The Meanings of Prayer
Rev. Tim Temerson
UU Church of Akron
June 10, 2012
I want to first thank Bob for his very thoughtful reflection about the meaning of prayer and his own experience of, to quote the Apostle Paul, “praying without ceasing.” I first heard Bob articulate his understanding of prayer during the class on Buddhism I taught a few months back. I was so impressed and intrigued by the way he connected prayer with awareness and mindfulness, which are at the heart of Buddhist spiritual practice. And I remember making a mental note to myself at the time which said something like, “worship service, prayer as mindfulness, Bob Fabre.” And here we are today.
Listening to Bob’s reflection and our readings from David Steindl-Rast and Mary Oliver, I am reminded of just how challenging and confusing prayer has been in my own spiritual journey. My earliest memory of prayer comes from a framed picture that hung on the wall of my room when I was a young child which contained the famous “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” prayer. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I don’t know about you but all this talk of death and souls being taken scared the you know what out of me and left me with a pretty negative and fearful understanding of prayer. Thankfully, my parents only had me recite this prayer when the grandparents who had given me the picture happened to be putting me to bed!
By the way the words to that prayer have been modified and improved over the years. Art Garfunkel turned them into a lovely set of lyrics which replace the last two lines with “Guide me safely through the night and wake me with the morning light.” A big improvement over “If I should die before I wake….” And in what has to be one of the most creative interpretations I have seen, the words have been incorporated into “A Prayer for Straight Single Women” which begins, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray for a man who is not a creep.”
Having started my spiritual life with a “prayer is about scary things I’d prefer not to think about” perspective, my relationship with prayer changed but did not improve very much as I grew into adulthood. For many years, prayer was something I associated with a particular place, namely church. Praying was something you did in church, something led by a priest or minister that one was supposed to follow along in silence or sometimes repeat.
And I must say that although I learned a few of those prayers and would repeat them on Sunday mornings, my heart was rarely if ever in it. Whenever it was time to pray, I never really understood exactly what we were doing. Were we requesting something, asking a question, providing an answer, expressing a feeling or emotion like sorrow or gratitude, and so on?
Even more confusing than what exactly we were saying and doing was the question of to whom we were saying it? Although the prayers I heard and sometimes repeated in church were addressed to God, what exactly did that mean? Was this God an actual being up in the sky, listening to our prayers like a kind of divine puppet master and then deciding when and if to respond? Every time I joined a prayer in church I couldn’t get this image out of my mind of an old guy, usually with a chewed off cigar in his mouth, sitting over an endlessly long list saying “Yeah, no, yeah, no.” I’m still not sure why my image of God resembles that of a bookie or a political boss in a smoke filled room from an old Hollywood movie. That’s probably another sermon altogether!
In any case, I think it’s safe to say that my own journey with prayer has been filled with more questions than answers, more uncertainty and skepticism than confidence or dare I say faith. As I drifted away from church and organized religion as a young adult, my prayer life amounted to, well, practically nothing. I rarely if ever prayed as I had been taught to in church. Although I didn’t know exactly what if anything I believed about prayer or God, it felt hypocritical and pointless to speak or ask something of a God I had so many questions and doubts about.
Not that I didn’t have those meaningful, soul-stirring moments Steindl-Rast talked about in our earlier reading – moments when a deep-seated thirst in my heart was quenched by a sense of awe and wonder, by a connection to or communion with something greater than myself. I experienced such moments while taking a walk in nature or gazing up at the night sky, while spending time with family or friends, and even when doing the most ordinary, everyday things like reading a good book or working in the yard. Sometimes those moments involved words and language; other times I experienced only silence. But rarely if ever did they include the kind of language I associated with prayer. God was almost never addressed or named and no special requests were made. Mostly what I felt was gratitude and a sense of being so very blessed to be alive. But if you asked me what those moments and experiences were like, I most assuredly would have not have used prayer or prayerful to describe them.
And I think the reason I and I would venture to say many Unitarian Universalists struggle with prayer is that we tend to associate prayer with belief rather than experience, with theology rather than practice. Prayer, in this view, is about who or what one is praying to, about the theological beliefs and creeds that justify it, and about being careful to use words and language that are consistent with one’s own beliefs about God or ultimate reality. In many ways, I think theological consistency rather than spiritual connection has been the predominant Unitarian Universalist attitude about prayer.
Erik Wikstrom, who serves as the minister at our congregation in Charlottesville, Virginia, has written a wonderful book about prayer for Unitarian Universalists called Simply Pray which I highly recommend. In his book Wikstrom argues that the problem many UUs have with prayer flows from our tendency to think before we experience. We find it hard if not impossible to put our preconceived ideas and notions about prayer and spirituality aside so that we can simply listen and be present.
In many ways, Wikstrom’s argument is echoed by Mary Oliver in her poem, “Praying.” Rather than worrying about getting the words right or perfect, prayer is about being in the moment and then, as she says so beautifully, finding a doorway into silence “so another voice can be heard.” What I think both Wikstrom and Oliver are telling us is that when it comes to prayer, we need to chill out, listen deeply, let go of our preconceptions and our penchant for focusing on the words or religious language, and to just experience the world and our lives as an invitation to connect to the beauty and blessing all around us. That’s prayer – listening, connecting, and experiencing the blessedness and I would even say the holiness that live within, among, and all around us.
My own challenges with prayer continued until a few summers when I served as a chaplain at a hospital back in Boston. In many ways, serving as a chaplain is a crash course in prayer - not only learning how to pray but in praying alongside people from very diverse faith backgrounds and who are facing life’s most difficult challenges.
While I can point to many experiences that summer which transformed my understanding of prayer, my encounter with one patient was truly the turning point. Her name was Esther and she was a recent immigrant from Haiti who did not speak or understand a word of English. Esther was a new patient on one of the floors to which I had been assigned and one morning, I received a request that she wanted me to come and pray for her.
Because I had been so uncomfortable with prayer when I began working at the hospital, I developed a kind of prayer strategy which I used whenever I was asked to pray. My strategy involved talking to my patients fairly extensively so that I would know the words and sentiments they needed in the prayer. I wanted to know what they were thinking and feeling and what they believed about God and religion so I could get the words of my prayer “just right.”
As I made my way that morning to Esther’s room, I was a bit apprehensive about how well my prayer strategy would work since we did not speak the same language. Luckily, a nurses’ aide working on Esther’s floor spoke Haitian -Creole so I would at least have the benefit of a translator.
When I got to Esther’s room, she and the aide were waiting for me. After introducing myself, I began, as I always did when following my prayer strategy, by asking Esther a few questions – How was she feeling today, did she have family in the area, did she have a particular faith tradition, and so on.
Although the nurse translated my questions and Esther tried to answer them, I could tell from their facial expressions that something was very wrong. They looked at one another as if they didn’t understand what I was doing. At one point the aide very gently reminded me that Esther had requested that I pray for her, and that prayer was all she needed from me.
Now I must admit that the nurses’ gentle advice annoyed me. After all, she was interrupting my prayer strategy, and how was I going to discover the right words if I didn’t get a chance to ask my questions. So I plunged ahead, asking Esther to tell me more about her life, her family, and her faith. And the longer I talked, the more confused and exasperated both the aide and Esther became.
Finally the nurse interrupted me rather abruptly and said for the second time, “Look all Esther wants is for you to pray for her. You don’t need to know anything about her and you don’t need me to translate. Just pray and she will follow you.”
Follow me? I couldn’t imagine what she meant by that. Esther and I were separated by so many differences and so many barriers – differences of age, race, class, language, religion, nationality, you name it – Esther and I were truly, truly strangers.
So out of desperation and frustration and since I knew Ether was a Baptist, I closed my eyes and began to say the only Christian prayer I could remember by heart – the Lord’s Prayer. I remember thinking to myself - this is totally pointless because Esther won’t understand what I’m saying and the prayer will be absolutely meaningless to her.
But as I began to pray, something unexpected and truly remarkable happened. You see, after I finished saying the first line of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our father who art in heaven” Esther repeated in a soft and barely audible voice, “Our Father Who Art in Heaven.” After I said the next line, “Hallowed be thy name” she repeated it and then the line after that until we got to the end of the prayer.
Although I was the one who had come that morning to offer prayer and comfort, something happened to me in that hospital room, something that has forever changed the way I understand not only prayer but also what it truly means to be a spiritual being and a Unitarian Universalist. You see, as Esther repeated the words of the Lord’s Prayer, I began to feel deeply, deeply connected – connected to her and connected to something holy and beautiful present in that room. Esther taught me that prayer is ultimately not about theology or belief, it’s not about doctrine or creed, and it’s certainly not about language or getting the words just right. Prayer, as I learned that morning from a remarkable and deeply spiritual human being, is about listening with an open heart, about being deeply connected, and about being in the presence of the Holy.
And that, friends, is the lesson and the experience I want to leave you with this morning. As you make your journeys of the spirit and enjoy what I hope will be a restful summer, take time to listen, to pray, and to just be. Say a few words, any words; they don’t have to be perfect or profound. Just let them come from your heart. Don’t worry about their content or meaning, and let go of all the doubts and uncertainty about what you believe or don’t believe. Prayer is ultimately about listening, about waking up, and about living into the fullness and the blessing of life and love. So live into that fullness, listen with an open heart, and simply, simply, pray.
REFLECTION BY BOB FABRE
In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul instructs his recipients to be “constant in prayer”. What exactly did he mean? There might be any number of answers to that question. That’s because, prayer conjures up any number of certain set images. And, depending on the images, you might find yourself comfortable with the idea of prayer, or uncomfortable.
I hazard the guess that many Unitarian Universalists fall into the latter category (i.e, not too comfortable with the idea of prayer). Maybe that’s because they see prayer as a number of things, none of which excite them; i.e., A petitionary address to God (whom they don’t believe in); or: A rote group activity; you know, prayer is something we all do at the same time (Sunday morning), in the same place (the sanctuary), all of us saying the same standard words (or maybe just listening to the words the minister says).
As we have just heard, Brother Steindl-Rast defines “prayer” in a different way, as more of an attitude than a set behavior. In other words, “prayer” is something that often happens without any prayers. There is no reason, in his opinion, why we should not be able to communicate with God in and through everything we do or suffer and so be “constant in payer”.
For myself, as a Christian, as a Unitarian Universalist, I try to live a life of constant prayer. In other words, every day, every moment, I try to remember where I am, what I am doing, and why I am doing it. And I try to be grateful.
Now, perhaps, you’re saying “But I’m not a Christian. In fact, I don’t even believe in God.” To be more specific, the concept of “God” disturbs you. If this is so, remember that Buddhists, who don’t believe in a personal God, talk about being “awake”, being “mindful”, which is the same thought expressed in different language. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, says: “When every step becomes a prayer; when every breath becomes a prayer; when each moment of working or driving or eating becomes a prayer, you don’t need to set aside time for praying, because all your daily life is devoted to the practice of praying.”
As I go through my day, praying constantly, I do so knowing I am in communion with myself (with my mind, with my heart), with my family and friends, with my church (the community of believers), with my county, with the world, and (for me, ultimately) with God, the divine, the source of all being. I invite you to join me on this journey.