TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: A UU Perspective on Prayer

Rev. Abhi Janamanchi

March 9, 2008

Do Unitarian Universalists pray? To whom? God, Goddess, Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Darwin? It is not very common to find "prayer" listed as one of the liturgical elements in Unitarian Universalist worship. Take ours, for example. We usually have "Centering Meditation - Spoken & Silent" instead of "Prayer." Even when we do pray, you hear me or Millie starting off with, "Eternal Spirit of Life, God of many names and no name, Divine Spirit, Source of compassion and healing, Ground of our being, etc, etc, etc." At times, I've found myself searching for every possible metaphor and symbolism to speak instead of saying, "Dear God" and moving on with whatever else I wanted to say. Part of the reason why I hesitate saying "Dear God" is because I am keenly aware that some of you might flinch a bit or take offense about my using those words and complain to me later.

Many of my esteemed colleagues feel the same way and find themselves in a similar kind of predicament each week when they stand up to lead that portion of the service. Why do we find ourselves in that position? Why can't we just pray or skip it altogether?

As Wayne Arnason and Kathleen Rolenz rightly observe in the Spring 2008 edition of the UU World, "We (Unitarian Universalist ministers) strive to be as theologically inclusive as possible. We ask ourselves, what about the pagans in our midst? How do we include them in a spoken prayer? How about the atheists in our congregation, for whom the word God or the mention of a deity outside of human knowledge is meaningless?"

Wayne and Kathleen wonder about the appropriateness of replacing "prayer" with "meditation" and subjecting meditators to "lengthy poetic exhortations" and how that might help or hinder our ability to reflect on our dependency on the "mystery of life that is beyond our naming" in the context of worship.

They then go on to provide some useful tips to both ministers and lay people on what to say in the context of prayers.

Let me digress a bit to touch on something that's been rankling me for a while and resurfaced last week when I was at my son's elementary school. Last Wednesday, Lalitha and I went to see Yashasvi receive an award at school for "honesty." As part of the program, there were some veterans there to thank the students for sending cards and gifts to our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan over the holidays. At the end of his remarks, the veteran exhorted all of us to "continue to support and pray for our troops" who were out there fighting for freedom and democracy. I was left with an irritated feeling the rest of the day as I wondered about the appropriateness of such a remark in our public schools as well as whether one could pray for American troops if one believed strongly that their mission was misguided and counterproductive. I also wondered what we would pray for and what we would pray against.

And then, I came across a rather startling and poignant tidbit in one of Michael Schuler's sermons that made me realize that others had struggled with this issue before and were far more eloquent than I. In his sermon, "Praying Outside the Box," Michael quotes an excerpt from Mark Twain's War Prayer which was written sometime in 1904-05 and addresses the unspoken assumptions of our nationalistic war time prayers:

O Lord, be thou near our young patriots as they go forth to battle. Be thou near them. With them in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe... Help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire... Help us to turn them out roofless with their little children, to wander unfriended the wastes of the desolated land... sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter.

Twain's prayer continues in this rather chilling vein evincing his moral revulsion for prayers that ignore the indiscriminate violence and chaos of war while seeking safety and success of our own soldiers.

Michael says, "Too often prayers intended to be caring betray an element of callousness. If we must pray, if prayer is for us an important spiritual practice, we should strive to make them inclusive -- expressions of concern for all the victims of war, prayers that call our leaders to greater wisdom, humility, and compassion."

And then, he mentions the "Loving Kindness Prayer" that Thich Nhat Hanh and other Buddhists pray which is more inclusive than some of the other traditional ones.

On the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, I invite you to pause for a few moments now to center yourselves, to focus your energies, and to offer the following prayer to members of our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Administrations in Washington, Kabul, and Baghdad, and the many wounded veterans and families who have lost their loved ones over the past five years:

May all beings be well. May all be calm. May all be happy. May they be at peace. May they be filled with loving kindness. May they be free from suffering.

Let's continue with the topic of prayer. Prayer or meditation has always been at the heart of religion. It seems to me that a system of beliefs, ethics, or a philosophy is not a religion unless it is held and supported in the heart and mind by some kind of intense, personal devotional activity.

Unitarian Universalists believe that each person must be free to search for meaning and truth be it intellectual, moral, emotional, or spiritual for himself or herself. We believe in accepting one another's unique spiritual journeys and encouraging each other to grow spiritually. This is one of the reasons why we have in our congregations Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, Theists, Humanists, Agnostics, Pagans, and even, a Hindu or two. Is there any way of making prayer or meditation meaningful to this wide range of belief, thinking, and spiritual orientation?

I think there is. What we need is a definition of prayer or meditation which makes some sense to almost any theological stance. There are a couple I wish to offer you to ponder this morning -- One, from Rev. Paul Beattie, who said that prayer "is a way of disciplining and transforming human personality." And, the other is from Mona Beukema who moved recently to California with her husband, George. She once shared with Sage Chaney that "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, unuttered or expressed."

By side-stepping the question whether or not there is a God, of atheism vs. theism, by these definitions of prayer, we make it possible for ourselves to think about practicing this spiritual discipline, rather than to argue our heads off about the philosophical basis of prayer or worse, reject it outright as a superstitious fallacy of feeble minds. In other words, whether or not there is a God, prayer can still be a valuable discipline.

If you are not comfortable with that word, please feel free to substitute it as I do with the word "meditation." I am not about to get into a linguistic argument on this issue and willingly admit that one is justified in separating prayer from meditation because prayer, in most dictionaries, means an address to a deity and meditation means seriously considering something in the mind. But as religious liberals, we always have to decide which words we would discard, and when we do, to do it with caring, respect, and deliberation, and which words we would reinterpret.

To use the word prayer as being synonymous with meditation, I am linguistically bending things my way. However, traditional concepts of prayer and meditation do blend into each other. Thomas Hooker back in 1586 defined meditation as "a serious intention of mind whereby we come to search out the truth, and settle it effectually in the heart." And William Sherry defined prayer as "an intellectual discipline in truthfulness and a moral discipline in unselfishness." "It is the endeavor," he writes, "to find what is true and right and then to conform to these."

There are very few human beings who have never prayed spontaneously or involuntarily. In some crisis, where a person near and dear to us lies suffering, and we can only stand by helpless, an involuntary prayer, a silent plea, is likely to rise to consciousness from depths beyond our control. Love wants that a turn for the better shall come, and from its own depths sends that prayer up to the conscious mind of the person who loves who, in turn, sends it out into the universe. And in this sense prayer is one of the most natural and universal things in the world. The heart asks, and this, a hundred-thousand years ago or now, is pre-theological.

This is also true also of what many anthropologists have good reason to believe is the oldest religious experience in the world -- the primary religious experience. When the first person stood, even as you and I have, over against a vast mysterious otherness, whether on a mountain top, or under a star-lit sky, or by the vast expanse of the ocean, and experienced inexpressible awe and wonder, there the first feeling-prayer was born on the planet. We human beings are creatures who confront the universe and, although this makes us feel infinitely small and insignificant, it also magnifies and exalts our awareness.

An involuntary turning for help, a sense of awe and wonder before the sublime and the mysterious -- these are both, not only eons ago but today, pre-theological experiences. They are a natural and a primordial kind of prayer.

There are other kinds as well. There is the wordless song or hymn of praise springing spontaneously from the heart. You walk forth some morning under a blue sky or witness a gorgeous sunset, and something within you says, How wonderful! You find yourself saying, "Yes!" or "Oh!" or "Ah!" Something within you is thrilled by this sheer miracle of awareness, this sense of oneness with your surroundings, and blesses the world with spontaneous joy in its beauty. Something within you sings, as naturally and spontaneously as a bird greets the dawn, but with a greater wonder of awareness.

The prayer of thankfulness is also a quite natural and inevitable response in certain circumstances, when human good or human mercy, or human generosity, or human love is made known to us. Then the heart expresses its gratitude, and the mind may even, quite naturally and without theologizing, refer that good to a source beyond its immediate manifestation. When someone has been in great sorrow or trouble, and friends come to extend a sympathetic hand, it is quite moving to see how humbly and genuinely grateful a person can be, how amazed that one has more friends than we realized, and how deeply affected that there is this beautiful thing called compassion, or fellow-feeling. The prayer of gratitude which can be as simple and poignant as "Thank you" is thus a simple and natural response of the human heart.

The prayer of anguish, since we are all subject to anxieties and crises at times in our lives, is also natural. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus' prayer on the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?", and the many prayers in Psalms vividly and poignantly express human anguish.

The quieter prayer of self-searching and self-examination is also natural; and since conscience is not self-made but social, it is natural also that humans have directed prayer outward, and said, "Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me, and know my thoughts."

And so, too, the prayer of contrition, repentance, or atonement -- every thoughtful, sensitive, and self-aware person having known himself or herself to have done things which he/she ought not to have done or to have fallen short of living at the level of his/her possible best.

Such prayers as Paul Tillich would say are ontological; that is, pertaining to being. They belong to our very emotional and intellectual structure as human beings.

Where then, does the seeming contradiction or paradox of prayer come in? A paradox arises when we make formal and sometimes conventional and threadbare, what is natural, spontaneous, and utterly real. Then we have the paradox of prayer as a hollow shell -- the words are mouthed but the feelings are absent. There is also the subtle form of sinning in prayer which is to indulge in insincere expression. It is to indulge in rhetoric rather than undergo the discipline of real expression. In this form, people are usually trying to achieve effects, or with subtle pride putting their ability with words on display, rather than wrestling to say directly what the heart and mind know to be true.

Another paradox of prayer emerges in what is considered to be "petitionary prayer." This type of prayer is quite familiar to those who were raised in a Judeo-Christian culture; it's a prayer that invites some "higher power" to act or intercede on our own or our loved ones' behalf. Prayer of this sort tends to be an incantation: find the right formula, muster your faith, suppress your doubts, and perhaps our petition will generate an appropriate response. God, in this form of prayer, is typically imagined to be someone who sits up there and listens. And if you push the right buttons or say the right things, God will do your bidding. Pat Robertson is very good at this form of prayer.

But this doesn't mean that petitionary prayer is always presumptuous and never appropriate. As biblical theologian Walter Wink observes, petitionary prayer has its place. What makes it work, Wink argues, is the believer’s conviction that "the whole universe is a spirit-matter event, that the individual self is co-extensive with the universe, and that everything is infinitely permeable to prayer."

The paradox, the seeming contradiction, is that petitionary prayer works -- not in the old naive way of stilling the waves or opening rain clouds or deflecting a hurricane, but by way of augmenting one's courage to be; so that "more things are wrought by prayer," as Tennyson said, "than this world dreams of."

What can the discipline of prayer achieve in us? More than what I can mention here, but here are some results of prayer. In prayer there is a stopping of the rush of time and the crush of events. We put ourselves in solitude, at home with ourselves, with our mind, body, and spirit centered, away from the worries of life even for a brief amount of time. This in itself is beneficial. By doing this, we begin to get to know ourselves, who we are, and how we feel about things. With increase self-awareness there is a simplification of the self, of its separation from the ego, and our ability to see things more clearly, and what we are becoming day by day.

There is also a purging of personality, evil intentions and unworthy motivations, accrued guilt and self-recrimination, and a renewed resolve to do better and a new sense of responsibility. Also, the humility that accompanies self-awareness enables us to forgive others without lasting resentment for the wrongs and hurts they have inflicted on us.

Does this mean that prayer is somehow a substitute for social activism and engagement? By no means. It is, however, a necessary compliment.

Before he took up any major undertaking, Mahatma Gandhi would pray. He would seek God's guidance and inspiration for focus, clarity, self-control, peacefulness, and motivation.

One thing we must do as spiritually mature people is to be sophisticated about forms. We must not be childish in these things. Forms are but forms, limited by human capacity for expression, conditioned by human beliefs, under which we must seek the focus of our true desire. We need to recognize that there is a reality here deeper and more constant than the formal act. "All men are always praying," said Emerson. "Every secret wish is a prayer," he said.

Deep down in our hearts we all desire in a certain direction; we are all asking for something from life: and it is right that by the sharpening and discipline of prayerful reflection we should try and test and focus this in a good direction. For what we most inwardly and constantly desire we tend to become. "If we go down into ourselves," said Simone Weil, "we find that we possess exactly what we desire." What we most deeply and constantly ask from life sets the direction of our energies and has its inevitable results. Therefore, said Emerson, be careful what you pray for. A discipline of mature prayer is a searching and a directing of our desires.

Whether this takes the form of petitionary prayer or serious thought and meditation is not the essential thing. The essential thing is that there be this inward discipline. But enough commentary. As these words about prayer and meditation settle into us, let us return to the practice:

And now, let this house be quiet.

Let our minds be quiet.

Let the quietness of the hills, the stillness of lakes be also in us.

So quiet that we feel the very being which binds us together, and

Is the life of us all.

So quiet that we are renewed, and feel at one with others,

And at home in a tabernacle of stillness.

So quiet that the marvelous stillness is like music;

So quiet that we sense the ripples of this pool of quietness and

Healing pass through us, and out to the furthest stars. - Jacob Trapp

REFERENCES:

Wayne Arnason and Kathleen Rolenz, Praying As Unitarian Universalists, UU World – Spring 2008

Michael Schuler, Praying Outside the Box

Writings of Rev. Paul Beattie and Jacob Trapp