Why Use the Word Prayer?

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 21^st of April, 2002

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here,
a community of mysteries who say first "I am"
and then "we are,"
to worship, to hallow our days with these joys.
Love, we come as we are,
our joys mixed with grief, with unnamed needs,
with songs of spirit unsung, with shrugs,
with disguised fears, with surprising strength.
Here, let the whole impossibility of us, O Love,
open up to the whole impossibility of you.

may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become….

Personal Affirmation of the Role of the Church:
The Saplings and the Greenhouse [Next] [back to top]

I am Ray Nandyal. I'm here to do two things: talk to you about an upcoming church event, and share with you my vision as a member for this church. I'm hoping that you will see that these two things have a lot in common.

Next Sunday at 12:45, there will be, what we call, a town-hall meeting on the issue of Same Sex Marriage. This is to prepare our church to vote later this year on a study/action issue that we would like to send up to the UUA. In next Sunday's meeting we also hope to have an honest dialog among all our members and friends not only on the issue of same sex marriage but on all the ways we as a church could affirm gay and lesbian lives and relationships.

For a non-gay person, I know a little bit about Society's withholding of affirmation and the needless pain it causes. In 1986 I met and fell in love with a woman from Cincinnati. We wanted to spend the rest of our lives together listening to Simon & Garfunkel and raising children to be world citizens. But all hell broke loose when we announced our engagement. If you want to marry an Indian, couldn't you find someone lighter-skinned, her mom said to her. Her dad couldn't believe that Mowgli from Jungle Book came over to America and wanted to marry his daughter. He started an investigation of my background. So when she and I got married, we weren't exactly the Prince of Wales and Lady Di tying the knot and warming the cockles of Caucasian hearts on all continents. Her parents showed up grudgingly at our wedding, like Klansmen at a bar mitzvah, and many of our friends who came probably thought that we were doomed before we ever started.

This November Lauri and I celebrate our fourteenth anniversary. We have three well-adjusted children. Even today a stranger's hateful glance reminds us that our marriage would have been illegal in many states until the mid-60's. In some places we still avoid holding hands in public so as not to offend our fellow-citizens.

All relationships start out, not as mighty oaks, but as saplings that need the sunshine of affirmation and protection from the bad weather of harassment. A marriage is a social contract that promises this affirmation. Whether you believe gay and lesbian relationships need this affirmation or not, it's important that we talk about it. So remember next Sunday, 12:45 pm.

This church is a greenhouse for all relationships. It cherishes and nurtures us and fights for us. So remember the needs of this church, this greenhouse, at the time of the pledge drive. We have loving and talented staff who need our affirmation, too. Let us be there for them so they can be there for us. Thank you.

Preface to the Silence [Next] [back to top]

Hot days prefiguring summer.
Chirping sparrows on the fast growing grass.
The first lawnmower sounds of the season.
Tank tops and shorts and blaring radios.
Magnolias opening up like the mouths of singers.
Frustrations with orange cones on every
street, and blocked ways and detour signs.

Deep despair on hearing the news of
eternal struggle and eternal stubbornness in the Middle East.

Frustrations with self, with family members.
Grief as usual.
Sunlight on foreheads.
Memories of family vacations that were wonderful.
Choir harmonies.
Beautiful words.

Silence.

It's all presence.
There is no place to hide.
There is no place to go.
It's all here.
The presence never goes away.
The joy and sadness, the excitement and fears,
the experiences and realities…
they are presence itself.
Our real lives move toward presence,
and never away.
Our real lives are presence to presence.
Presence in the words. Presence in the music. Presence in the sorrow. Presence in the joy.

Presence in the absence. Presence even in the silence.

silence

In the silence, all the realities, the friendships,
the losses, the worries, the hopes, the concerns.
Naming aloud all those who embody these
feelings in our lives, or seeing their faces in our inward life, we honor the presence of our whole
lives in this place, and honor the world that is our home.

naming

Such simple prayers are the home of what
our ancestors called "the spirit," the same
spirit that cries when we feel, when we reason,
when we sing, when we let the music
embrace us with rhythm and harmony.

(sung) Veni Creator Spiritus

Come, creative spirit
and be present in all that is delight.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] The First Reading is a poem by the Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosc.

"On Prayer"

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it, we are aloft, as on a springboard, above landscapes the color of bright gold transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
where everything is just the opposite and the word is unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, everyone, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh and knows that if there is no other shore
we will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] Reading is by the late May Sarton, and it's also got an appropriate title:

"Of Prayer"

Straining the dark for some answer,
calling the strange dancer with our formal prayers, hoping for a private sign, a secret world of grace.
We never meet your face, Prince of the Imagination;
Not to our prayers have you been merciful.
Always the human faces open their eyes behind our lids and all our questions become human questions.
So when we seek we do not find you.
And you offer no suggestions.

But in that hour least expected
when we are most ourselves and not deflected
even by remembrance of your name,
we stream down the paths of grace -
Hour of the poem, or that hour
when two people war to the bone
and meet each other's skeleton.
Here desire is a tremendous flower;
Petals have steel in their growing,
Balance-in-power as the pillar
that supports arched leaves of stone.

It is a mistake, perhaps, to believe
that religion concerns you at all;
that is our own invention,
longing for formal acceptance
to a formal invitation.
But yours is to be the anarchist,
the thrust of growth,
and to be present only in the
prayer that is creation,
in the life that is lived. Prayer is
love planted deeper than emotion,
Pure Idea that cannot break apart,
Creator of children, or the work of art.

Sermon: Why Use the Word "Prayer"? [Next][back to top]

In the church I used to serve, I came to care deeply about one particular man over the years. Strangely, his name was also Mark.

Mark was as bright a man as I have ever known. He was a zesty talker, a deft humorist, an inventive engineer: a real idea man, but one with a generous heart. He alone among the congregation used to drop into my office in the afternoon before picking up his kids, just to shoot the breeze… about philosophy, or Life, or the relationship of theology to the physicist's lab. I loved my conversations with Mark; he was always real to the bone, and thus he put me at ease about my own deeper self. Our conversations were among the most satisfying memories I have of my former congregation.

Mark and his wife Mona were told they would never be able to conceive children. So, encouraged by me in any way, they went through the difficult, lengthy process of adoption, which gave them two wonderful sons.

Then, as these things often go, Mona suddenly got pregnant, even though it was "impossible."

The pregnancy was undeniably delicate however, and Mona spent a lot of time in the safety of her bed. I visited her when I could.

Finally, one night about two months before the due date, a phone call from Mark woke me up at around 1 AM.

"We're at the hospital," he said, "Alta Bates. They just told me that my wife and child might die tonight. I think I need you."

"I'll be right there," I said, obviously horrified to the core of my being. I threw on enough clothes to be decent and tore off to Alta Bates. I got there in ten minutes instead of the usual fifteen.

When I found him, Mark met me and fell into my arms and wept. After some minutes, we tried to see her, but they wouldn't let either of us near her. She was totally surrounded by lab coats, as if she were in a great white tent.

Mark explained to me that Mona's waters broke a few days earlier, and that, since the child was so premature, they kept him in the womb as long as possible. But now, in the meantime, he said, Mona had developed a form of pneumonia which prevented the doctors from inducing labor. It was a medical mess which translated into a horrific knot of human misery.

Mark and I wept and paced for hours. Finally, toward morning, Mark fell asleep exhausted on a chair. I went walking outside and, frustrated as I had ever been, said the following prayer in my mind:

"This is the way it is, Love. I do not think of you as some omnipotent person in the sky, or some cruel fate rolling over the world like a wave. I do not think of you as having power to move the world, or raise the dead, or stop the sun in its tracks. But if this woman and her child die, I announce to you I will not do this work I do any more. I will not be able to. I will be too heart- broken. I will be desolate beyond my power of sufficient recovery. I will lose all my faith, all my hope, and much of my love, for love clearly makes me too vulnerable. I do not think that you need a minister who will hate you, even though I don't believe for a moment you caused this. But I would probably hate you anyway. All I know is this: I pray that this woman and her child will live, and I want to see joy on Mark's face once again. My decision is made. Their death will be the death of my ministry. I can do no other."

Never had I prayed a more fervent prayer, strange as it may strike some people.

But, even though I paced the rest of the night, I felt a lot calmer. I meant exactly what I said. I said everything I meant. And such clarity and commitment can strengthen a human heart.

At dawn, the doctors came out and woke Mark up. They told him that everything worked out OK. The child "decided" to come on out without inducement, and, as soon as he was delivered, they hit Mona with heavy medication to attack the pneumonia. Both mother and child not only survived, they are thriving to this day. Mark's face was the True Picture of total joy on that morning. But he understandably tells me that he weeps at times when he is alone whenever he remembers that dreadful turning point in his life.

I did not tell him that it was a turning point for me, too. As you can tell, I continue to serve as a minister, keeping the promise I made to myself, and to Love, in a prayer in my mind.

Prayer. Now, I know folks have lots of different experience with the word "prayer." Some were raised with loud, free-form prayers that went on and on. Others were brought up with formal prayers in a book, often in other languages, like Latin or Hebrew or Arabic. Some were taught to pray privately before bed - "Now I lay me down to sleep" - but otherwise never entered a house of worship. Others have only heard public prayer in their lives, mostly on television from snazzy smiling preachers scrunching up their faces as if they were in pain. A few may know more sublime statements about prayer, as when the agnostic painter Matisse compared his own colorful work to prayer. A few might even remember the ancient monastic dictum from their high school history classes: Orare Laborare, "to work is to pray."

Now hear me. I don't believe that my prayer for Mona and her child helped them to live. I would be mad if I thought such bargaining power was given to me. In the same way, I really don't believe that the prophet Joshua in the famous Bible story successfully asked his God in prayer to make the sun stand still in the sky. To make the sun appear to stop (as we know now in these post-Copernican days), this God would have had to brake the whole earth. And this would have immediately flung Joshua, his gang, and several sizable mountain ranges as well, right off into outer space. No, the sun does not stand still because God obeys mortal wishes and cancels the laws of nature. And, despite my friend Anne's admirable practice to the contrary, I really don't think that there is a real Parking Goddess either, playing requests. (Although I have to admit her "parking karma" is a lot better than mine.)

But having said that, I also want to affirm that it's plum foolish for anyone to take his or her own childhood definition of the word prayer and assume that's what the word still means. That's as sensible as saying that a 3rd Grade reading level will suffice in graduate school, or that playing with tinker toys as a tot entitles you to serve as chief architect and engineer for the nearest suspension bridge.

So, I want to assure you that I do not think the word prayer automatically stands for something that begs for favors, or something that is foolish, just a joke, a game for dolts, a waste of time, or something no decent skeptic should ever consider as a possible understanding of spiritual practice.

"You ask me how to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge and walking it we are aloft… above landscapes that are ripe gold, transformed by a magic stopping of the sun"

So writes the brilliant agnostic and Nobel Prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz is a cultural Catholic who attends St. Mary Magdalen in Berkeley, California now and then. But he says quite clearly in his poem, "You ask me how to pray to someone who is not." It seems to me no believer would even suggest that God "is not." A believer would say God "is." Clearly Milosz is no believer. Yet he prays. Why?

Because when he prays, he sees the world as if the sun had indeed stood still. Taking the startling image from the book of Joshua as his model, Milosz prays. And as he prays, behold, the world around him stops for a moment, the frenetic pace ceases, the sun no longer moves with such relentless swiftness, but seems to stand still and light up the world in a way he did not notice before. He no longer says (like my mother, like my father, like me, and perhaps like you), "How fast time flies! Where does the time go? The older I get, the faster things get!" His prayer, instead, is a pause, a noticing, a paying attention to what is happening both around him and inside him. It is only then, he writes so elegantly, that "the word is unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned."

When the skeptical Milosz prays, he "feels compassion for others tangled in the flesh." Anything wrong with that? He also asserts a rather odd thing, too. Prayer is "a bridge" he says, but a bridge that does not lead to some other shore, but to the great "Reversal." He capitalizes the word Reversal so we know it is important. What might that mean?

I think when Milosz prays, he does what many great people have done… he imagines not just what he wants, what he needs, what he feels, but he imagines the opposite of what he needs and feels, the reversal of all of his desire. He sees the other half of the picture, hears within his heart the other side of the story, sees himself not as a needy individual, but as a person among other persons just as valuable as he is, each with needs, each with dreams, each with roadblocks. With prayer, he looks at the world upside-down for moment, and sees how he fits into a world where he is not the center, and his needs not the only needs.

Intriguingly, at the end of the poem, just in case you fear he has fallen for the consolations of traditional religion, he reassures us he is not praying for such reasons. Even "if there is no other shore" that is, even if there is no heaven, no ultimate meaning, he will pray, and "walk that… bridge" all the same. For Milosz, prayer is not necessarily a religious thing to do… it's a perfectly ordinary human thing to do. To pray is to walk a bridge of compassion over the violent, cruel and cynical shambles of our age. To pray is to bid the wheeling sun stand still for a time as we walk across that bridge so we can see the world for what it is, and ourselves for what we are….fearlessly.

The late May Sarton, who was a Unitarian Universalist, agrees. "It is a mistake," she wrote with unmistakable clarity, "to believe that religion concerns" an omnipotent God at all. Religion aimed at such a God is "our own invention" she writes, our own "longing for acceptance," order and reliability."

Rather, she asserts, her God never answers prayers. "Not to our prayers have you been merciful," she writes with complete candor. "We never meet your face, we seek you but do not find you, and you offer no suggestions."

But then, what else is new? Speaking to people who clearly needed to believe that their God was powerful, some editor of the Book of Joshua wrote these absolutely amazing words in the passage about the stopped sun: "Yes, the sun did stand still and moved not. But never in the history of the world has there been a day like that, before or since, when the Eternal listened to the cry of a human being."

That's right, it's right there in the scripture. In the whole history of the world, this one prayer was "answered" and that's that. Prayers are not spells to be answered with magic results. God did it only once, the skeptical biblical author writes, and that's it. Thus you should never expect it again. Milosz and Sarton understood that very well I think. They were not conventionally religious, but they sure were rather biblical in their understanding of things .

You see, it's clear to me that the western scriptures support May Sarton and Czezlaw Milosc a lot more than they support the more popular 3rd Grade understandings of prayer. After all, the Bible has dozens of words translated as prayer; but none of these words suggest anything at all similar to the words Billy Graham would offer for the US President on an inaugural day. For instance, here are some of the words actually used in the Bible that are translated as "prayer" in English. The Hebrew word paga actually means "to come up against." Palal, also translated as prayer, means to "judge oneself." Siach means literally "to meditate." Chalah, means "to smooth oneself down." Erotao means "to ask questions." Deomai means literally "to express need." Euchomai means "to wish that it might be so." Parakaleo means "to come along close to the side of." All of these words and more are translated as "prayer." Yet none of the actions described sound like what people who pray on television are doing at all.

"You ask me how to pray to someone who is not," writes Milosz. And you say to me, "It's a pretty poem, yes…" but you are still wondering, perhaps, "Is Milosz just playing a silly game with words?" You say that you find the word "God" so fraught with theological nonsense like hellfire that you can no longer easily use the word. You say that you understand the wonder and mystery of the world. You say you can understand the feelings that many have attached to the word "God," but that you do not for one minute believe that such feelings need to be symbolized into some personal Super-Being who lives outside the Universe and knocks us around for sport in between our fleeting mystical experiences of wonder and awe.

I have great sympathy with that position. You'll note that I do not use the actual word God much myself. But every Sunday I do publicly pray to Love, or Life of my Life, or Fire of my Spirit instead of "God."

Ah, but is there a Being called Love somewhere in the Universe, a Life of my own Life? Interesting questions to some perhaps, but questions which I believe miss the point utterly. They are questions which are playing a rigid nineteenth century philosophical game which should have faded away ten seconds after Auschwitz was built, but somehow didn't. Remember what Sarton says: prayer is not about petitioning an almighty God and it's not about religion. It is not based on some specific metaphysics which cleaves the world into nature and supernatural, here and there, up and down. Those of you who have heard my sermons these last four years know I personally distrust metaphysical conclusions about the world that assume hidden Order behind the chaos of life, or require Supernatural Justice that explains or redeems all the injustices in this natural life. Remember what May Sarton prays to the One she calls, "Prince of the Imagination?" "Yours is to be the anarchist…" she writes without self-pity. "Prayer," she affirms, "is in creation, in the life that is lived," in "love that is planted deeper than emotion."

Verbal prayer, in fact, does not have to be addressed to God, or to Love, or to anything, although I personally find that direct address and dialogical forms are more useful than most to me. Furthermore, prayer does not have to be verbal at all, spoken or written. Sarton says that it can be a "work of art," or can even be found in sexual expressions. Prayer can take untraditional verbal forms too, such as passages in an honest diary, Anne Frank's comes to mind. It can be a dream journal that offers clues as to how to smooth down a rough time in one's life. It can be a relationship of almost excruciating friendship with another human being, as Sarton puts it so vividly: "When two people war to the bone and meet each other's skeleton." Even a long silent meditation can be a form of prayer. In fact, for 15 hundred years such silence has been called contemplative prayer in the Western Tradition. Buddhist language that calls such long silences meditation is actually relatively new here in the West. But in the end, the words we use don't matter much. The experience does, however.

Whatever action, words, posture, gesture or structure helps us to transcend our own limited understandings of our selves, that's a good prayer in my book. Whatever cuts through our defensiveness, whether it's disguised as a sense of worthlessness, or else a sense of hubris and arrogance, is a great prayer. We pray, I say, any time we embrace life with the authority and power given to us.

. Personally, I am a verbal person, and I prefer the forms of prayer that speak, scribble and spread across the page. Writing my Sunday prayers is always the favorite part of my whole week. But a prayer can be any number of things…a work of art, a time of silence, or a dance, just as well.

According to my research over the years, there is no really compelling, unequivocal evidence that any prayer, however sincere, changes other people's minds, or moves the universe around like a stock-boy stacking boxes. But my experience with my prayer in the hospital reminds me that prayer can help give even a mortal in deep distress like me the strength to go forward when he does not see any other way. Prayer made me clear on both my wants, my emotional needs, and how much I do not control. There are few greater powers than that among all the powers that move and shake the world. By praying as I did, I was able to let go and be more present to Mark in his distress.

Oh, I know there are pernicious prayers, touted by loudmouths, like the time when Mr. Falwell claimed that God never heard the prayer of a Jew. Rubbish. But the existence of pernicious forms of prayer does not invalidate the concept of prayer anymore than an abusive, drunken parent invalidates the concept of family, or a policeman on the take in Brooklyn invalidates the idea of the law. Pointing at things ungracious does not, folks, eradicate the gracious.

I am convinced that praying to God, or Love, or the Spirit of Life… take your pick… won't help you pass a test if you have not studied. It will not grow back an amputated leg, raise the dead, or create gold coins out of thin air for the poor or even the greedy. It will not stop the literal sun.

It can, however… whether with fixed words in prayer book, made-up words in the silent inner mind, a simple pause, a bit of painting or tender lovemaking, a journal entry, or a few moments thinking about the possible meanings of a dream… help us to know our needs (we do have them, do we not?), face our pettiness, enlarge our compassion, help us to be less critical of self and others, ease our built-up stress, unload our need for control, or show us for what we are: mortals in a mysterious, and yes, anarchic universe who nonetheless can grow more loving, more peaceful, less controlling and less panicked each and every day. When I prayed in the hospital for Mona and her child, I became completely clear about my feelings, my capabilities, and what I could and could not do from that fateful day on. I was clear about what I wanted, and what I would choose to do in either case. The sun, as it were, at that very moment stopped overhead and lit up everything clear as day, even though it was the middle of the night. It wasn't the most elegant of prayers. I was angry when I offered it, but I meant it and it was real. It was no bargain, but a pledge and a promise. And strangely, that prayer has given me strength to continue this work to this very day.

Prayer, in short, is one of the most human things we can do; and since we are human beings, isn't it wonderful we can do so much?

Or even maybe the children's story we heard this morning about Grandad's Prayers has the best and perfect closing insight…maybe all of the redbuds and cardinals and magnolias are praying too, all the time…by being exactly who they are.

Mystical Prayer [back to top]

And if I am made of the same stuff as the distant blue and red stars, what then? If the "I am" of Jesus by his lake is exactly the same as the "I am not" of Buddha under his fig tree, what then?

If the great philosopher Aquinas can have an experience of prayer so compelling that he could say to his colleagues, "Take all that I have written and use the pages to kindle the breakfast fire!" what then? If just one man or woman got up and walked away from the battlefront because they were sick at heart, what then? If Martin Luther King, Jr. and Harvey Milk both predicted they would die young and lived out their lives fully anyway, what then?

If God's name is not God, what then? If in ten thousand years, no one will remember Lincoln, let alone us, what then?

If for just a moment on a Thursday afternoon I reach a place where I can no longer tell where I begin and the magnolia blossom leaves off, what then?

If when I sing a song of spirit I cannot, at the same time sustain a brutal argument, what then? O Love, O Love, O Love, if you are as real as this moment, which touches me, but which I cannot touch, what then? O, what then?

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