To Pray Is Human

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Full Transcript, Feb 6, 20222

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Like many other kids from Catholic families, I was instructed in the habit of prayer from a very young age. Every night before going to bed, my brother and I knelt down and said the same prayer: “God bless mommy and daddy and…” then it went on to list approximately 30 other members of the family, ending with “...and the whole world, amen.” Over time, new categories were added: special God-bless, and extra-special-God-bless, for family members who were ailing or had recently died, and eventually a tag line was added in asking God to prevent my brother and me from getting lead poisoning from the tap water.

As I got older, I went through the various Catholic sacraments, and learned the staple prayers - the Our Father, the Hail Mary, etc. While all of this was, by some definition, praying… it didn’t create the same connection that I consider characteristic of prayer today. The first memories I have of praying voluntarily, meaningfully, were of singing a children’s setting of the 23rd Psalm every time I had to go in the basement. I felt the powerful, irrational fear that children have upon descending into a shadowy space, and the only way I could keep myself feeling calm and protected was by singing to God.

It wasn’t very many years before life started instilling doubts about Catholicism in me, and I took a path away from Christianity in general. My relationship to the Divine has changed so radically since childhood, and yet there’s something that still returns sometimes. In the very worst moments, when I’m filled with fear and I feel like I have nothing left, I still find myself on the floor, talking to the God of my upbringing.

It makes me feel a little mixed up and torn when I find myself praying to that old Father-God. I’m not sure he deserves my attention, and I don’t know like it means that deep pain connects me to him. But there’s also a kind of beauty to those prayers of despair, and I cherish them in their own way. They give me a safe container through which I can observe one extreme of human emotion. When I have no choice but to give up that illusion of control and admit that it’s not up to me what happens next - there’s a form of growth that happens there.

That cry of “oh God, help me!” is a common one, especially in our Christian-influenced culture. If asked to define prayer, people of all ages will often give the answer that it’s asking God or a higher power for help. All the experiences of prayer I’ve described above certainly fit that definition, but that is actually a specific form of prayer called Intercession. Asking for help, or healing, or protection, all fall under the category of intercessions. This form of prayer has its uses; it enables us to calm ourselves in times of distress; and it can also be helpful in relinquishing our death-grip on attempting to control things.

Intercession as a practice has a stickier side, though, which is the widely criticized “sending thought and prayers” response. Context is key here - this phrase can be comforting in the right moment, but too often it’s offered in place of real action. When we leave our response to real human suffering at “thoughts and prayers,” we are abandoning our own necessary work to the hypothetical power of god. When prayer is a form of bypassing, it actually separates us from our relationship with the divine.

To fully experience the purpose of prayer, we need to look deeper, beyond just intercession. I find that the more I explore, forms of prayer surface everywhere.

A common one is the prayer of gratitude. Again, a useful practice - there’s plenty of research to be found about gratitude as a key component to emotional resilience. Someone recently asked me how it’s possible to have a gratitude practice as an agnostic or atheist - they shared that it feels weird because they didn’t have a sense of who they were saying thank you to. I posit that, regardless of our views about a higher power in the world, gratitude practice helps us remember that there are good things in our lives that we can’t take personal credit for.

Many of these ways of praying tend to be characterized by words - thinking, speaking, or writing our prayers. So could we say that prayer is a conversation with the divine? Some do, but I think that’s too limiting.

The story Twinks told earlier in the service is a retelling of a piece of short fiction by Kevin Brockmeier. I loved this story the first time I heard it, and it continues to hold a lot of meaning for me, both as a human being and a minister. In the original story, at one point the man who has inherited God’s overcoat goes to a play in a theater and finds a note in his pocket which contains every line one of the actors spoke on stage. At this point in the story I always have to pause and cry for a while, because it strikes at something very profound. I have absolutely performed choreography and prayed with my body. I have heard cello pieces which were prayers, and seen paintings, and walked through buildings whose architecture was a prayer. This understanding brings me closer to the challenging task of finding a comprehensive definition of prayer.

Unitarian Universalists often conflate meditation with prayer, and I think we do that in part so that people with religious wounding might feel more comfortable being present here. I think that’s a mistake, because we are selling both prayer AND meditation short by conflating them. Meditation is its own complex, meaningful practice. It is prayer-related, and it might be the vehicle for an individual’s prayer practice, but it’s not exactly the same thing. To boil each down to one core word, meditation is a practice of awareness, and prayer is a practice of connection. Beyond that, they both go up there with “gender identity” and “being in love” on the shelf labeled “you know it when you feel it.”

Sometimes the strongest form of prayer is to be in nature and find ourselves fully present, communicating with the wonders around us. The forest, the desert, and the ocean sometimes seem to pull prayers right out of us. There’s a different feeling to praying in nature vs. in a sacred building, and there’s a different feeling to praying alone vs. in community. Many of us have preferences about these conditions, but each of them can be profound in its own way and time.

I am not going to sit up here and list a survey of worldwide prayer practices - in order for that to have any meaning, we would have to take quite a few hours to study the roots and contexts of them all. But if we were to embark in that study together, one thing we would find is that all over the world, from today back to ancient times, people have prayed. Along with music, dance, visual arts, and love, it seems common to nearly all of human experience. What is it about us that gives us this instinct to pray?

Many people dear to my heart who identify as some form of nonbeliever would prefer to deny the impulse to prayer, and yet, upon exploring the idea more closely, can only admit that at some point in their life they have been moved to do so. I believe the prayer instinct belies an inescapable understanding of a mysterious truth - that we have a connection. We are connected to each other, and to the world - to something greater than ourselves. And to me, prayer is the act of reaching for that connection, observing it, interacting with it, letting it fill my awareness.

Perhaps I am reaching for that connection to ask for help, set an intention, express wonder and thanks, or even just be in its presence. And when I started engaging with this practice intentionally, I felt embarrassed at first. It’s not particularly hip for somebody in my social location to pray. But openness is important to me, and eventually I couldn’t deny my beautiful relationship to prayer. I pray for the right words when I write a sermon. I pray to be the needed presence when I do pastoral care. I pray when I’m tired or worried, and I pray when I’m filled with joy.

Despite my lack of identification with Christianity at this point in my life, my favorite written prayer still comes out of that tradition. It’s a (slightly adjusted version of) the Prayer of Saint Francis.

O divine spirit, grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Amen.

I discover something new every time I revisit this prayer, but the most important thing comes back to that feeling, that feeling of connection to something beyond myself. When I read this prayer, I feel as though a wholeness is available to me, in spite of it all.

May we engage in curiosity and playfulness as we explore our own many connections to prayer. May we have gentleness with ourselves, and gravitate towards practices which give us a sense of wholeness. May we approach this and all other relationships with the balance of intentionality and flexibility. May we never be ashamed to bring along that which serves us, and let go of the rest. And may the gifts of this exploration give us new energy for creating justice and compassion in the world.

Amen.

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[Copyright 2022 Miranda (Bran) Lennox]