A journalist was assigned to the Jerusalem bureau of his newspaper. He gets an apartment overlooking the Western Wall. After several weeks he realizes that whenever he looks at the Wall he sees the same old man praying vigorously.
Wondering whether there was a publishable story here, the journalist goes down to the old man and says: “You come every day to the Wall. What are you praying for?”
“Well” says the old man, “in the morning I pray for world peace. Then I go home, have a cup of tea, and I come back to the Wall to pray for the eradication of disease and suffering.”
The journalist is inspired by old man’s sincerity and persistence. “How long have you been coming to the Wall to pray for these things?”
“How long? Maybe twenty, twenty-five years.”
“Wow. How does it feel to come and pray every day for over 20 years for these things?”
“How does it feel? How does it feel?! It feels like I’m talking to a wall.”
Well, unless you were praying fervently for the Democrats to sweep Congress this past week, you can probably relate to the old man…
What is prayer? How can we pray?
Prayer is a practice found across cultures and throughout the history of humanity. Tinged with more than a little magic, the history of prayer suggests a deep human need to express ourselves to an infinitely compassionate listener. (Who that listener is, and whether that listener listens is a profound question, and will be a different sermon.)
Some definitions describe prayer as a conversation with God. That definition should not stop you, though. I think we can understand that much prayer is pre-theological. That is, our desire to pray, does not require that we already understand with absolute, unchanging consistency or integration—to whom it is we address our prayers. In other words, even without knowing or believing or understanding God as such, we may still pray with integrity, with energy, and with conviction that our prayers are heard, if only by ourselves and one another.
In the days before there was a decision that our country would go to war with Iraq, the poet Ellen Bass emailed a poem to everyone in her address book. The poem is a heartfelt prayer for peace, an urgent call to “Pray to whoever you kneel down to: Jesus nailed to his wooden or marble or plastic cross, his suffering face bent to kiss you,/ Buddha still under the Bo tree in scorching heat, / Yahweh, Allah, raise your arms to Mary/ that she may lay her palm on our brows, / to Shekinah, Queen of Heaven and Earth, / to Inanna in her stripped descent.// Hawk or Wolf of the Great Whale, Record Keeper/ f time before…Fields of Artichokes and elegant strawberries. //Pray to Gandhi and Dorothy Day. Shakespeare, Sappho. Sojourner Truth. / Pray to the angels and the ghost of your grandfather.”
Because we long to connect and express, we must pray as we can, and not as we can’t. We can pray with our lives.
As I child, I got down on my knees every night to pray a prayer that may be familiar to many of you: 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.
And then I would continue: “God Bless Mommy and Daddy and my brothers; and Grandma and Grandpa, and Grandma and Grandpa. Amen.” As my child consciousness grew, so did my list of people to bless. Eventually my mother had to encourage me to quit delaying bedtime (there were after all, four other children whose prayers had yet to be heard) and start using summary phrases such as “all my aunts and uncles and all my cousins and friends and teachers and pets…” instead of trying to name them one by one!
Somewhere along my life, I lost my practice of getting down on my knees at the side of my bed before sleeping. That does not mean that there have not been times in my life where I still felt called to my knees by life. On 9/11 surely we could all understand the words of Lincoln who wrote: “I have been driven many times to my knees by an overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of those about me, seemed very insufficient for the day.”
There are moments in life that call us--if not to our knees--to prayer; to that sometimes inarticulate desire to build “a velvet bridge” between our hearts and the Great Heart, the Heart of God. These moments are not only ones of anguish or pain. Sometimes it is the confrontation with overwhelming beauty: a sunset in which all the elements of nature conspire to draw stunning combinations of color and light across the sky. Might not waking up on the deck of a ship to gaze out at an un-limitable sea move us to awe? Or holding a newborn baby in your sweat covered arms? Perhaps a great work of art, or the light in a lover’s eyes has shattered some last defense and moved you to profound wonder. What actions, what words can express our encounter with that awe? What words, what actions will suffice in the face of horror? Shall we express and connect with words called from the very same alphabet that makes up my plodding phrases? What else? Eli Weisel tells a story of the rabbi who, in the bowels of Auschwitz had forgotten how to pray. “Do you recall the alphabet?” his companion in suffering asked. “Yes, that I remember.” “Then let us begin.” And they recited the alphabet together.
We struggle to find meaning-filled ways and words to express and connect in the face of mysterium tremendum. When we feel we have no place else to go in the face of pain, suffering or horror but to our knees, before we can make sense, we long to be heard and witnessed. We are moved to prayer. In encounters with wonder, awe, or sheer beauty, we glimpse our connection to mystery and are moved to find an expression for that connection. That expression is creative and sometimes it is called prayer. We beseech: Hear us, O Lord. We pray: O God, if there is a God, save my soul, if I have a soul.
We can await those rare enough moments of surprise and wonder and awe to move us beyond our ordinary expression, to connection with that awesome mystery, to that inner stillness in which we glimpse Truth, the Peace that Passes Understanding, God. We can also cultivate our connection. Just as “chance favors the prepared mind,” so can we can prepare our selves and increase our connection with that awesome stillness by engaging in a practice of prayer.
How then can we pray? This question has an almost endless answer. The simple answer is: find a quiet place, calm your energy, and listen. We all could start there. You could back next week and tell me how it went, and I could stop speaking. But this is a sermon, so of course I have more to say.
How can we pray? Let me use words from Ellen Bass again: “Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM, for your latte and croissant, offer your plea. / Make your eating and drinking a supplication. Make your slicing of carrots a holy act, each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.// Make the brushing of your hair a prayer, every strand it’s own voice, singing in the choir on your head…// When you walk to your car, to the mailbox, to the video store, let each step be a prayer that we all keep our legs, that we do not blow off anyone else’s legs…// With each breath in, take in the faith of those who have believed when belief seemed foolish, / who persevered. With each breath out, cherish. // Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for peace, / feed the birds for peace, each shiny seed / that spills onto the earth, another second of peace…”
Of course, sometimes we wish we had words, too.
In 1939, the poet Edwin Muir wrote in his autobiography about his experience with word prayer. His wife was very ill and Europe was plunging into war for a second terrible time: “Last night, going to bed alone, I suddenly found myself (I was taking off my waistcoat) reciting the Lord’s Prayer, in a loud, emphatic voice—a thing I had not done for many years—with deep urgency and profound and disturbed emotion. While I went on I grew more composed; // [A]s if it had been empty and craving and were being replenished, my soul grew still; every word had a strange fullness of meaning that astonished and delighted me. … as I stood in the middle of the floor half undressed saying the prayer over and over, meaning after meaning sprang from it; overcoming me again with joyful surprise; and I realized that simple petition was always universal and always inexhaustible….”
Imagine discovering words of your own--a prayer that might have such a profound and innovative effect! How many teenagers feel frustrated in English class when they have to dissect a poem line by line, sometime word by word, to delve for its truer meaning? I didn’t understand that such tedious literary analysis could reveal new meaning and understanding. I wanted to leave it intact, just the way it was, and experience it directly: pure impulse and reaction. But it turned out my teacher was right: the verse would yield so much more to investigation and experience.
So too, with prayer. Whether one learned by rote in childhood, or discovered in one of the great traditions, or one that you craft yourself, a prayer will yield itself to your heart with attention. As a practice, any beautiful text can be used—a favorite poem or passage from scripture. To dwell in the words can open us up to new vistas of the heart.
In his book called Prayers of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas-Klotz took the words of the Lord’s Prayer and attempted a translation from the Aramaic—a language spoken in the time and area that Jesus lived. He wanted to plumb not only the intellectual meaning of the words, but also the metaphorical and mystical. For example, he takes the very first line of the King James Version translation, “Our Father which art in heaven,” and comes up with a litany of invocations that a Unitarian Universalist might be comfortable saying:
O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos
O Thou! The Breathing Life of All
Creator of the shimmering sound that touches us
Radiant One
Name of Names
Silent Potency
In contemporary Quaker circles, Paul Buckley took this practice of delving deep into familiar words to find a meaning that resonates with one’s own heart. Through word by word or phrase by phrase meditation and reflection, Buckley unlocked the Lord’s Prayer for himself in a new way. He re-wrote it:
Heavenly Mama, Papa of us all!
Just to call your name is a blessing.
There is a home for you in my heart. May your love for all creation be answered.
Help me to be faithful.
Give me only what I need for today.
Forgive me as much as I forgive others.
Be my guide.
Help me to face my weaknesses and
Save me from my own stupidity.
Thank you for your blessings.
So help me, God!
By rewriting it in our own words, on our own terms, we might find what Muir discovered: meaning after meaning and joyful surprise. In the end we may come back to saying the familiar words as shorthand, as a way to share them in a group—or because its easier to remember them that way when you are alone in your room in a rage. But having yielded their deeper personal meaning through your attention, the words will have more resonance for your heart, and will serve you in your desire to express and connect.
As humans with life experiences, we will all at some moment feel called to pray—to find expression and connection. This movement—this being moved--is the beginning of our prayer—however we know how to pray it. With our eating or our sighing, on our knees or even fast asleep. It is the impetus, the desire, the movement towards that which calls us to a centered quiet, to the Great Heart--that is the beginning of prayer.
Begin the way you can, not the way you can’t. Amen.
