"The Prayers of Unitarian Universalists"

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The Rev. Suzelle Lynch
October 17, 2004

It may be that since the beginnings of consciousness, human beings have prayed. “No one knows when or where prayer began. Almost two thousand years ago Plutarch, the Greek biographer and historian . . . observed, ‘If we traverse the world, it is possible to find cities without walls, without letters, without wealth, without coin, without schools or theatres: but a city without a temple, or that practices not worship, prayers and the like, no one has ever seen.’” (from “Prayer is Good Medicine,” by Larry Dossey, p. 77)

For early peoples, prayer was not a practice separate from daily life, but was woven into the fabric of life itself. All of life was prayer, because life was lived in constant communion with the natural world, which was thought to be enlivened by spirits. Everything one did was a kind of prayer – the gods were everywhere. But somewhere along the historical road the spiritual life and the material life became separated, and prayer became the possession of organized religion, which sought to bind it with rules and to tame its magical powers.

In recent years, scientific studies about prayer have made news by seeming to reunite the spiritual with the material. The scientists who are studying prayer can’t tell us why it works, but so far, the evidence seems to suggest that not only do prayer and meditation elicit a “relaxation response” that is beneficial to the one doing the praying, but also that being prayed for actually helps people heal physically, even when the person being prayed for doesn’t know it is happening. This has created quite a controversy in some medical and religious circles.

I can certainly understand why. I grew up mostly without prayer, and, I should say, with a profound disrespect for prayer. I remember praying as a young child, at least occasionally, that old bedtime staple, “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. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, bless the bed that I lay on. . .” I don't think this was something I learned at home, but perhaps on a sleepover at a friend's house – the same friend who frequently assured me I was going to hell because I wasn't a Christian. No doubt I went along with the prayer out of a need to fit in, but I sure had a lot of questions about it. Like just who was this lord who was going to keep my soul? Or take it. And what, exactly, was a soul, anyway? And who were those guys, Matthew, Mark, and so on. And what about dying in my sleep? I’m sure that was the source of at least one nightmare.

In my Unitarian Universalist world of the 60s and 70s – people didn’t seem to pray much, perhaps because they didn’t believe in God much. This was just the way it was, and I never questioned it.

But while I was taught outwardly to be respectful, inwardly I thought that people who prayed were weird. I thought they were weak. I thought they had been brainwashed or deluded into thinking that there was a guy in the sky out there listening to them. I felt pretty smug that I knew better, and secure in my knowledge that Unitarian Universalists saw no need for prayer.

The one day – about eighteen years ago -- something strange happened. I went to church – a UU church – and heard the minister – a UU minister – intone: "Let us unite our hearts and minds in the spirit of prayer…" Whoa, I thought. He's going to pray? UUs don't pray! But pray he did, and I sat there squirming until we got to the silent meditation part. Whew! Now that I could cope with: sitting silently with my own thoughts, surrounded by other people sitting silently with their own thoughts… But prayer? Did UUs really pray?

If we take a walk through our history as Unitarians and Universalists, we find a solid and enduring tradition of prayer. Lengthy prayers, often spoken extemporaneously by the minister, were a regular feature of worship in our early churches. These prayers could last as long as one of today's sermons! Congregants would write their concerns on scraps of paper and pass them to the minister, who would then weave them in as best he could, while they sat with the bowed heads they felt expressed the proper humility toward the "Power of God." This tradition is probably at the root of our practice of sharing Joys and Concerns during our services.

The 19th century brought flowery language to our public prayers. Mystical poetry featuring nature imagery and social concern began to replace the words of the Biblical psalmists.

The Rev. William Ellery Channing, one of our great 19th century Unitarian ministers, urged his congregation and all Unitarians to pray at least twice daily. “The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments agree in enjoining prayer," he wrote. "Let no man call himself a Christian who lives without giving a part of life to this duty. We are not taught how often we must pray; but our Lord, in teaching us to say, 'Give us this day our daily bread,' implies that we should pray daily. … Our religion is too liberal and spiritual to bind us to any place or any hour of prayer. … Let our prayers, like the ancient sacrifices, ascend morning and evening. Let our days begin and end with God." (In “Daily Prayer,” in Collected Works, 1875)

The 20th century brought spiritual explosions inspired by the works of Freud, Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche, plus revolution and economic collapse. As a result, Unitarians and to a lesser degree, Universalists, were no longer able to accept with any semblance of ease the idea of an all-powerful God. The questioning of prayer that began with the radical ideas of the Free Religious Association – which had brought transcendental and Eastern religious ideas into Unitarian circles, reached its peak in the assertions of the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, and the practice of prayer began to disappear from our congregations and our lives.

Our hymnals provide evidence of this movement away from prayer. The 1938 hymnal, "Hymns of the Spirit," had hundreds of prayers, but it also introduced "meditations" and "aspirations" for use in worship services. The next book, published in 1963, was "Hymns for the Celebration of Life." It had prayers, but they were mostly hidden under the category of "responsive readings," or "closing words."

Our current hymnal, "Singing the Living Tradition," was published in 1993. It has, by contrast, a substantial section of "Meditations and prayers," in which the prayers outnumber the meditations nearly three to one. It would appear that we are reclaiming the word "prayer," as well as its practice on Sunday mornings, and elsewhere in our lives.

Some of you might be wondering how this can be so when prayer is usually understood as a personal communication with God, and not all of today's UUs find the concept of a god relevant or useful.

Here's the thing about that. For those of you who are humanists or atheists, far be it from me to try to talk you into believing in any kind of god. But I would ask you to remember that the god you do not believe in isn't necessarily the god people like me do believe in. For me, God is not supernatural, not the guy in the sky, not supreme or manipulating or separate from the world. God is not the guy who makes sure your bicycle doesn't get stolen. God is more like what happens when a catalyst is added to a stable chemical solution. God is that force or transcendent energy that splashes up, that is more than the sum of the immanent parts or divine sparks each of us carries.

Here's the other thing: you don't have to believe in any kind of god at all to be able to pray.

I discovered this in seminary when I studied the teachings of the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, an African-American theologian who was, for a time, closely allied with our UU movement. Dr. Thurman wrote, "Prayer was not necessarily useful as an attempt to have a request granted, but rather, was effective because of the change that the act of praying evoked in the heart of one who prayed."

This was radical good news for me. It changed prayer from something that required me to bow down to a supreme being who was monitoring my life, to a practice that could change my heart about whatever it was I was called to pray about. The very act of prayer, Dr. Thurman wrote, involved giving voice to a part of myself previously kept silent.

That is, indeed, what I believe prayer to be. It is the act of speaking God into being. Not to grant wishes like a magical genie, but to transform our relationship to life in the very act of that speaking. In prayer we open up to a reality larger than that which we can rationally know, and our consciousness opens out, reaches high and far and digs deep. Instead of running in circles when we feel despairing, impotent or stopped, prayer allows us to express gratitude, wonder and need, and thus access a different state of being.

The other important key to prayer is that it doesn't have to make sense. Despite my deep belief in a Spirit of Life that is both immanent and transcendent, within us and beyond us, I remain a skeptic. But I have discovered that I can open myself in prayer to a larger Wholeness while remaining firmly seated in my skepticism that any kind of god exists in a scientifically provable way. This requires, of course, being comfortable with paradox, but ultimately paradox lives at the bottom of all the deep questions of human living.

These days my life is filled with prayers. My interfaith clergy group opens its meetings with a prayer or devotional of some kind. My UU clergy group includes prayer in its gatherings. My family says a simple grace at meals. I've prayed with people in hospitals, offices, homes, and over the Internet. Each Sunday from this pulpit I invite all of us here to join our hearts and minds in a meditative spirit. I pray silently and aloud by myself at least several times a day, and I often write prayers or letters to God in my journal. Prayer – both public and private -- has become a comfortable part of my daily life.

But it was not always this way. My early attempts at prayer were embarrassing at best. I'll never forget the time when I was working as a hospital chaplain intern and a woman who was very sick asked me to lead her and her family in the Lord's Prayer. "Uh, oh," I thought. Such a well-known prayer. Definitely not a part of my UU upbringing. But I plunged in bravely, “Our Father, who art in heaven….” When I got to the end, I realized I'd left a line out! Whoops. I quickly added it back in. The woman didn’t seem to mind, but I sure felt like a goofball. But somehow, I didn't let experiences like this stop me.

In my former church, for about a year, we had a group that met regularly to pray in my office. We mostly prayed for other people in our lives, but sometimes we prayed for ourselves as well. We sat in a circle around a candle and held hands, and most of us closed our eyes. People would give me the name or a description of the person they were praying for, and I'd start each prayer by saying, "We pray for so and so…." And then the person who knew that person would say a bit about what to pray for. It felt odd at first, and I was tempted to disband the group, but before long, everyone became quite comfortable with praying together, and they had a strong sense of increased hope for the world.

This experience was a great help to me when one of the regulars in that group, several years later, discovered that she had been sexually abused as a child by her father, who was long dead. She was devastated, felt completely betrayed by her mother, who was elderly and dependent upon her for help and support. It was wintertime, and she and I used to go together into the sanctuary of that church, and stand by the large windows that looked out into a valley full of trees. We would stand together, and hold hands, and pray – sometimes with words, sometimes with tears, sometimes in simple silence. In the prayers, in the grasp of her hand, I could feel her confusion and despair ease just a bit, and it gave us both hope.

Part of my intent today has been to reassure you – in case you were wondering -- that Unitarian Universalists can and do pray. But perhaps you also are wondering how to pray, so let me offer a few tips and hints.

In seminary, my instructor on Jewish spirituality, Jo Milgrom, taught us that prayer has at least four, and perhaps even five aspects. She named them petition, praise, thanks, and confession – and then added the fifth, which she humorously called "kvetching." (Sounds funny, I know, but it is a very powerful kind of prayer…)

Petitionary prayer was the one I'd heard most about – it was the kind of prayer my Catholic friends had been taught not to do. Asking God for help or to give you something was wrong, for God was supposed to know and provide what was best at all times. Praise and thanks, Jo taught us, were perhaps best understood in the Jewish practice of reciting blessings every day. There are lists of traditional blessings, such as prayers before meals, but also ones that are said upon seeing a beautiful landscape, experiencing a new food or putting on a new piece of clothing, and many more. These blessings usually begin, Blessed are you, O Lord our God…. For example, upon seeing nature's beauty, we might say, "Blessed are you, O Lord our God, who created the universe." Jewish tradition teaches that a person should perform 100 blessings per day – it’s a practice meant to foster a powerful awareness of and gratitude for all the gifts of life, and definitely something we might try: noticing, pausing, and offering thanks for the daily blessings in our lives. For as the great mystic Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer we ever say is ‘thank you,’ it will suffice.”

Confession, of course, means telling God of our failings – not necessarily so that God could pardon us, but as a way to encourage ourselves to make amends. And kvetching, well, this form of prayer is easily found in the Psalms, intermingled with words of praise and petition. Listen to these lines from the 22nd Psalm:

My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest….

The Psalmist goes on to tell the tale of his isolation from others, of the threats that surround him. He is pouring out his problems to God.
This kind of prayer is about realizing how alone we are, yet somehow not alone. It is a kind of remembering that even in our deepest despair or greatest confusion, we can reach out. I felt this keenly five years ago when my best friend was dying with cancer in her brain. I walked along a beach on the Oregon coast late in the summer, and yelled and screamed at God. Why, I yelled. Why, God, why is this happening to my dear friend? Why is this happening to me?
I was not praying for healing for my friend, for medically, she was beyond healing. I was not angry with God for hurting her, because that’s not the kind of God I believe in. But I was praying for a kind of healing for my own soul. For help in letting her go, letting her die. And no voice came in answer, only the "Shh" sound of the waves, but like Elizabeth Tarbox in our third reading, somehow "my soul leapt into the mightiness of God-space and was caught up in the momentary foreverness of love, and I knew without understanding or needing to that the Creator had spoken." I would not be saved from grief, my friend would not be saved from death. But in the very act of speaking, of yelling, of screaming, my relationship to life was transformed. In prayer, our consciousness opens out, reaches high and far and deep.

But prayer only works if we actually do it. To pray, we have to be able to stop amidst the rush and bustle of our lives. “To pray is to know how to stand still and to dwell upon a word,” says Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. We have to begin the discipline of making space in time and in our busy minds, for quiet, for focus, for reaching out to the great mystery.

This is why many religious traditions prescribe prayer. In Islam, for example, prayer is commanded five times a day. And these are not prayers made up by individual Muslims to suit their individual needs. The prayers are spelled out, certain words must be said, and are to be accompanied by prescribed movements. After the required number of units of prayer have been said, one may add personal prayers, asking Allah for guidance. Diana Eck, author of A New Religious America, How a "Christian Country Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation, comments that, "… no other tradition has so universally and elegantly ritualized a daily rhythm of prayer. Muslims speak not just of praying every day, but of 'establishing' prayer as a part of everyday life. In Islamic understanding our human condition is not so much a matter of original sin but of perpetual forgetfulness. We do forget God and thus fail as well to remember who we are as human beings. To establish prayer in one’s life is to stop the daily rush of life and commerce at regular intervals, to collect the mind and will in intention to prayer, and to perform the required prayers." (Page 272.) What would our lives be like if we knew, as the Muslims know, that all Unitarian Universalists were praying five times each day in a great and mindful circle of shared intention?

I believe that all prayers are meaningful, even those bargaining sessions we might secretly indulge in with god when we find ourselves in dire circumstances, even our most childish prayers that treat God like Santa Claus. There simply is no right or wrong way to pray.

And remember, you need not believe in any kind of god to pray, but you must believe in life. For the purpose of prayer is not to earn brownie points in heaven, not to magically manifest goods and services, but to change ourselves from the inside out, so that we move into life more deeply, more compassionately. The purpose of praying, as James Dillet Freeman said in our reading is “to quicken into activity the creative processes that lie at the root of being.. .” the creative processes which allow us to be like the tree he describes – stretching ourselves into the mystery with both roots and leaf-tips. Stretching our responses to life so we may become more whole; and becoming more whole not for ourselves, but so that we may help heal the many hurts in our world.

And so, if we will, let us pray. Amen.