Rev. Susan Maginn
"Does It Matter If We Pray?"
November 16, 2008
Wy'east UU Congregation
Portland, OR

Children's story:

I pray every morning and I'd like to show you how I pray. If you like, you can ask other people in the congregation if they pray and ask them to show you what it looks like.

When I pray I get very quiet. I put my hands like this. I say, "O God, O Source of all, Thank you for this day. Thank you for my family and my friends. I ask for patience as I learn to be fair and generous. In the name of all that is holy I pray."

If you were to pray, what would you be thankful for? I asked for patience. What would you ask for?

"Some Mornings She Simply Cannot" by Luci Shaw

Some mornings she simply cannot bring herself to pray. Even so, a prayer will at times break through her clenched lips, announcing the slow drain at her heart. She will raise her face from its cage of fingers and gape at the fog that has lain itself down over the field behind her house like a dream of erasure. Even the green trees have lost color. No air breathes. Not a wing of sound flies back from the highway behind the hill. And then some midnight, when faith has quite emptied itself, a familiar loneliness makes itself at home under her ribs. A ghost of God? An inkling? She holds her breath, listens as a small draught weathers its way through the eaves, into her ears. The next moment she hears her child stir in the room down the hall, calling her name, as if he names her longing and in that naming, names a kind of answer.

From "Journal Intime" by Henri Frederic Amiel

December 2, 1851.--Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new--thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being--do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness to any one! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception should be enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence and night.

A spiritual life doesn't happen all by itself.

Sometimes spiritual experiences take us by surprise while we are immersed in nature. Or sometimes we are in awe, noticing this little moment that happens every day of our life, but for some reason, on this day, this little moment isn't such a little moment. It is life.

Such spiritual experiences can take us by surprise, but a spiritual life is something different because living a spiritual life is a conscious choice. You see, when we are left to our own devices we can so easily devolve into habits that are not aimed at our highest aspirations for ourselves or anything else for that matter. It takes vigilance to live a spiritual life day in and day out. Our consumer culture is all too happy to tell you that what your best self needs - what it really, really needs - is to be faster, thinner, smarter, richer.

A spiritual life takes discipline and for me it means consciously choosing a particular practice. Now here is where UU theology comes in. We aren't going to tell you which practice is the 'right' one. It is up to each of us, in this precious evolving faith of ours, to have a vision of what a deep spiritual life means and to move in that direction.

It is like walking in a dark place. You can't see where you are going, but there is a rope that is along the wall. In the darkness, you hold on tightly to the rope as you move forward. The rope is your spiritual practice. You certainly can move through a spiritual life without a practice but, to follow the metaphor, it will be a lot like feeling around in the dark.

A spiritual practice can be memorizing poetry or sacred texts. It can be a whole host of things. What distinguishes the practice from anything else on your 'to do' list is that you are focused on that larger vision, that larger spiritual reality. You are focused on cultivating who you are in the eyes of God, who you are as your best self. You are focused on giving the spiritual fruits of your practice to the greater good, the Great Mystery, to the benefit of all, to the spirit of God creating peace in places of suffering.

In preparation for today I have had a good companion in UU minister Eric Walker Wikstrom's book Simply Pray. He talks about how in Christianity there are four forms of prayer: praise and thanksgiving, confession, meditation, and intercession. For this model, we pray to praise and to give thanks, to acknowledge our own brokenness by confessing sin, to focus with reverence on something and the intercessory prayer is when we pray well-being of a particular person or situation.

Wikstrom has reinterpreted these for a Unitarian Universalist way of prayer and calls these four types of prayer: Naming, Knowing, Listening and Loving. We name who or what our prayer is directed toward: toward the beauty of the Earth and the ever-sustaining life force, toward a loving a gracious God, toward the One who churns things up. This naming can be a real stumbling point for Unitarian Universalists that don't believe in a personal God who receives and responds to prayers, a la Santa Claus.

As Wikstrom poignantly asks us, How do you pray when your God is more of a what than a who?

When I was a child and learning to pray I remember trying to make sense of what I was doing. I was praying to God. Saying Dear God, Thank you for this. I'd really like that. Amen. In the concrete imagination of a five-year-old, I thought that I was sending a message to God. If I was sending messages to God, then surely other people are too and that means that God gets a lot of messages. I imagined those messages backing up and that some prayers that were really important could get lost in all those messages being sent to God.

As I have gotten older, I have engaged in multiple spiritual practices. Ashtanga Yoga and Zen meditation have been the most consistent over my adult years. Recently, I have felt the need to connect with the spiritual practice of my childhood and of my ancestors, which is prayer, prayer to God.

I have come to understand prayer as the ability to articulate my heart's longing and to experience companionship in that longing. I pray at least three times every day at this time in my life: one spontaneous prayer when I am alone and two repeated prayers with my family. And then I often have unplanned moments of prayer throughout the day. Often at stop lights or waiting in line.

At dinnertime my family holds hands and we actually say two prayers. We say the Selkirk Grace by Robbie Burns, which my Scottish father-in-law ushered into my husband's childhood dinner table. And after that prayer, we say my preferred dinner blessing with is, "This is the day that life has given us. This is the food that life has given us and these are the people that life has given us. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Amen." I also whisper the same prayer into my child's ear before they each go to sleep at night. It is a prayer that my husband and I wrote together when my oldest child was a baby. "Now I lay me down to sleep and float into God's dreamy deep. For my life, my thanks I give. To love the world, for this I live. And when I wake in the morning light, may God be with me and guide my sight. Amen."

The first thing I do every morning is meditate and pray. Well, actually the first I do is to feed the cats so that they will leave me alone long enough so that I can meditate and pray! I then light a candle on my altar. I sit in a position that allows me to be relaxed and yet also fully attentive. Ideally I meditate for 40 minutes and then I close the meditation with a brief spontaneous prayer.

In that moment of prayer, I am listening to what is closest to my heart and speaking it aloud. But first I am listening. This is what I like about praying after silent meditation because in the silence I am listening to my breath, to the sounds of the house, of the rain, of the birds, of my busy thoughts. I am listening. This attentive listening is a prayer, too. Try it sometime. Wherever you are, stop, and simply listen to the layers of sound surrounding you.

There is a story about Elijah hiding in the mouth of a cave as God passes by:

...a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. (New International Version)

It is easy for us to notice the great winds, earthquakes and fires. They will roar by us and pass away and we can listen deeply to hear the whispers.

Sometimes this 'listening to the whispers' is delightful and sometimes it is not. Many are the days when I am meditating and I would rather be sleeping instead of just waiting in the dark and the cold for that incense to burn down, already! On such mornings, I just can't believe how long 40 minutes can take! I am not a patient person by nature.

And there are those other mornings that are spiritual highs, full of insight and profound peace. Neither experience is the 'right' one. If I wanted to have an enlightening spiritual peak experience every morning, I would have quit long ago.

And such is life. Sometimes it is effortless and inspiring and sometimes it takes all that we have to bring our best selves forward, to move through the mire to stand strong, living by our vows and our commitments, not just by the passing storms of our emotional life.

I recently had an insight that has been helpful for me - it is kind of a bridge between my meditation and prayer practice. God is to me like the involuntary nature of my breath. My breath is there, rising and falling, whether I am thinking about it or not. God is there, rising and falling, whether I am thinking about it or not. However, when I want to, I can participate in my breath, in the rising and falling. I can slow my breath or deepen my breath. I can participate in God's work in the world. My breath is not just my own. It is the breath of life. My life is not just my own. It is the life force alive in the arc of time, bending toward justice. I breathe. I am breathed. I pray and I am a prayer.

My prayers usually have something simple like how I aspire to be in the coming day. I might say something like, "O gracious and loving God, hear me. Please give me the gift of patience today. Let me notice possibilities for play and joy with my children. Let me cherish the beauty in our life together." Then I pray for anyone that I know that is going through a rough time: a friend who just lost his benefits because his hours at the restaurant were cut back, my son's teacher who is having surgery that she is nervous about. I pray for this congregation and those who among us who are struggling. I pray that we as a covenanted community may walk together in the ways of love and peace. I pray that my leadership will be worthy of such a noble task. I close bringing my hands to my forehead honoring my connection to the source of all, honoring God, honoring the holy. Then bring my hands to my mouth honoring my connection to all beings in this world. Then bring my hands to my heart, honoring myself.

I used to simply meditate and I loved it. I saw little need for prayer. It seemed a little silly to me. It seemed a lot silly to me, actually. When I met people who admitted to praying, I felt sorry for them. I did. I assumed they weren't very smart if they would have such a childish view of the world to think that God was out there listening and collecting all their prayers. I guess my own understanding of prayer really had not evolved far beyond my childhood view of it. After all, I thought, if I can't analyze everything about how prayer works, then why bother praying. It is silly and certainly not worth my devotion.

Some years back, when I was serving as a chaplain in a level-one trauma center, people who did not think that prayer was silly surrounded me. They understandably looked to me, the chaplain, to lead them in prayer before their surgeries, with a circle of family members in a waiting room and they asked me to pray in the time before, during and after the death of a loved one. These experiences changed me. I learned from these patients and their families that prayer was not silly. Prayer immersed people in holiness and strength.

I began to pray. In fact, the work became impossible to do without prayer. And when I prayed, I prayed to God. It didn't make any sense to me, but I did it anyway. Each time I would go into a patient's room; each time the pager would ring; each time I heard the helicopter landing on the roof of the hospital, I would pray to God for myself. After all, I had problems of my own - family crises, health issues or simply the problem of being really tired at 4:00 in the morning after responding to emergencies all night long. So I prayed for myself, that I could somehow have the strength to set aside my own concerns and be fully present for the person I was about to encounter. As I finished my quick prayer and whispered 'Amen' and opened my eyes, I walked forward. I was not afraid and I was not alone.

I remember someone once told me that they prayed because prayer changes people and people can then change the world. That is to say that by coming to silence and reflection, we are able to have deeper insight and understanding. We can then bring that depth into the world. This is good reasoning. It is an analytical acceptance of prayer. It makes sense. It has a logical cause and effect. And we UUs love nothing more than a logical explanation of religious life. This explanation of how prayer works is true for me, that prayer changes human beings and human beings change the world. However, I believe there is more to prayer than our logical mind can understand. I don't rule out the woo-woo factor. Yes, I believe in woo-woo. I definitely believe that when we pray we are changed and then we can bring change to the world. However, I also believe that when we pray we are tapping into something that is beyond us, something that moves and lives beyond and within all.

I don't know what I am praying to. I call it God, but I could just as easily choose some other metaphoric language. I don't know how or why or if my prayers are received in any way that a human being can understand. And you know what? I am OK with that. In fact, surrendering logic and analysis is one of the things I cherish about that moment of prayer. The biggest gift of daily prayer is that I am now accompanied by the experience of being held. Throughout all the vicissitudes of life, I experience that I am not alone.

There is no one place to direct our prayers. I happen to use the word God because given my roots in Catholicism, that feels right and true for me, for now. My faith is evolving and I am a Unitarian Universalist because it is my greatest hope that my faith always will evolve. It is good to know that in a moment of prayer I can remember my spiritual home. A home that sends me out as a living prayer, to bless the world when I am at my best. A home that welcomes me back, patching me up, accepting that I am not perfect, sometimes accepting that I am not even enough. And yet my patched-up soul is sent out from that home. Again and again. Bless my soul. And yours. So be it. Amen.

Prayer:

O Source of Peace, lead us to peace. Lead us so that we may live in ways that bring peace to all who would yearn for it. We would ask blessings for all of those who have devoted their lives to peace and may be feeling frustrated. We ask blessing for those who live in war. We ask for the blessings of the new leadership in this country that they will have the support they need to end war wherever possible. We ask mercy for all of the places in our own lives where we have turned from peace. Bless us each and all and every one.

So be it. Amen.