Some Thoughts on Prayer

A Sermon by the Rev. James R. Bridges

at the UU Congregation at Rock Tavern 

This morning’s talk originated from one of the readings that we used in a covenant group here at our fellowship.  It is an excerpt from a sermon by my colleague, the Rev. Christine Robinson, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Albuquerque, New Mexico.  The story she tells is rather poignant.  She states: 

About 10 years ago, I got a call from a member of the church. He was resigning from a leadership position because he was going out of state to help care for his only grandchild who had become dangerously ill. If she recovered, she would need a good deal of care for many months. He told me about all of this rather briskly, and transmitted the information I needed about the committee he was abandoning, then said he and his wife would be leaving that evening. At that, he choked up. "I know that Unitarians don't pray, Christine," he said, "but will you pray for us?" I assured him that I would and that I was glad to be able to do something comforting for them, and for me.

I was also sad. It was no time to say so during that phone call, of course, but it is not true that "Unitarians don't pray." I was sorry that this long-time, committed UU, who had given so much to this church over so many years, felt self-conscious about asking me to pray for him and probably didn't realize that he could have asked for other's prayers. I was even more sad that this member probably didn't have a way to feel good about his own desire to pray during this crisis.

What tends to be true is that UUs don't talk much about prayer. Prayer is another one of our fractured words, like worship, conversion, soul, even God, which too many of us rejected with orthodoxy and have not found definitions that work for us in our religious life. It's another word that can hook our anger over feeling duped or rejected in our religious past. It's easier sometimes, for minister and laypeople alike, to avoid using these words rather than getting into an argument or turning someone off.

 I know for me, prayer has been a term I have tended to shy away from.  For many years, I was one of those for whom the term meant nothing.  Prayer was a myth which I had cast off when I left the organized Christian church in the late 1960’s.  Of course, at that point in my life, I used the word as I had been taught as a child.  Prayer was a one way communication to a God up in the sky, who might or might not grant my childish or adolescent wishes.  Usually, my experience indicated, he did not.  Mind you, at that time it wasn’t a she – but only a he up in the sky.  When that belief system was discarded by me, in favor of an evolutionary world view, one in which even the necessity for a First Cause was denied, replaced with a self-contained Big Bang which resulted in the cosmos, prayer to me was a meaningless, superstitious concept.  It didn’t work, and there was no need for it.  I abandoned it with no reservations.

True, occasionally when under much stress, when I was deeply in need, I would revert to what I considered an immature habit – pleading silently to myself for help in facing something, like the death of a loved one.  It was as if the little child in me was reasserting his need to ask the God in the sky for help.  I never really looked at the dynamic – just ignored it.  And I certainly never, ever talked about it.

Over the years, as I aged, I became interested in Buddhism, mainly Zen – and sitting meditation.  I was much later quite surprised to learn that something akin to this meditative practice existed within Christianity as well….a millennia or more ago, and it was called Lectio Divina.  Those who practice it today we reference as leading a contemplative life.  Even more surprising to me was that this is also considered a form of prayer.

Going into seminary, I knew that I was going to have to revisit a number of concepts and ideas that I had previously discarded, prayer being one of them.  Does such a thing as prayer make sense – to someone who is basically a humanist?  I thought long and hard on it….periodically revisiting the question – never being really satisfied with my answers.  I am still not fully satisfied with them – but my best answer to date is that I view prayer as metaphoric language.  It is a way of communicating with others or with ourselves – making connections with others or ourselves – on a very deep level.  It gives voice to deep longings of the soul – wants and needs.  It also gives voice to an envisioned future – a promised land for which one is seeking and hoping.  This is the outgoing type of prayer – the requesting prayer, or the prayer of intercession, which as a child I used to send to God.

I learned how to do this in a more advanced way while performing CPE – serving as a chaplain under supervision at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.  My first experience was at the deathbed of a professor – with his grieving young adult children being present immediately after a failed attempt at emergency open heart surgery in his hospital room.  My goal was to give voice to their grief – to share it as an expression – and to ask for loving care over them in the days ahead. 

Did I believe that God was going to give them that loving care?  Not really – but I did want them to be open to and experience the love of those who did indeed care for them and their deceased father.  My praying for them was an attempt to center them in their grief and anger – and to help them yet remain open to love and support from others.

To me, this is what prayer is really about – giving voice to deeply felt emotions – and making healing connections, either within oneself, or between others, as in the love I hoped they would be open to.  Some of you may have heard me say before, in other talks, that the Greek word religio, means to rebind, or to re-connect, to that which had been connected before.  Thus, such prayer, which helps one to reconnect to oneself or others, is truly what religion is about.  Many times we do it in private.  Other times we may do it in a small group of friends who offer each other support.  Some of us may engage in prayer while we journal….or perhaps go on walks.  Others might even pray in the context of psychotherapy, where they get in touch with deeply held beliefs and feelings, reconnecting to parts of themselves, and in the process, transforming their lives.

Another type of prayer happens not in tragedy and pain, but in the silences we experience.  It happens where there are pauses in deep and heavy conversations.  It also occurs during the times of no words – as when reading poetry – or walking in the woods, much as Thoreau experienced during his days by Walden Pond.  The contemplative life – the life of meditation – is another form of prayer.  That is prayer in which one receives – in which one feels the connections between the parts of oneself and life in general.  It is sometimes reached or experienced while sitting in meditation.  It is what I often experience while hiking alone or with a small group of people.  The gradual realization that we are all a tiny part of a vast complex of space-time-matter-life within a tremendously huge universe.  And even though we are so infinitesimally small, we still make a difference…and we still can enjoy the beauty of it all….much as a soap bubble exists momentarily and then pops into its component parts.  For just a brief moment – its beauty is manifest – so too are our lives manifest in the eons of time.

These are basically the two types of prayer which are meaningful to me.  The first is often given and experienced at times of crisis and pain, the other at times of relaxation and reflection, or even at times of joy and excitement.

The Rev. Suzanne Meyer (UU) has a slightly different view of contemplative prayer, and though I do not often engage in this, I thought it wise to include it today:

Prayer, as I see it, is systematic and deliberate, a discipline, if you will. Prayer is not a hasty, 'Dear God, get me out of this mess and make it snappy!'. Prayer is not about changing the universe to suit my needs; it is about changing me to suit the needs of the world. Prayer is about being really honest with myself and recognizing that I don't often 'put my life at the service of the best'. Prayer is about the struggle to broaden my narrow, self-centered perspective, into (to use Ralph Waldo Emerson's words), “contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.”

Her view of prayer sounds more mindful, intentional, and self-critical than that in which I usually engage – much as a confessional might require.

Another type of prayer, one which I personally find difficult, is that of public prayer, the type of prayer ministers are often asked to give at public events.  While gradually I have learned to offer such types of prayers, I shy away from them if at all possible.  For one thing, I am not good at them.  I am not particularly smooth talking and articulate.  Some clergy can get up and speak with golden sounding, smooth flowing words, words which incorporate everyone present.  I am just not that eloquent.  I stumble, fumbling for words.  Plus, I don’t really know how to connect to a large group of people in a given room – talking about their deepest concerns.  I am reminded of Jesus’ lesson regarding prayer – to do it privately.  I find that a welcome piece of advice.

Yet, at times I do engage in public prayer.  I attempt to touch those with whom I pray – giving voice, focus, and form to their concerns in a public manner.  Sometimes I truly believe fewer words are better than more words, and shorter prayers are better than longer ones.  Perhaps that is a rationalization.  Nonetheless, I am reminded of our own Puritan history, in which sermons sometimes lasted three hours, and a given prayer might last an hour!  There is not a doubt in my mind that that was too long!  And that, my friends, is no rationalization.

Still other forms of prayer exist with which I feel uncomfortable.  The creation of art has been recognized as a form of prayer by some.  Similarly, contemporary dance and dance forms like tai chi have been called prayer.  Again, connections are made in the dancing, and a sense of unity is achieved, be it with oneself or the spirit of life.  I obviously do not perform either.

Lastly, for some Unitarian Universalists, social action can also be thought of as a form of prayer.  It yields connection with others, and it can reflect the unity, the spirit of life, which permeates us all.  It is a valid expression of one’s loving concern for others and the whole of creation, yet I have difficulty in thinking of this as prayer as I understand the word.

Of all the various definitions and understandings of prayer that I have read, the Rev. Kathleen McTigue, senior minister at the Unitarian Society of New Haven, offers perhaps the most satisfying understanding of prayer to me:  “Prayer is the conscious turning of our attention inward, in order to lift up for scrutiny that which most concerns us.”  Simple and direct.  It happens in meditation; it happens by the hospital bedside; it happens on the battlefield; and it happens in community – such as here.  It happens privately, and it happens publicly.  “The conscious turning of our attention inward, in order to lift up for scrutiny that which most concerns us.”

To sum up….if you are in that school from which I came, that which doubts and perhaps even scorns prayer, I would like to invite you to open up to its possibilities – to reconsider it and to explore it….not in the hopes of it working magic, but in the hopes of a learning a deeper way of connecting with yourself and others, be it through meditation, journaling, or social action.  And if you already have a prayer practice, I would encourage you to continue attending to it….no matter how well it is working for you.  One of many things that I have learned that while prayer doesn’t always work, often I don’t work…but attending to it daily is a form of faithfulness, which is still another component of religion….

I thank you for your attention.

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