When Naomi and I sat down to coordinate our parts of this service, we weren’t sure how to bring up prayer in the Time for All Ages. None of the stories we could find felt right. Some of them were collections of prayers for kids. Others privileged one tradition’s prayers without considering others. So Naomi suggested this: “Why don't we ask the kids? What do they think about prayer?” When all else fails, ask a friend. We call it a time for all ages, because we know that people of all ages can learn something from it. And people of all ages have something to teach each other. And as we listened along, I imagine that you all heard some of your own questions and answers in what our kids shared.
It could be….
There are so many ways we can answer the question, “What is prayer?” It’s a beautiful thing that we can answer it in so many ways, but it’s a challenge, too. That's the tricky thing about prayer for us as Unitarian Universalists. We won’t all agree on what it is, or why it’s important, or if it’s important at all. We come together based on how we want to treat each other. We’re not worried about agreeing on how the universe is ordered and how to best honor that order.
Because of our different relationships with this practice, it can be a source of tension – maybe worth avoiding. But prayer also feels like something “we’re supposed to do” in church. It feels fundamental to so many experiences of religious life. If nothing else, taking time for reverent contemplation feels like it makes our time together complete. Yet the question remains. When we pray together, if we pray together, where does our prayer go? To who, or what, are we praying? And for what? We don't come here with one particular answer. Even still, while we can celebrate being a faith of questions, seeking answers also matters. Answers ground us, even if we change them later. In that spirit, I want to search for an answer with you today. What is prayer good for?
You might ask that question yourself with some sincerity or skepticism. Some of you might be thinking of family traditions you grew up with. Maybe prayer was how your family got ready for bed each night, or marked the end of one week and the beginning of the next.
Some of you might have felt jaded as you turned the thought over in your head. Maybe you could hear Janis Joplin singing, “Lord Won’t You Buy Me A Mercedes Benz?1” Sitting there, gritting your teeth as you think of all the people who treat prayer like some cosmic vending machine to get what they want in life. Or perhaps you feel your stomach tightening, thinking back to a time when someone asked to pray for you, or told you to pray through something, when that was far from what you needed.
And some of you, I know, have a rich and active prayer practice. It’s an opportunity for you to reflect on your life. To celebrate it. To commit to living in it more fully.
That’s certainly the case for me. Prayer is something that grounds me in relationship. It helps me prepare to show up as my best self. But like any practice, it has taken years of my life to feel like I know what I’m doing. The first time I remember praying, it was late one night as I was going to bed. I must have been five or six. And earlier that night my mom had told me something I didn’t understand. She told me that an old friend of hers had cancer. And she asked my brother and me to include Camille in our bedtime prayers. I don’t remember her elaborating. I don’t remember us asking any questions. Just say a prayer. So there I am, knees bent on my comforter, hands folded on my windowsill, looking out into the night, trying to find some star to fix my attention on. And I say something small and earnest like, “God, please take care of Camille.”
Of all the things I could remember from a lifetime ago, I'm not sure why I have held on to this one. But it’s one I have returned to over the years. Sometimes when I have returned to it, I’ve wondered, “Was that a vending-machine prayer?” After all, there I was, all of five years old. Praying about a woman I've never met. Who has a disease I don't understand. To a God I only know so well. I've wondered looking back, “Did I even understand what I was asking for?” Probably not. But there were things I understood then. I understood how worried my mom was. I could feel it in my little chest, and I can still feel it talking with you now. And while I didn't bend my knees with a deep, theologically-reasoned understanding of who God was, I understood this much. That God was someone, something, bigger than me and my family. God was whatever is bigger than all of us. Big enough for me to pour out my little heart full of worry. Big enough to hold it all and then some. I see now that whatever else was true, I had a sense that prayer is how we honor our relationships.
How and when I pray has changed since that night. What prayer means to me has changed. The Gods and power I pray to have definitely changed. But that longing to pour out my heart remains. So I hear echoes of my own story in Rev. Cheryl Walker’s, our reading for this morning. It took an unlikely friend to remind her about a simple power of prayer. It can be relieving to pour out our hearts.2
There is something fundamentally important about getting things off of our chests. Even good things get hard to bottle up if we let them sit for too long. Pouring out our hearts matters. It's important also that we direct our outpouring somewhere, somehow. In our reading, Rev. Walker's friend isn't filing away her outpourings into a journal or blog-post. She poured out her heart to the very universe itself. We can imagine, out to the fullness of life and existence. Prayer is a way of reaching out beyond the smallness of our lives. It's a way of keeping a line open to something greater than ourselves. Of maintaining a relationship.
That was the part of prayer Rev. Walker missed. She missed remembering that we're part of a greater whole3. Remembering that we're not alone. Whether or not we believe in or pray to a god with a capital G, we are not ourselves the biggest thing out there. We are part of a big, sprawling cosmos, stretching out around us. A cosmos full of relationships knit together. It’s one thing to know this intellectually. It’s another to put it into practice. To remind ourselves and each other of this reality.
In our opening words4, the ecofeminist Ivone Gebara gives names to the many reminders prayer can offer us. It can remind us of deep feelings, deep commitments, deep connections. It directs our attention to the ways we want to show up in the world: in solidarity, respect, compassion. Perhaps now more than ever, we’re in danger of forgetting our commitments and connections. Dr. Gebara is a Brazilian Catholic nun, now in her eighties, and has spent her life reminding anyone who would listen how profoundly damaged our relationships with the world and each other are. As a young woman in Recife, Brazil, she saw how the lives of the rich damaged the world, and damaged the poor women around her. So she committed herself to finding ways to repair desecrated relationships with the sacred world5. She knew it would take a massive reimagination of God, the Cosmos, and how we relate to them. Decades after she wrote our opening words, this imaginative work feels even more urgent.
For all our differences, I still find she has many things in common with UUs. She was trying to find her way to a new understanding of our place in this world. Doing that involved a massive amount of theological transposing. Taking one register of understanding and giving it a new sound in another key. Finding new meaning for prayer and its purpose was part of this. And she knew not everyone would agree with her, but took a stab at answering this sprawling question anyway.
Prayer, she knew, is a way of remembering our connections. It prepares us to honor them. For Dr. Gebara, prayers are natural, creative expressions, as natural as song or dance. As natural as the human need to reach outside our individual selves6. Dr. Gebara and Rev. Walker are alike in this way. They give us an understanding of prayer that is broad but seems intimately ordinary. They are untroubled by the question of who we’re praying to. It's the act that matters. It’s what the act inspires in us that matters. And yet, knowing to whom or to what we pray is also important. If prayer is about relationship, reflecting on what makes relationships meaningful guides us to explore prayer’s power and possibility.
Consider your own relationships for a moment. Which ones are the most meaningful? The ones, I imagine, where you really know the other person. A relationship with nothing in particular has no depth or contour in particular. Knowing to whom or to what we pray anchors our intentions and attention. We could pray to anyone, anything, and getting specific helps.
Though what does this mean for Unitarian Universalists? I’m not advocating here that we subscribe in a Singular Something Particular. Our ability to disagree makes our lives together richer and stronger. But still, if we aren't moved to agree on to whom we pray, or whether there is even anyone to pray to at all, how do we anchor ourselves? How can we be both broad and specific at the same time? What could unite our intentions and attention?
Let's take a pause. Listen to the people around you. Notice the person next to you. Now notice someone across the room. Notice the people on your screen, or in the world around you if you're at home watching by yourself. Where is our attention now?
There is relationship right here, and there is power in relationship. Power to love. Power to care. Power that brings change to life in the world. Power to bring meals to a loved one, or circulate a petition, or hold each other in tender witness. However else we may disagree about the world, this much is true. There is a power and potential between us. The power of our relationships are worth remembering, tending to, honoring.
You may have noticed something about how I pray in my time here. Often when I lead the Pastoral Prayer, I draw our attention to something like the Love of all Loves, the Sum of All Being. If there is any unifying entity in this universe, then it comes from the bottom up, like cells dividing to create a body. This is my way of remembering that we are a part of something greater that ourselves. We are a part of an interdependent web. A web of relationships, the source of great power.
This has been one of the most precious things Unitarian Universalism has taught me. I hear us honor that truth each morning when we sing Spirit of Life7. Spirit of life, spirit of all our lives combined, come unto me, come into our collective awareness. Move in our hands, that we may give life the shape of justice. This simple, beloved hymn is a prayer to our collective potential. This is a theme in many of our prayers and affirmations. It was in the affirmation we shared in our Pastoral Prayer this morning. This affirmation was written by the religious humanist Rev. Leonard Mason8. In these words he invokes the possibility between us. We affirm the unfailing renewal of life, we affirm our power to renew it. No matter how lofty our joys, no matter how heavy our sorrows, together we always have some power to care for one another, to build a better world. The world we dream about together.
This is what we can hold and remember in prayer.
1. Janis Joplin, Bob Neuwirth, and Michael McClure, "Mercedes Benz," recorded July-October 1970, side 2, track 3 on Pearl, Columbia Records, vinyl.
2. Cheryl M. Walker, “The Outpouring of the Heart,” in Not for Ourselves Alone: Theological Essays on Relationship, ed. Burton D. Carley & Laurel Hallman (Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 2014), 50.
3. Ibid., 49.
4. Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation, trans. David Molineaux (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 120.
5. Ibid., 2.
6. Ibid., 117.
7. Carolyn McDade, "Spirit of Life," in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: The Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993), #123.
8. Leonard Mason, "Affirmation," in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, MA: The Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993), #470.