OPENING WORDS
A simple, uneducated Jew was invited to a Hasidic third Sabbath meal. The Rebbe presented a brilliant discourse on the Torah, demonstrating his depth of insight and oratorical abilities. “I don’t understand,” exclaimed the guest, with a puzzled expression on his face. One of the Hasidim then told a story, a wondrous miracle story. “I still don’t understand,” whispered the guest, tears beginning to form in his eyes. At length, the assemblage began to sing a nigun, a wordless tune of joy and love, a song of peace and yearning, a Sabbath melody which captured the desire of a people for God. Slowly, the guest began to lift his voice in song together with the Hasidim, to move his fingers to the rhythm of the music, to join hands with his friends as they rose together to dance. “Now I understand,” he declared, with glistening eyes and an open heart.”
Barukh atttah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha-olam, shehekhiyanu, v'kiyamanu, v'higiyanu lazman hazeh.
Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has sustained us, kept us alive, and enabled us to reach this season.
“Prayer” is one of those words we Unitarian Universalists are reluctant to use, at least publicly. It is one of those words many of us left behind in the religious experience of our youth, back then, before we came home to this free faith. Sometimes you will hear the claim, “Well, we don’t pray. We meditate.” And then all kinds of specious distinctions are drawn between the two. I say the function is the same. I say further that, more often than not, the form is the same. We may say words into the silence or we may think words into the silence or, if we are UU Buddhists, we may say “Hello!” to the words as they spin through the silence of our private meditation. Unitarian Universalists pray. Let me suggest some ways in which I see this congregation praying. I’ll start from the outside and work my way in to the individual. The architecture of this church is a prayer. It is a prayer that we be one with the land, a spacious branch in the trees, a resting place on the hillside. The structure, with its browns and greens, with its windows, with its interior sky—hub and spokes—prays for the Unity of beings. This cherished art behind me is a prayer. It is a prayer set to music that we sing. We will sing it together today at eleven, in fact. It is a prayer set down in colors and lines and images on cloth and hung for all to see. Our worship is called forth through the medium of this prayer. We cannot be in this room and not pray it. The lighting of this chalice every Sunday is a prayer. And we light others like it throughout the church at meetings and gatherings of all kinds. It settles and focuses us and, whether we are aware of this or not, we pray this prayer in solidarity with people who share our tradition all over the nation and the world. We invoke the Spirit of Life when we light this chalice. That is a prayer. I know there is at least one choir member here who could testify to the prayer that is singing together. Something happens when people sing together sometimes—when it all comes together, when the harmonies are perfect (even for one fleeting moment), and the perfect words burn into the heart, and the Whole that is the music lifts you all up, nearly off the floor it seems sometimes. And the hairs on your arms and neck stand up. When that happens, a prayer has been offered. And answered. And the UU Buddhists and Hindus say: “Hmm. Something about the Breath.” So you do pray here. I see it every day.
Now, the way you pray says something about your shared theology too, of course. From my perspective, what we might call God here appears, like a laser-beam when smoke is blown across it, in the moment we connect with one another. We become aware of this God when the conduits between us are clear of debris, open to the energy of compassion, of mutual affirmation, of comfort with what is. This compassion, affirmation, this dwelling in the real feels bigger than any one of us--much bigger, and so powerful. With this love, this right-relation, this unity, we are then empowered to do what it is we need to do—for ourselves in our own lives, for and with the group in which the prayer arises, for others in the world around us, living and non-living.
I’ll just say a word about prayer at home. Guesses, just guesses. I imagine that many of you keep sacred altars at home: a bureau-top, say, and on it pictures of people you love, the pinecone you found, the shell she gave you, the bluest blue of a blue jay feather, a picture you drew when you were three. It is a prayer you experience, standing late at night by the baby’s bed, looking at her perfect face (his perfect face) relaxed in sleep, glowing in the moonlight, and you think that you might burst with adoration? Is your lovemaking a prayer and an answer to that prayer? Isn’t it a prayer when you are doing the dishes and looking out of the window at the willow out back dancing in the wind, and suddenly you realize that the song playing on the radio is in synch with the willow’s dance and for a moment everything makes sense, you are surrounded by beauty, and your skin tingles in recognition of this God? In the story from The Sun, Patti’s prayer, her weeping, brought her to a kind of salvation which the spiral of her life may bring her to again and again, perhaps more and more frequently, until some day she might live in a constant awareness of her newness and purity, the peace and friendliness of the universe, the sweetness of life.
Prayer is a doorway, an opening. A. Powell Davies, one of our esteemed Unitarian forebears, says that “prayer is the place where the mystery about us touches the mystery within us.” Prayer is the doorway between the two mysteries. We have a sense of an inherent orderliness beyond or even within the disorderliness of our ordinary lives. Prayer positions us at the nexus of the two orders. There, if we pay attention, if we stay our fear and impatience, if we persist, we can invoke the child of orderliness and disorder whose name is surprise, or in Christian lingo, grace. My favorite definition of prayer goes like this: “Prayer is the cultivation of the awareness of the actual presence of God.” God is here, in and among us. All we need to do is pay attention and remain open to the experience. Prayer is an activity which renders us a conduit for grace, which engages us, connects us to the world in such a way, and here I quote a practitioner of Buddhism, that we “apprehend all things without prejudice, with equanimity, and with absolute clarity.”
So Unitarian Universalists do pray. But often words and postures get in our way. Maybe we get stuck in the memory of prescribed prayers—the “Our Fathers,” and the “Hail Mary’s,” the barakha, and the “Praise Him!” which may have seemed forced and alien, dry, ornate and aimed at a far-off inscrutable and judgmental Supreme Being we did not know or really even want to know. These are the “types” of prayer—petitionary, thanksgiving, praise, intercessory, confessional, invocational. Our religious past survives in what I call “prayer fragments” like “Oh, my God!” and “Damn it!” I notice that, when I am in extremis, I revert to begging favors from the Man Upstairs. When last fall I was forcing my way through rush-hour traffic back to the North side of Chicago where I had accidentally left my wallet in a bag of other essentials on the pavement in an alleyway—I am telling you, I prayed like hell. “Oh please, God (named Him even!), Oh, please let no person see my bag! Please let a mist settle over it so that any one looking who might otherwise snatch it will not see it. Oh, hear my prayer (Episcopalian me)!” I prayed hard, all the way, fifty minutes non-stop, out loud, leaning over the wheel gripping it fiercely, determined to protect my stuff by the sheer power of my appeal. Now, with equanimity, love and perfect clarity I can say, I hope the person who stole my stuff found as good a way to make it count in his life as I did its loss in mine. (I love you, man!) The old words do come up. They’re right there behind our teeth. The begging and the helplessness and the desperation.
But the old words can still be ways in. They are already deep inside us, like reflexes. My Dad, who was unchurched but spiritually very alive, found comfort in the Lord’s Prayer. He liked to mess with it. After his death I kept coming across these little typed versions of it. He would take lines like, “Our Father who art in heaven,” and divide the syllables up in different ways. He did this at night when he was trying to get to sleep. I remember one that began “Arf!” And I remember a character in another named “Tin Heaven Hal,” “Oh, wed be thy name!” This comforted him, made him smile. These words took him to a place of prayer. It reminds me of what I know some Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors tell their sponsees who are newly sober and reluctant to pray. “Just get on your knees and read the ingredients off a can of pinto beans if you have to. Say ‘Water, beans, salt, and preservatives. Keep me clean. Amen.’” The thing is, our heart hears something within and beyond the actual words. It is our aim that matters. The words are vehicles. My friend Elliot for Christmas gave me a hand-written copy of the Lord’s Prayer “from the Aramaic.” I don’t know how valid linguistically this translation is, but it makes for a nice vehicle.
Create your reign of unity now.
Embody your desire
in every light and form.
Forgive us and untangle our knots.
Do not let us enter into too much business
or forgetfulness of who we are.
For this vision
and your light energy,
do it in harmony
from gathering to gathering.
In my notes for this sermon, I had fun putting together a table of three categories of prayer. This kind of prayer which is based in the use of words as a way to connect with “the mystery about us and the mystery within us,” is one of the three. What I call the mode is conversational (most people, asked to define prayer, put it in terms of conversation), and the skill that must be developed in order to pray this way is unselfconsciousness. Its features are an internal dialogue, a process of thinking things through, of coming to clarity about questions or problems. The purpose of this type of prayer is really to ask (yourself, God, the universe) for things—everything from good ideas, to sleep, to company, to a new job or a car. The language of this prayer is verbal and it seeks a familial relationship with the universe: God as parent or friend or self. It is also the least silent of the three. Because there are words, there is a certain level of noise. It is a necessary, reflexive, good and comforting kind of prayer. They all are.
Another category of prayer I account for in my table operates in the mode of awareness. To enter this kind of prayer skillfully you must practice watching and listening, that is, paying attention to what is going on around and inside you. Its features are an awareness of cycles and patterns in the world and in the self, memories and feelings (which are parts of patterns themselves) that arise while watching and listening. The purpose of this sort of prayer is to discern the orderliness and disorderliness in that which you are observing. The language of this discernment process is not verbal but a language of images which seeks guidance and orientation. Soren Kierkegaard, in the reflection at the top of your order of service today, says “the true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when the person doing the praying continues to pray until he or she is the one who hears.”
There is a phenomenon that occurs in my life that I call
“clowns.” I think this happens far more
often than I notice it, but once in a while I REALLY notice. In the periphery of my life a scenario or an
issue related to my life is enacted by other people. It acts almost like a message: “This only
seems to be outside your experience,” the image says, “This is what you might
want to be paying attention to in your own life.” For example, many years ago I was walking on
the streets of
The other and final category of prayer I identified in my study (I am trying not to appear to rank them) operates in the mode of connection or integration, a feeling of being in the flow. The skills involved in this way of praying are similar to those of the last category in that things have to slow down for attention to be paid, but different in that here the self that watches and listens is to one degree or another caught up in the One, in the Whole, so that one’s eyes and ears seem almost to become the eyes and ears of God. The desire is for something beyond companionable conversation, beyond guidance. The desire is for merging, union. Patience and the ability to wait, sometimes for a long time, are the skills. The purpose of this prayer is to embody gratitude, compassion and a sense of responsibility to respond to the blessing of a moment. Its features are an experience of peace, self-love and compassion for all beings, and a kind of fearlessness. You may recognize these features in the story about Patti. And the sense of responsibility may solidify as a sacred “call.” There is energy there in that moment for powering big changes in a life.
The words of the old Shaker Hymn ‘Tis a Gift To Be Simple go: “’tis a gift to come down where we ought to be, and when we find ourselves in the place just right, ‘twill be in the valley of love and delight.” That’s where Patti ended up that night, looking at the “long-ago light of the stars.” She was in the valley. I have had experiences like this, experiences of the absolute searing preciousness of life, which I can’t express to you, first because I would cry, but more importantly, these experiences are really beyond words. They take place in a holy silence, out of time and place. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner (writing informally in a collection of accounts about how people pray) puts it this way:
“[I]t’s like I’m the wave and God is the ocean, and when I pray, I go, “Oh, my God! I am a part of the ocean!” And there is nothing that the wave has to tell the ocean, and the ocean already knows that. All I need to do is become aware of my real place in the order of being. That’s the function of prayer: to remind me of that.” (in Castelli, How I Pray. NY:Balantine, 1994)
And the Taoists sigh and say, “Hmmm. Something about the way of water.” Unitarian Universalists pray, though not all and not all ways. I believe our prayers are one practice which maintains the integrity of the web of interdependence we affirm, by helping us to live in right-relationship with the mystery within and around us. Our prayers, such as they are, open us to the energy of the Whole, one person at a time.
In closing I want to quote our President, the President of
the
My faith sustains me, because I pray daily. I pray for guidance and wisdom and strength.
If we were to commit our troops—if we were to commit our troops—I would pray for their safety, and I would pray for the safety of innocent Iraqi lives as well.
One thing that’s really great about our country is there are thousands of people who pray for me that I will never see and be able to thank. But it is a humbling experience to think that people I will never have met have lifted me and my family up in prayer. And for that I am grateful. That’s—it’s been a comforting feeling to know that it’s true.
I pray for peace. I pray for peace.
Let us take a moment this morning to pray in silence for our President, that he may in his prayers experience himself drawn by his words into the One, that he might know himself a wave in an ocean of souls.
© Margaret H. Allen
March 16, 2003
Introduction:
The reading for today is an excerpt from a short story published in the March
issue of The Sun magazine (issue # 327). The story, by Doreen Baingana,
is called "Hunger." It is written in the form of a diary kept
by a teenaged girl attending a boarding school in
The Story:
As I walked up the hill through the dark, the chapel glowed weakly in the distance. The cassava sat like a rock in my belly, but still there was an emptiness, and the dull ache of disappointment. Mama hadn’t visited. I know she has to do everything herself, and I’m not the only one she has to think about: there are three of us children. God, help Mama, I prayed. Please be good to her. I looked up to the sky, hoping to find…what? A sense of God, perhaps, from whence my help would come. Oh, God, please help me, I pleaded. The night answered with a cold silence.
We usually hold our meetings in the front part of the chapel, before a large, bare, wooden cross hanging high on the whitewashed wall. The only pieces of furniture there are a long, empty table and two benches along each wall. That is the altar space: simple, clear, and clean. Down a couple of steps, the rest of the chapel is filled with rows of lean brown benches. For our meetings we move a few of these into a semicircle. We begin with prayers, then sharing. After three girls’ joyous testimonies, I got up.
“Praise God!”
“Praise Him!” the girls chorused back
“I prayed today for my family to come see me. They didn’t. But I am trying to understand that my plans are not His. His solutions are not my solutions, and I have to be thankful at all times. Even if I am laughed at or mocked or I go hungry or…”
I stopped, confused. What was I saying? I didn’t want to talk about the begging incident and shame myself all over again in public. I ended lamely with “Praise God” and crept back to my seat.
* * *
Intense prayer followed the testimonies. Those already anointed by the Holy Spirit
quickly fell into that blessed state, and some spoke in tongues. I knelt down, closed my eyes, and waited,
tired of pleading. The holy girls’ cries
rose to a frenzy around me. As usual, I
felt separate from everyone else. The
light above glowed red through my closed eyelids as I struggled to concentrate
on God. Subdued, not anointed, and
always hungry: for food, for the Holy Spirit, for a sense of myself as part of
this group, my sisters-in-Christ, or the circle of girls in my dorm, or a part
of a normal family. To be part of something.
For comfort, I started to recite as many biblical promises as I could remember: “Do not be afraid: I am with you…. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff shall comfort me.” But I couldn’t clear the bitter sugar scene out of my mind: the humiliation, the need.
* * *
Everyone joined in, wailing and singing. I remained silent and waited—for what I don’t know. All around me the girls swayed in sweet suffering, enjoying the pain of being outcasts on earth, but chosen by God for heaven. Only Jesus could see them through. Only Jesus.
The light seemed to darken behind my eyes. The day’s humiliation, hunger, and deep loneliness crept through my body, rising like a dark river, as if to drown me. I was overcome by a strange sadness, as though touched by the sorrow of Jesus Himself. I started to cry and hid my face in my hands, bowing low. I couldn’t control myself, didn’t want to. The tears came slowly, painfully. I gave up all resistance and let them flow free. Wave after heaving wave washed away my strongly built dam of false hopes and pretensions, my anxious pleas and desperate beliefs. Out flowed the dirt of resentment, bitterness, and blame for my suffering at the school. My family’s proud history gone horribly wrong. Mama’s criticisms, complaints, and endless scraping for money. Tata’s hopeless cycles of drinking and trying to stop and failing, then drinking even more in disgust. My family’s disgust with him, our shame, our pity. Out poured my own self-absorption and self-pity, which had bound me down, kept me from souring high into the spiritual, pure and free. All my longings welled up and flooded over. The noisy chapel and its group of greedy saints disappeared as I cried and cried, completely wetting my hands, my face, and the front of my uniform.
After how long, I don’t know, I stopped. I was now empty, flat, like a dead fish washed up after a driving storm. Then a quiet calm crept over me…. I wasn’t supposed to cry. I should have spoken in tongues, praised God, and sung, not cried uncontrollably. But that didn’t matter. I felt like a newborn baby: simply there.
* * *
Some girls usually stay behind after the fellowship, milling and talking and hugging outside the chapel. Yesterday, I would have walked away like a lonely leper, fearing the slightest brush of human contact. But now I stayed, standing at ease in the warm, dark air, under the faraway but friendly sky. I could taste peace, and it was sweet. I felt warmth for my sisters as they moved through their routine, but I had no need to do so. I felt part of the sky’s endlessness and mystery, which flickered down in the long-ago light of the stars, God’s messengers.
* * *
Go back to the Sermons Archive or the UUCA Home Page
Send Mail to the Church.