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Opening Words

(Offered in honor of the Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley, former minister at the UU Church of Tampa, deceased December 10, 2006.)

 "It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.

 I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.

 If you know despair or can see it in others.

 I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you; 

 [I want to know]...if you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.

 I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living -- falling toward the center of your longing.

 I want to know if you are willing to live, day-by-day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat.

 I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God."

- Self-Portrait, by David Whyte

Reading

Those who attended our December worship service on the theme of hospitality will remember that I introduced, in that service, the thinking of a Catholic priest named Henri Nouwen.  The book of his that we discussed is entitled Reaching Out. 

(By the way, I'll be leading a workshop on this book on Tuesday, January 23rd at 7pm.  It should be a fascinating discussion, and I hope you'll join us.  Copies of the book can be bought from the church office.)

 In this book, Reaching Out, Nouwen talks about the need for solitude; solitude is how we learn to be in touch with our innermost realities.  From that place of self-knowledge and strength, we can enter into the business of hospitality - of reaching out to others with open arms, without our fears or insecurities getting in the way.  That inner work and that outer work eventually run up against limitations, and it is here, that Nouwen sees a role for prayer.

Prayer is a way of expressing our heart's longings, hopes, and aspirations.  It is our turn from the inner, to the outer, finally to the cosmic - to the universe we live in, and everything in it that we cannot control.

 In the passage I've selected for our reading this morning, Henri Nouwen delves into the difference between praying together in community and how we might pray as individuals: communal prayer versus individual prayer.  In discussing this, he writes:

Prayer as the language of community is like [a] mother tongue.  Just as a child learns from his/her parents, brothers, sisters, and friends -- but still develops a unique way of expressing himself or herself -- so also our individual prayer life develops [through] the care of the praying community.  Sometimes it is hard to point to any specific organizational structure that we can call 'our community.'  Our community is often an intangible reality made up of people, living as well as dead, present as well as absent, close as well as distant, old as well as young.  But without some form of community, individual prayer cannot be born or developed.

Communal and individual prayer belong together as two folded hands.  Without community, individual prayer easily degenerates into egocentric and eccentric behavior, but without individual prayer, the prayer of [our] community quickly becomes a meaningless routine.  Individual and community prayer cannot be separated without harm.  This [is] why spiritual leaders tend to be critical of those who want to isolate themselves, and why they stress the importance of continuing ties with a larger community where individual prayer can be guided.  This also explains why the same leaders have always encouraged the individual members of their communities to spend time and energy in personal prayer [and reflection, recognizing] as they do so that community [by itself] can never fulfill the desire for [an] intimate relationship [with the Divine].

The community of faith, strengthened in love by our individual prayers, can [collectively] lift up [those prayers], as a sign of hope, common praise, and thanksgiving.  Together we can reach out beyond our many individual limitations while offering each other the space for our own most personal search.  We may be very different people, with different nationalities, colors, histories, characters, and aspirations, but [that which is Holy calls] us away from the darkness of our illusions and into the light.  This common call transforms our world [and the time we live in]. 

 
Sermon

Prayer in community versus prayer as an individual.  Henri Nouwen tells us that we need both, that only one or the other is insufficient.  Praying only by ourselves, alone in some corner, our prayers can become egocentric, they can become prayers of selfishness.  Praying only in community, it can become a hollow act, one done as ritual, because everybody else is doing it, an act divorced from our inner lives and realities. 

Both of these possibilities presume that we pray, or at least that we could pray, which is an interesting presumption, because many of us Unitarian Universalists don't consider ourselves as people who pray.  Praying is superstitious, and just not something a dedicated humanist, like myself, should be doing, right...?  Yet...I do pray, and we do it here, together, every Sunday. 

Leading a service entitled A Thousand Ways to Pray, it's worth noticing that we've already prayed together several times this morning, and not just when I have actually offered something I have called 'a prayer'...did you notice?  There are elements of our worship service that we might not refer to as 'prayer' but which nonetheless are prayerful.

The hymns we have sung this morning, "Spirit of Life" and "This is My Song," were originally written as prayers, not as lyrics.  "Spirit of Life," is a prayer of longing for that which is holy and transcendent and but at the same time within each of us.  It is an appeal to the sacredness that exists outside of us and inside of us.  "This is My Song," is a prayer for universal peace and understanding.  It expresses a heartfelt dream for the future.  Indeed, our music this morning has been one of the ways that we have been praying together.

If you did not know prior to today that "Spirit of Life" and "This is My Song" were prayers, no need to worry or feel bad -- I didn't know either.  This is something I learned from friends who are Unitarian Universalist musicians.  But such only illustrates a point that is so important about prayer in the society we live in.  We are often surrounded by prayer, practically around every corner and every turn.  Yet at the same time we're almost equally oblivious to it.  Oblivious in the sense that we don't notice that we've just engaged in prayer, OR at the other end of the spectrum we jump to immediate conclusions about what praying means.

When it comes to jumping to conclusions about prayer, I'm no different than any of you, I jump to conclusions as well. 

A few years ago I was interning as a religious studies teacher at a prep school in New England, called Milton Academy.  My supervisor and colleague in ministry, a Methodist minister, invited me to a Saturday afternoon football game with him.  It was an idyllic fall afternoon in New England.  The leaves were yellow and orange and brown.  A crisp breeze was in the air -- not too cold, but just cool enough -- and to make things picture perfect, there was even hot cider served in hollowed out pumpkins.  It was such a perfect fall day, that it was almost unreal.

The school I was working for, Milton Academy, was playing one of its main rivals, and as the game was about to begin, my colleague and I were called onto the field to lead our team in prayer.  There, on that crisp fall day, we huddled together - two dozen or so burly teenagers, the coaches, myself, and my supervisor.  We bowed our heads, and my Methodist colleague led the team in prayer. 

As he did so, a rush of sarcastic comments, unbidden, went running through my head.  Thoughts like: "Gee, does God really care whether one high school beats another one in football?" and "If The Lord is really willing to micro-manage things on that level, I'd like to offer some of my own prayers, too  -- like, God, please, please, please help me win the lottery."  But, also, on a more serious note, I found myself wondering, "What if they lose??  Does that mean these teenagers have somehow fallen into disfavor with The Lord?  With their God?"

Questions and thoughts like these would likely have occurred to any Unitarian Universalist who might have magically been put in my shoes that day.  I think we, as a religious denomination, know exactly what type of prayer we're not interested in, and for me, the situation on Milton Academy's football field exemplified it: in that context we were praying to an anthropomorphic deity, one that looks and acts like a person, and we were asking this deity to intervene in human affairs for the sake of a local high school football game.  At the time, the whole thing struck me as not only silly, but also potentially unhealthy.  It was a dangerous approach to prayer.  The message sent when such prayers are not answered is that those who prayed might somehow be unworthy or unfit for God's favor.

There are, indeed, conventional notions of prayer, like that which I encountered and reacted so strongly to that day at Milton Academy.  But there are also many non-conventional ways of thinking about it, one example of which I lifted up earlier: we can interpret the language of our hymns as prayers.  Taken collectively, these experiences point to the fact that there are many, many ways to pray.  Some may be healthy ways of thinking about and engaging in prayer, and others may not be.  But the most important thing I think we can notice is that there is no one single way to pray; no individual and no denomination has a monopoly in defining what prayer is.

In order to be a prayerful people, we Unitarian Universalists need to take some time to think about what the term 'prayer' might mean for us.  And that, in turn, leads us to several closely linked questions:  Who are we praying to?  Why are we praying?  And what are we praying for?"  The "Who, Why, and What's" of prayer, if you will.  How we answer these questions determines the nature of what prayer means to us, and also determines if, in fact, we are willing to engage in prayer.

I, myself, have been working on these questions for a long time.  As a young adult in my 20s, I had a lot of difficulty with the concept of prayer because I felt 'burned' by my understandings of it.  I got burned because my answers to the "Who, Why and What" questions didn't mesh with my experience of the world. 

I grew up in an orthodox Hindu household, and as such, I was surrounded by prayer, we did it all the time.  My parents prayed on a daily basis, and I heard prayers of gratitude, prayers expressing hopes, and prayers expressing fears.  While prayer was all around me, we didn't really spend time talking about what the concept means, so, as a kid, I arrived at my own conclusions.  I came to believe that some deity, though being Hindu I didn't know which one because there are so many, must hear these prayers.  And if prayers are heard, God must acknowledge and respond in some way.  No response would mean that God didn't care about us, and I just didn't believe that was possible.  God did care about us, therefore prayers were heard.  And, of course, I believed that the more sincere, and the more intense the prayer, the more likely God was to hear and respond in some fashion.

That's why, when in high school I began to perceive that I was gay, I didn't immediately panic.  Instead, I prayed.  Everyday.  In fact, I strove to become one of the most observant Hindus on the planet, thereby hoping to earn God's favor.  As a teen of 16 or 17 years of age, I routinely kept fasts, had a regular practice of prayer, and engaged in charitable acts, all in the hope that God would hear my prayer of simply wanting to be like everyone else, of not wanting to be different, of not wanting to be gay.  If there was a God who could help football teams win games, then there was no reason why that same God couldn't help someone like me, who was genuinely in pain and looking for help.

Those prayers were never answered, or at least not answered in any way that I had been hoping for.  Despite praying for heterosexuality, I remained gay.  And as I faced that reality I decided, a bit angrily, that God could not exist.  If there was a God, there was no way such devout and heartfelt prayers as mine could be ignored.  So, coming out of the closet for me, an act of survival and sanity, was twinned with a crisis of faith.  God stopped existing for me, and prayer was a sham.

Here's where one can begin noticing a pattern: my disillusionment with prayer was rooted in a theology, similar to our football team prayer, in which some divine power was supposed to intervene here on earth because a human being prayed.      

I have come to arrive at a radically different way of understanding prayer: what if prayer has nothing to do with a divine being that dispenses favors?  If that were possible, what would be the purpose of praying?  In response, I can offer you one Unitarian Universalist perspective, my own.

Prayer, to me, seems to be a fundamental recognition that there are forces in this world that are utterly beyond our control.  Two examples.  I have always hated flying, and to this day I still pray every time I'm in an airplane: right before it takes off, and right before it lands (which, I understand, are the two most dangerous points in an airplane's flight).  In a similar vein, when I was in graduate school I routinely prayed before I took exams.  In both cases there is a recognition that on some level that I am not totally in control of what is happening in my life.  Airplanes have pilots, mechanics, technicians - and I always hope that they've all had a good day when I get on those planes.  Airplanes fly in weather that I don't control, and at altitudes I'll never believe human beings were meant to be taking naps.  Likewise with exams, my professors chose the exam questions, not me, so some measure of my academic success was automatically in the hands of others.

As a minister, my most intense experiences of prayer have occurred working with families in crisis.  Some years ago I served as a Chaplain at a pediatric hospital, and the most sincere, heartfelt prayers I witnessed in that setting were offered by the family members of those facing life and death.  Those prayers were also a recognition of our finitude.  Doctors can only do so much; our knowledge and technology has limits and is imperfect.  In such circumstances, prayer may serve the purpose of putting us in touch with our limitations and with our deepest hopes and fears.

This is not very different, by the way, from one of the basic purposes of Buddhist meditation -- mindfulness.  In the Buddhist tradition, mindfulness is considered a tremendous virtue, and one of the reasons for practicing meditation is because the quiet and stillness it creates allows you to understand what's really on your mind; we can see our hopes and fears most clearly when we have the solitude to pay attention to them.  That solitude also gives us the space to recognize our limitations, our ability or inability to affect those hopes and fears.  Prayer can function the same way, as a practice of mindfulness.

If prayer can be a practice of silent mindfulness, then why not simply turn to Buddhist meditation?  What do we gain by vocalizing prayers, and who are we vocalizing them to?  In verbalizing our deepest hopes and fears we give them a level of recognition that does not occur in silence.  We frequently say "you have to name your fear, in order to confront it," and I believe that's true.  Vocalization takes our mindfulness to the next level - we are not merely engaging in silent (or passive) mindfulness, but an active (naming) mindfulness.  In prayer we name our deepest hopes and fears.  Sometimes we are the only ones who hear that naming process.  At other times, prayer occurs within community.  When it does, the whole community becomes a witness, a source of support, for the individual or the group's hopes, dreams, and fears.  Vocalizing our prayers is a way of being in deeper connection with ourselves and with those around us. 

This leaves the question of who we're praying to.  As a Unitarian Universalist, I don't believe that God is a divine being that looks and acts like us.  But I do think we can understand the term "God" metaphorically.  In the broadest sense, we can think of God as that "Spirit of Life," that universal mystery and/or energy that permeates everything.  At the same time, I think we humans find it hard to conceptualize something abstract of that enormity, something that huge and that ambiguous.

This may be why, throughout the ages, different cultures, including my own Hindu culture, have developed pantheons of Gods.  One deity representing love, another destruction, another good fortune, another something else.  These deities become concrete ways to represent and think about the aspects of love, destruction, or good fortune (for example) that are outside of our control.  So, in concrete terms, individuals might pray to a specific God because the mythology surrounding that God symbolizes our hope or aspiration and simultaneously acknowledges that we are not in control. 

As I've personally moved towards understanding human-like representations of God as being metaphorical, I have found myself increasingly comfortable in using those metaphors as a way of focusing my prayers, of focusing what's on my mind.  When I was in graduate school and worried about exams, I vocalized and acknowledged those fears by offering my prayers to the Hindu goddess Saraswati, the Hindu Goddess of Education and the Arts.  I don't believe that there's a divine woman on a cloud somewhere named Saraswati listening to my plea, but I do believe I'm acknowledging to the universe in some fundamental and meaningful way, my own recognition that I'm not really in control, that I'm afraid, and that I'm counting on a lot of external things to help get me where I want to go.  Saraswati, for me, can symbolize and focus all of that in a moment of heartfelt prayer. 

I have spent about a decade moving away from the image of prayer as a form of communication with a divine being that dispenses favors, to understanding prayer as our own heartfelt way of being mindful of what's in us and between us.  As I've done so, I've come to believe that it's important for us, as religious liberals, to claim, or reclaim, prayer as an essential part of our spiritual lives.

We should feel comfortable claiming it, because no one has a monopoly on the word.  While there are conventional understandings of prayer, those understandings don't work for me, and they probably don't work for you.  I think we Unitarian Universalists can offer the world an alternative, one in which prayer is about our shared humanity, rather than supernatural intervention.

Next, I think we need to understand prayer for the sake of our children and grandchildren.  I have worked as a Sunday School Director, and through that work I know that kids are highly observant.  If we adults notice that prayer is all around us, so do they.  Yet, if we don't talk to our children and grandchildren about prayer, helping them understand it a bit more holistically, a bit more realistically, then they, too, run the risk of internalizing conventional understandings of it and potentially feeling burned later in life by those assumptions.  Studies on faith development show that most kids have an understanding of both prayer and God, but that very few families intentionally sit down and talk about these concepts with their children.  We Unitarian Universalists can and should have those types of conversations.

Prayer also has something to offer us as a spiritual discipline.  As I have broken down and rebuilt my own understanding of prayer, I have been able to reclaim it as a spiritual practice, one that has meaning for me personally as well as in the context of community.  Prayer puts me in touch with my hopes, dreams and fears; it helps remind me that so much that happens on this planet is completely outside of my control; it reminds me of our interdependence as a community of people that can support and nurture one another; it reminds me that we are spiritual seekers with different, individual lives, but with shared values and a shared quest.

Reinterpreting and reclaiming prayer might serve one additional purpose in our lives: it might make us a little less judgmental.  Harkening back to that fall afternoon on the football field, the "judgmentalness" with which I found myself mocking the prayer my colleague offered has faded and been replaced with a different understanding.  That community, in that context, was also vocalizing its hopes, dreams, and fears.  They faced a game with so many unknown variables, and they were acknowledging that what would happen next was not entirely in their control.  Even the use of Christian language and metaphor can be understood differently - it was that community's way of providing their prayer context and focus.  Too often we religious liberals look down on others for what we consider a 'superstitious' approach to prayer, and at times, and in part, some prayers may indeed be superstitious, but on another level, perhaps we can begin recognizing the common elements of our humanity that find expression through different styles of prayer.

As Henri Nouwen noted as we began this journey, prayer is both an individual action and something we do together in community.  Navigating how we individually understand prayer is essential, because we cannot participate in communal prayer, in any meaningful way, until we are first clear about what the concept means for ourselves.  In a culture where we are surrounded by prayer and images of prayer, we Unitarian Universalists have a message to bring, an understanding that prayer need not be hurtful, it need not be unrealistic, and it need not be superstitious.  And as we understand that truth, and how it might operate in our own lives and in the life of our community, let us be mindful of those lyrics, that prayer of recognition, that "other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and [as] high as mine."  There are a thousand ways to pray, let us dedicate ourselves to understanding those different ways.