A Sermon by John Parker Manwell
The Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
March 1, 2009
CALL TO WORSHIP
And so we come, each week
Drawn by our joy in being together
To plumb the depths of our longings
That we might grow in compassion and understanding
To join head and heart and hands
In the work of justice and mercy
And to voice our gratefulness for all that is our life
It is good to be together
Let us join now in worship and in song
That we might be one with all that is
READING
For our reading this morning we draw from a little classic called Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer, published in 1984. It was written by Brother David Steindl-Rast, an Austrian who is now a member of a Benedictine monastery in Elmira, NY. He has become especially known, like Thomas Merton, for his efforts to bring together Christian and Zen Buddhist spirituality.
In a chapter called “Heart and Mind,” he describes the heart as “the taproot of the whole person.” The heart, he says, is “our meeting place with God in prayer.” But then he turns to the many of us who are not comfortable with the concepts of God we have learned, and of prayer. Psalm 42 may declare that “As a deer yearns for running streams, so does my soul thirst for God, the living God.” But, he says:[1]
Lucky the psalmist who could give a name to what our soul is yearning for. But what name should we use now? Today many whose thirst is no less burning will not use the name “God” because of those of us who do use it. We have abused it and confused them. Can we find another name for that which gives rest to our heart?
The term “meaning” suggests itself. When we find meaning in life, then we find rest. . . . Meaning is simply that within which we find rest. But so is the heart. It seems to be a contradiction. . . . When our heart rests in the Source of all meaning, it can encompass all meaning. Meaning, in this sense, is not something that can be put into words. . . . Meaning is not something that can be grasped, held, stored away. Meaning is not something. . . . Maybe we should stop the sentence there. Meaning is no thing. It is more like the light in which we see things. . . . When we find meaning, we know it because our heart finds rest. It is always through our heart that we find meaning. Just as our eyes respond to light and our ears to sound, so our heart responds to meaning. The organ for meaning is the heart. . . .
In prayer, the heart drinks from the fountain of meaning.
SERMON
You may wonder this morning why I am preaching about prayer, such a sensitive topic for this congregation. That, of course, is precisely the reason. It is why I also preached last Fall about God. It seems to me that when a topic is painful, it can only be helpful to bring it out into the open, and look at it more closely, rather than walk around on eggshells. When we speak of “prayer,” are we all on the same page? Have we explored its fullest meaning, or are we trapped in popular stereotypes?
I hope that this sermon will help to desensitize the issue of prayer so that we can more freely talk about it, and thereby understand each other more deeply. So here we go.
Perhaps a few of you share my habit of reading the comic pages. The strip called “One Big Happy,” some years ago, pictured little Ruthie saying her bedtime prayers. Eyes closed and kneeling, she puts her palms together. Then she reaches over her head, and turns this way and that. Her mother looks in and says,
“Ruthie, what are you doing?” Ruthie replies: “Trying to get better reception.”
I think that fits the images of prayer, and God, with which many of us have grown up: God is up there, far away, and prayer is about asking Him (it was always “him”) to reach down and intervene in our lives. That would take pretty good reception.
This morning I want to offer us an understanding that is at the same time simpler and yet more mature. At the same time I want to reframe our idea of prayer to focus less on God and more on ourselves, and each other. I’m not going to suggest that anyone should pray. But I hope we can become comfortable enough with prayer, in its broadest sense, to talk about it.
To start with, I’d like to distinguish between “prayer” in general, and “a prayer” in particular. What might prayer mean for us, today, as children of the Enlightenment now facing the 21st century? How might it help us to find meaning in our often uprooted urban lives, and to find our spiritual home in the universe?
Prayer, for me, is about relationship. It’s about our relationship with the universe, and with the “Spirit of Life” whose presence we invite as we close our service each Sunday. Ultimately it’s about achieving a sense of oneness with all that is. It can include asking – we’ll come to that later – but it begins with reaching out for connection. That means it’s an attitude, an attitude of letting go of our need to be in sole control. Letting go of our pride in our ability, through the intellect alone, to run our lives, and trusting in life to guide us, strengthen us, and sometimes to comfort us and even save us. Prayer is as much about trusting and listening as it is about asking. Even when we ask, it’s as often about helping us to let go and trust in life, as about doing special favors just for us. This is how I understand prayer – and in this sense, it’s a sometimes more verbal form of meditation.
“A” prayer, on the other hand, is a particular form of prayer, in words, or even in silence, which we use in seeking that relationship, and inviting that guidance and strength and comfort. It can also be a vehicle for lifting up our hopes and our fears, and our caring for others. It can be addressed to God, or the Spirit of Life, or, if you will, to whom it may concern.
I make this distinction between prayer and “a prayer” to help us to see prayer in a broader light. I invite us to move beyond the idea of prayer as an occasional recharging of our batteries, in a special, set-aside time, to see prayer instead as a way of life – a goal which few ever fully achieve, but which, with even modest success, can enrich our lives.
In considering this concept, I can’t think of a better starting place than Brother David Steindl-Rast’s idea of beginning, not with verbal prayers, but with the cultivation of gratefulness – gratefulness for so many things, so much, that we did not create, as we open ourselves to the surprise of discovering beauty all around us. This is the beginning of an attitude of prayer. Prayer, for Brother David, is simply “grateful living.”[2]
We go through so much of our lives with tunnel vision, preoccupied with our agendas, or just oblivious. We so easily assume that we already know what’s there – we’ve passed this way a thousand times. I’m sure that you, like me, have had the experience of driving with our eyes on the road ahead, or walking with our minds somewhere else, then being caught up short. “Look!” we cry out: “a rainbow!” Or a cardinal or great flock of migrating geese, or a tree ablaze with autumn foliage. Early on many mornings as I walk my dog, it is a sudden delight as my eye first catches the glow of the sunrise.
Harder, for some of us, may be opening ourselves to the inner beauty of people. The Trappist Thomas Merton once spoke of being on an errand for his monastery, one day, and standing on a city street corner gazing at a crowd of people. Suddenly, the seemed to him aglow with light, as if they basked in a collective halo. And then it was gone. Now and then, this feeling has come to me, as I’ve sat beside a hospital bed, or looked out over this congregation. At moments like this, I think of our hymn, which sings of being –
Surprised by joy no song can tell/no thought can compass, here we stand to
celebrate eternal love/to reach for one another’s hand.
Perhaps growing out of his experience of sharing his spiritual journey with Buddhist monks, perhaps thinking of people like you and me, Brother David adds that –
Even people whose world view does not include a divine Giver to whom thanks can be directed often experience deep gratitude in these moments. They experience it no less strongly than others, even though their gratefulness gets mailed without an address, so to say. [p. 87]
We have been speaking of special moments of surprise, yet it is not a contradiction to think of experiencing all of our lives as a constant, joyful surprise. Students of spirituality associate this way of life with Brother Lawrence, a simple 17th century monk whose duties were in the kitchen of his monastery. In a little classic known today as “The Practice of the Presence of God,” Brother Lawrence said, “I flip my little omelette in the frying pan for the love of God, after which I get happier than a king.”[3]
Thomas Kelly, a 20th century Quaker philosopher who taught at Earlham and Haverford colleges, called this way of living “Life from the Center” – the center of our being, where we experience the Inner Light. We spoke of Kelly just last Sunday. “One can,” he wrote, “live in a well-nigh continuous state of unworded prayer, directed toward God, directed toward people and enterprises we have on our heart.” As we grow in this ability, “we cannot keep the love of
God to ourselves. It spills over. . . . It makes us see the world’s needs anew. . . . [We] . . . relove our neighbors as ourselves. . . . Life from the Center is a heaven-directed life.”[4] You or I might say, a “heart-directed life.”
Of special interest to us in our intensely busy lives, living from our hearts does not take more time, but actually simplifies our lives. We learn to say Yes or No to the calls made upon our time and energy, not on the basis of “heady decisions,” but “on the basis of inner guidance and whispered promptings . . . from the Center of our life.” In this way, Kelly concluded, “Life from the Center . . . takes no time, but it occupies all our time.”
Perhaps no one ever succeeds completely in achieving this way of life. It is rather a spiritual image which ever beckons to us, as it gradually opens us to toward an ever growing awareness of the beauty which surrounds us. Elizabeth Barrett Browning described in these familiar words:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
To make prayer our way of life means seeing both the blackberries, and the “bush afire with God,” with beauty. Seeing the world with fresh eyes, we would have moved from prayer as an act, to prayer as becoming more aware, and more alive.
It is this image of prayer as “becoming,” as changing our lives, that leads me now to the question of petitionary prayer, which has turned off so many of us from even thinking of prayer. If prayer begins in gratefulness for the beauty and divine possibility in everything and everyone, what can it have to do with our petitions? How, anyway, can we expect divine intervention in a rational universe? And how would prayer as asking fit into a life lived as prayer?
Sorely tempted as I was during the play-offs to pray for the Ravens to beat the Steelers, and reach the Super Bowl, I resisted. Still, I wonder if there were not some prayers offered here among us for the Redskins, who sometimes seem to need all the prayers they can get. I do confess that I sometimes pray as I navigate the relentlessly racing traffic of an interstate highway. And I still have a vivid memory of praying years ago as found myself white-knuckled in an airplane tossed wildly in a violent thunderstorm. Please, God, see us safely to the ground.
I have also prayed as I lay in a hospital emergency room, with a heart attack. And if I, or my son or grandson, were a soldier in Afghanistan, I’m sure that I would pray that I or he might survive – and not be called upon to kill someone else. How can I ask these things, as a rational Unitarian Universalist? I will tell you, with the caveat that when my head cannot always explain things, I’m likely to let my heart run ahead while my head takes the time it needs to catch up.
Here, in four statements, is how I think about it:
First, my image of God is not that of a sentient Being who has a plan for my life and yours, but rather an image of the creative forces of life. I talked with you about this last Fall, when I spoke of “painting the face of God.” I pray to the Spirit of Life itself, in which we all are one.
Second, though I see the universe as neutral, I see the forces of life as harboring the possibility of creative love. So I pray that I might become more loving, and find the courage to do so.
Third, I do not pray that God might be on my side, do my will, but rather that I might be on God’s side, and do God’s will. Thus, my prayer must be about listening as much as asking. I pray in the hope that I might find comfort and trust, direction and strength, and be changed.
And fourth, I see my prayers as part of an ongoing relationship, a conversation with Life, that begins in gratefulness, and continues as I confess my shortcomings and lift up my hopes and my caring.
In the intimacy of this relationship, I try to feel the great love of the universe – and to listen for its call upon my life. That’s the hardest part, listening. For as long as I’m doing the talking, I don’t have to worry about changing anything, giving up my comfort. But when I’m able to listen, I’m often amazed at how the guidance I have sought has just come to me, in the silence.
All of this, I think, distinguishes the attitude of prayer from the attitude of control: It engages not just the mind but the heart. It lays bare the soul.
So far I have spoken of private prayer. Public prayer, I think, serves much the same purposes, in calling us into deeper awareness of the relationships of our lives, and reminding us of those we care about. But it has the special power which comes from sharing our caring in each other’s presence. And though the words may be spoken for us, our religious tradition customarily leaves it to us to understand how our prayer is addressed.
So far, here at Paint Branch, I have not yet felt comfortable in praying publically. As an interim minister, I probably won’t. I would need the ongoing chance which a settled minister has to engage in conversation with you about prayer, such as I have begun this morning. Because of our “town hall” meeting today, we cannot continue this conversation after church. And so I hope you will write or call me, or find a time when we can talk, to share with me your thinking. I suspect it would help both of us, and I know I would enjoy it. But more important, I encourage you to share your questions and your thinking with your new settled minister, as together you build an ever-deeper trust and understanding.
As we close, my prayer for all of us is that, if we feel the longing to pray, we will be able to get past our intellectual suspicion that we don’t know about this God business, don’t know how prayer works, past the embarrassment that a Unitarian Universalist may feel at the very thought of prayer. I hope that we will find inspiration from little Ruthie, and find a way to pray that leads us into a place so close to our hearts that we will not have any trouble finding good reception for that still, small voice which we experience deep within us, however we may name it. After all, in the words of A. Powell Davies, designated in our charter as the first minister of this church, prayer is simply “the language of the heart.” And we all have hearts.
[1] Brother David Steindl-Rast, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), pp. 32-35.
[2] Ibid., p. 59.
[3] Quoted by Philip and Carol Zaleski in Prayer: A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 157.
[4] Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), p. 122.