CALL TO WORSHIP
In December, 1944, the U.S. Third Army was preparing to
cross the Rhine River into Germany, under the leadership of
General George S. Patton. Persistent soaking rains were
impeding their advance. General Patton ordered James
O’Neill, a chaplain with the Third Army, to “see if we can’t
get God to work on our side” by composing and publishing to
the troops a prayer. Chaplain O’Neill balked at the idea of
praying for clear weather to facilitate the taking of human
life. Patton insisted. The chaplain composed and
distributed the following prayer:
Almighty and most merciful father, we humbly beseech Thee,
of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains
with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather
for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call
upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from
victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness
of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and
nations. Amen.
I don’t know what prayers might have issued
from the other side of this battlefield. It is recorded,
however, that the bad weather soon abated, and Chaplain
O’Neill was promptly given a medal for his outstanding
service. [PAUSE] General Patton’s prayer was preceded and
followed by many other famously misbegotten ones—so many
that no one could be blamed for doubting whether it is still
possible to recover prayer from their cumulative desecrating
effect. But for an hour or so this morning, let us try.
Come, let us worship together.
SERMON
My earliest memory of prayer goes back to second grade. A
classmate got seriously injured on the playground one day
and was taken away in an ambulance. The rest of us got into
a circle and prayed. It was something you did when somebody
got hurt badly or was really sick.
It was also something you did in
church, of course. I mostly remember not knowing why we
were praying or how to do it. I felt there must be rules,
but nobody talked about them, other than telling me to close
my eyes and bow my head.
Prayer was like a strange form of long distance phone call.
I say long distance because back then such calls were
unusual; expensive; and meant something important was
happening. I say strange because the person being
telephoned was unknown to me . . . and never once said
anything back.
This child’s-eye view of prayer followed me into adulthood.
Everyone continued to pray in church as if prayer were
perfectly understood, which gave the impression it would be
rude to ask about it. Becoming a UU in my thirties didn’t
clear up my puzzlement about prayer. In my new church,
discussion of prayer – such as there was -- focused on three
questions: first, if we do pray, to whom or what are we
praying, whether called God, a universal spirit, or
something else? Second, what does it mean to communicate
with a being who is silent? Third, are prayers actually
answered; if so, how, and if not, well then what’s the
point?
My UU friends tended to fall into two camps in relation to
these questions. Some had concluded that satisfying answers
were not to be found. They also associated prayer with
religions they viewed as oppressive – just as sin,
salvation, and some other religious concepts were. Others
had found something in the experience of prayer that they
could not articulate fully, but felt positive about. They
associated prayer with meditation and focused mostly on how
it affected their living. They weren’t particularly
concerned about the philosophical questions.
My own engagement with prayer was complicated by another
problem: I felt I simply wasn’t “good at” prayer. It made
me feel clumsy. A big unconscious assumption lay beneath
this feeling: that prayer should be artful. The possibility
that artfulness might actually be an obstacle to real
prayer didn’t occur to me.
My difficulties with prayer persisted, but so did a sense of
glimpsing its deeper meaning out of the corner of my eye,
like something always about to claim my attention. I still
don’t have prayer figured out. As a practitioner of
it, I certainly have no sense of having arrived. But
as a result of the turn my life has taken in the past few
years, prayer definitely has claimed my attention. Here is
what I see.
Real prayer is not ostentatious pieties, but rather, a way
of begging and pleading. If you have ever seen, or been,
a confirmed nonpractitioner of prayer who finds himself
falling to his knees when something of extraordinary value
is suddenly at stake – like life itself – then you know what
I mean. People beg for many things in prayer, but if we put
aside the wish fulfillment variety of prayer for things like
a Mercedes Benz, there is a common underlying theme: a cry
for connection with whomever and whatever we are
disconnected from, or are in jeopardy of becoming
disconnected from. Disconnected from our own selves, from
our communities, from nature, from the world, from all that
is finite, and from the infinite realm that lies beyond.
All of these prayers are about the human longing for
wholeness.
This longing is felt most deeply in that place within each
of us where we know what it means to be whole, to be
connected, and thus feels the anguish of separation and
estrangement most acutely. This is the part of us that
knows what is needed to recover from and transcend these
wounds and losses. “Heart” or “soul” are the names I use to
talk about this interior place.
The heart needs to speak the truth about separation and
loss, to reach out for connection. At the risk of sounding
melodramatic, to reach out for the many connections
that add up an experience of wholeness is to plead for
life. Not life in the ordinary sense of functioning
physiologically. Life in the sense of being fully alive –
present to the whole experience. Wholeness means connection
to everything. We can’t have that if we pick and
choose, seeking out pleasure and happiness while filtering
out pain and sadness. Wholeness demands a life in full, a
life lived incautiously. A life so large as to include not
only being grounded in the here and now but also being
connected to the infinite – call it the divine, call it God,
call it whatever name suits.
To live this way, rather than only catching rare glimpses of
it, is to have a profound experience of life as a blessing,
as rife with astonishing, creative possibilities. Every
human heart has the capacity and the longing for this
experience. And yet, we often overlook these possibilities
– especially when they are found where we don’t usually put
our attention. What dusty dwarves have you and I rocketed
past in our travels – our gaze fixed on far-off things we
deemed “Important,” with a capital “I”? And every heart
knows and accepts that these possibilities utterly depend on
an all-inclusive mixture of good and bad in our mortal
experience. There is no such thing as real joy and
fulfillment without real pain and sorrow in the bargain.
Along with being a violation and a loss, every wound is an
opening to something new and valuable.
And so the heart looks for its chance to cry out “I am
disconnected, I am isolated, please embrace me.” This is a
wonderfully paradoxical grievance – one negated as soon as
it is spoken. To make this plea to whomever or whatever is
on the other side of the chasm of disconnection is to affirm
the most important connection of all: our shared experience
of isolation and disconnection. But from the bottom of our
hearts to the front of our mouths is a long and difficult
distance for this cry to travel.
Prayer is all about bringing this precious, heart-felt plea
to the surface. Some may prefer a less intense word for
this than pleading – maybe something more dignified; but
all the evidence I see tells me we are eager to beg
and plead when something vital is at stake. A life cut off
from an experience of blessing and creative possibility is a
life of desolation. A life connected to that
experience is precious beyond measure, worth all the
challenges of a downward, inward journey to the bottom of
the heart, and back. And worth being a beggar, bowing
before the universe, hat in hand, to utter the heart’s plea
aloud. [pause] In this life, we are all spiritual beggars.
Our hearts know it. The only question is whether we will
own up to it.
And whom does the heart wish to have hear this plea? My
answer is, someone who can enable us to receive the
aliveness for which our hearts hunger. If this aliveness
depends on an experience of connectedness with all
beings and all things, then to be heard by a
universal being or spirit – the mystery I usually call God
-- surely is what the heart wants and needs. Fulfilling
this need doesn’t depend on pledging allegiance to God, or
finishing the work of sorting out your beliefs or unbeliefs
about God. Staying with me for the rest of this sermon
doesn’t depend on that either. If we could only have a
conversation about things we’re already clear about, the
conversation wouldn’t be worth having.
God can hear our hearts only if our hearts speak. And the
heart will only trouble itself to speak if a receptive
listener is present. How is God receptive to our
prayers? I say, by being silent. God hears our plea. No
reaction is interjected, no control exerted, no condition
imposed, no judgment rendered, no wound inflicted. The idea
of a silent communication partner may sound strange, but
we’ve all had the experience of talking with someone who
just listened, or said very little – someone who had no
particular power to grant our wishes, and yet gave us a
tremendous feeling of having our burden lightened, simply by
being heard. Really heard. It is so different from just
talking to yourself.
This is the God I want to be connected with – a God that
means so much more to me than the tactical support unit
General Patton wanted his God to be. A God that does not
turn life into a game of tennis played with the net down; a
game rigged from the start by some genie who will grant my
foolish wish to have every match point go my way, and then
to drive off in a new Mercedes.
And can you imagine what it would be like if God actually
spoke in response to our prayers? In the face of such
power, would there be any life left for us to live, anything
to do other than conform to such a divine pronouncement?
[pause] Does that sound like the life you want?
If God must remain silent in order to give us room to plead,
how can God answer our prayers? I say, by giving us the
astonishing range of possibilities we are capable of
receiving when we have an experience of wholeness, of being
fully alive. We have the capacity to ask for an
all-inclusive life. Every morning when we awake, God
answers with the given world – good and bad, pain and
pleasure, the whole nine yards; the makings of an
all-inclusive life, if we are willing to receive
them. We choose and act into that world, and the
next day, it is there for us again – updated, if you will,
to reflect that we were alive and in it the day before. God
is willing to be surprised by our choices and actions. If
we likewise are willing to be surprised – better yet,
astonished -- by the given world, then our plea for the
largest possible life – which is to say, for wholeness --
can be granted.
This “answer” to our prayers is not like a human response
that follows in chronological sequence. The only way I know
to describe it is to say that God has always been answering,
is answering when we pray, and will be answering forever.
When we ask for life by praying, we connect ourselves to
that endless answering.
This unlocks the puzzle in the passage from Christian
scripture printed in your order of service, in which Jesus
says that everyone who asks receives, everyone
who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks the
door will be opened. The asking and receiving, the
searching and finding, the knocking and opening are
inseparable. They are one and the same. When the heart
truly speaks, it pleads for life. In the very making of
that plea, a transformed life of full aliveness is what the
pleader receives. The prayer is asked and answered. The
longed-for wholeness and reconnection is realized.
This understanding of prayer has enabled me to make my peace
with those three basic questions that seemed so difficult
when I first became a UU. First, I don’t need to worry about
working out a theology of God before I pray, because God is
inherently a mystery. Second, far from being a problem,
God’s silence is exactly the wide open space needed to make
room for my plea for aliveness. And third, once I let go
of the conventional idea of an answer following a prayer in
chronological sequence, I can see that the plea itself is
the answer.
I don’t think the hard part of prayer is the praying itself
or how to get an answer. I think the hard part is to get to
the point where the heart can plead for its deepest desire.
This can only happen if the heart opens itself to everything
from which it has been separated. That means risking new
wounds and the re-injury of old ones. It means dropping
all of the heart-hardening defenses we have built up against
such wounds.
This may sound like we need to pry open our own hearts
before we are eligible to pray. But an open heart is not a
prerequisite for prayer. Rather, it is a posture toward
living that prayer can bring within our reach. We
never need to make ourselves presentable to God before
praying. God has no standards. God’s readiness to listen
is indiscriminate. We never have to conform to a prescribed
style or content in praying – not even a prescription that
we must beg accurately for our heart’s deepest desire. We
have only to begin from where we are. No one has ever
gotten where he is going by starting anywhere else.
If where we are is wounded, angry, and isolated, if we feel
unable to welcome that
everything-included-nothing-left-out-warts-and-all life,
then these may be the truths our prayers need to publish.
If we pay attention, our hearts will tell us whether our
petitions are moving us closer to our deepest desires – or
whether we have played it safe by asking for too little – a
mere Mercedes, for example.
The same questions should be asked about our prayers that
can be asked about any spiritual practice: is this
loosening the rusty hinges of my heart? Is this
moving me closer to seeing that full-out, incautious life as
a blessing rife with creative possibility, rather than as an
evil to ward off – rather than as just another chance to get
hurt or disappointed? Is it enlarging my experience of
wholeness – of connection with myself, my community, nature,
the world, and the mystery that lies beyond the finite? The
important step is to put ourselves in a position to listen
to our own prayers, and in so doing, to open up the
possibility of having a different experience of being
alive.
Prayer deserves to be called sacred, which is the name for
anything that moves us closer to the holy, to an experience
of wholeness. Sacred also means “set aside.” To treat
prayer as sacred requires that we remove it from the
deafening roar of daily life. This enables us to listen for
God’s silence, if you can allow that paradox, and to hear
ourselves speaking into that silence. Only in such a set
aside place can we do the work of making our pleas truer and
truer to our heart-opening purpose. We are in such a place
right now.
The best prayer is the one you can bring yourself to
utter. Maybe yours will have the imagery of a Native
American prayer -- like the one Jess read this morning from
Joy Harjo. Someone else’s might sound like the prayer we
heard in Hebrew in this morning’s choir anthem, which
translates “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of
my heart be acceptable in your sight O Lord, my rock and
redeemer.” That may not sound like a plea for life to many
of us, but all that really matters is how it moves the heart
of the person who utters it.
And I know some of you are wondering why on earth I
read you that prayer poem from James Weldon Johnson – pretty
obviously not the way I use words. I read it because I
couldn’t help reading it. I read it because the voice I
hear in it is so real, and opens my heart so. I read it
because hearing that African-American voice ask again for
life, for salvation, after being called everything but a
child of God, makes me more able to haul my own prayer up
from the bottom of my heart, and push it out of my mouth,
where it might do me some good.
Your best prayer might not sound like any “genre” at all.
[pause] I have a friend in Portland who makes her living
doing social justice work. On days when the insanity of
injustice in the world gets particularly unbearable,
she paddles out into the middle of a nearby river, sits
there in her canoe completely alone, and cries out to God.
She does not request the rescue of a particular friend, or
the vanquishment of a particular foe, or the cessation of
military hostilities somewhere on the globe, or an end to
world hunger. Her prayer is a simple and open-ended plea
for help – help in rising to the challenge and gift of the
largest possible life.
Prayer is so much more than a ritualized form of direct
address to God. It is the opening through which life can be
received, in the very act of asking for it. It is a sacred
struggle to plead the truth, to listen to ourselves, to live
with each other heart to heart. To move ever closer to being
fully alive. Come out of your tents. Knock. Seek. ASK.
AMEN.