—and a rich spiritual practice.
May it be so. Amen