Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

January 25, 1998

"God, I discovered, was not an upper-middle-class snob in a private, clublike ‘holy of holies’ nor was God an impersonal I.B.M. machine computing petty sins in some celestial office building above the clouds. It came home to me that God was loving, in a terrible unsentimental and profound way."

--from the radical priest Malcolm Boyd, in his book Are You Running with Me, Jesus?

SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS

They asked the abbot Macarius, saying, "How ought we to pray?" and the old man said, "There is no need of much speaking in prayer, but often stretch out thy hands and say, ‘Lord, as Thou wilt and as Thou knowest, have mercy upon me.’ But if there is war in thy soul, add, ‘Help me.’ And because He knoweth what we have need of, He showeth us His mercy.

GONG

A friend of the monk Anthony once asked him, "What thing is so good that I may do it and live by it?" Anthony answered not by saying, "Here is what you need to do and here is how you need to pray." Instead he answered, "Cannot all works please God equally? Scripture says, Abraham was hospitable and God was with him. And Elijah loved quiet, and God was with him. And David was humble and God was with him. So whatever you find you soul wills in following God’s will, do it, and keep your heart.

GONG

They said of an old man that he went on fasting for seventy weeks, eating a meal only once a week. He asked of God the meaning of a text of the holy Scriptures and God did not reveal it to him. So he said to himself: "Here I am: I have worked so hard, and profited nothing. I will to to my brother and ask him." Just as he had shut his door on the way out, an angel of the Lord was sent to him; and the angel said: "The seventy weeks of your fast have not brought you near to God: but now you are humbled and going to your brother, I have been sent to show you the meaning of the text." And he explained to him what he had asked, and went away.

GONG

GONG

A few days ago as I was reading Sports Illustrated—now right there we’ve destroyed a stereotype: I’ll bet you guys thought I didn’t read Sports Illustrated—well, this just goes to show. Actually I was in the home of a friend who pointed out an interesting article in the current issue of the magazine (January 26): it is entitled "Does God Care Who Wins the Super Bowl?" Well, I have my answer, even without reading the article. But the article was interesting—it turned out to be a recounting of the fundamentalist religious fervor that has taken hold in many pro-football teams.

It appears that after the Denver Broncos won the AFC Championship Game on January 11, "a group of players dropped to their knees on the artificial turf at Three Rivers Stadium. Some raised their eyes and helmets to the bright-blue heavens. Others voiced their thanks to God. ‘It was the Lord’s will that we win, and we won,’ Denver guard Mark Schlereth said later in the locker room." Four hours later the Green Bay Packers beat the 49ers 23-10 and won the NFC title in San Francisco, and once again, the will of God was invoked as the cause of victory. Right after that game about 20 Packers and a few Niners gathered near midfield and knelt down in prayer, to praise and thank God. This afternoon I guess we’ll find out just where God is betting His money.

We Americans are a praying people. Ninety per cent of us pray, and more than half of us pray daily. Eighty-seven per cent of us believe that God answers prayers. And where do we as Unitarian Universalists fall in this nation of praying people? All over the map. Many of us are skeptical. Like the good Unitarian, for example, that was visited by the chaplain in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital. He showed respect for her religious perspective, and yet asked, "I’m curious, really. Tell me, in a situation like this, facing surgery, where does someone like yourself find her comfort?" The woman blurted out, "Well, in statistics, I suppose!"

Concerning prayer, many of us might agree with the late Carl Sagan, who included prayer along with spoon-bending, ESP, witches, and repressed memories as examples of the tenacity of irrationality. Though many of his friends prayed for him during his final illness, Sagan could never become a believer himself. As he neared death, there were no appeals to God, no hope of an afterlife. "But didn’t he want to believe?" his wife was asked. "Carl never wanted to believe," she replied fiercely. "He wanted to know."

Yes, many of us Unitarian Universalists are skeptical in regard to prayer, for historically we have said that reason must not be set aside for comforting superstitions. There is courage in that stance. And yet many of us are exploring spiritual dimensions of our existence, dimension in which there can be little objective or scientific proof. Joseph Campbell once said to Carl Sagan, "Carl, do you believe in love?" Sagan said, "Of course I do." He was very much in love with his wife. And Campbell replied, "But can you prove to me that love exists?" Sagan finally had to agree that love, like faith, is ultimately unprovable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There are realities—perhaps the most significant of realities—realities like love and honor and compassion--that we can’t know empirically, but nonetheless carry the real meaning and burden of our existence.

Today I’d like to try to see if we can go deeper than seeing prayer as manipulation of the world order, to explore whether or not there is something here for those of us who would never dream of thanking God that our team won the Super Bowl. First of all let me say that it would be arrogant of me to lay out a technique, a proper approach to prayer. As I said in a recent sermon, quoting Paul, "God hears our inarticulate groanings." The essence of prayer is the desire for the relationship. So you do it however you can do it and don’t worry about technique.

And don’t worry about the fruits of prayer. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to judge how the Spirit works in this world. We have to trust in a larger truth than we can know. But I do pray for people. I pray for the leaders of this congregation; for those of you going through particular hard times, times of brokenness or illness or stress; I pray for my children, I pray for myself. My spiritual director gave me a candle for Christmas and when I do my morning prayers, I light the candle and pray that I might be a reflection of that larger light that animates all the world. Sometimes people tell me they are praying for me, and I treasure those prayers, even if they are from people who think I’m in real trouble, like my fundamentalist brother who thinks that God doesn’t want women to be leaders in the church. The fact is that life and goodness are tenuous, and I need all the prayers I can get. I’m greedy for prayers, you might say. Put me on your list.

I’m remembering a minister friend of mine, a strong social justice advocate and an atheist—we had a rather passionate disagreement about the existence of God in the women’s rest room at seminary. She was disdainful of me for believing. I was surprised, then, several years ago when she published an article on prayer. In that article she tells this story. She says, "I was about to embark on a ten-day trip to El Salvador, at a time of great tension in that country, shortly after six Jesuit priests and their housekeepers had been murdered. I had been to Central America many times before, but this time I was more nervous than I’d ever been about such a trip. On the Tuesday before my departure, I attended the regular weekly meeting of the local Ministers’ Association. Except for me and one or two others, this group consisted entirely of African American ministers. I had been a member of the group for over two years, and had grown to feel quite accepted despite the distance posed by race, theology, gender, and age. I told the group what I was about to do. One of the members asked that when the meeting was over, the group take an extra few minutes to pray for me. When the time came, to my surprise and initial consternation, I was asked to come up to the front and have a seat facing the sixty or so ministers who were still there. Then someone started singing a rich and resonant hymn that spoke of resting in the safety of Jesus, and as they lifted their tenor and baritone voices, these ministers trooped up and gathered around me as they sang and then as they prayed. I have never felt so cared for . . . and to be honest so brimming full of the Holy Spirit as I was in that moment."

So there are intentional times of prayer, in which we come in quiet to listen for the murmurings of the Spirit or to give thanks or to place our petitions before the Mystery. There is public prayer in public places, to acknowledge in community our devotion to our highest ideals. But could there be another kind of praying that is so close to the heart that we hardly think about it as prayer? What would it mean to throw off conventional concepts of prayer and to explore the meaning of St. Paul’s admonition in I Thessalonians 5:17: "Pray without ceasing." What would it mean to pray without ceasing?

There was a group of early Christians that took Paul at his word, and they became known as the Desert Fathers. This group of monks flourished in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine in the fourth and fifth centuries: some were hermits living alone, some were monks and nuns living in communities, and some lived in groups of three or four, often as disciples of a master. For the most part they were simple, uneducated men and women. They attracted the attention of many others because of their simplicity and devotion. The first thing that struck people about them was how much they did without: little sleep, no baths, poor food, tattered clothing, hard work, and of course no sex. This is a life that doesn’t sound very inviting! But out of the emptiness of the desert and out of the rejection of earthly concerns, they cultivated the love of God and the love of all creation. Their founder Anthony said, "The one who abides in solitude and is quiet, is delivered from fighting three battles—those of hearing, speech, and sight. Then that person will have but one battle to fight—the battle of the heart." They were the rebels, challenging the received wisdom that property and goods are essential, that no one can be fully human without sex and domesticity. Their very name, anchorite, means rule-breaker. They did not write much, for most of them remained illiterate. Their "words"—aphorisms and stories--were collected by their disciples and have been passed down to this day.

Now given that most of us do not want to go out into the desert and weave baskets all day, or any contemporary equivalent, what can these early monks teach us, these strange men and women who renounced all earthly pleasures to pray without ceasing?

Well, for one thing they teach us that prayer need not be a "special" activity set aside for a special time and place. For them there was no clear boundary between work and prayer. Similarly, in a community of prayer, they questioned whether there was really any boundary between the prayer of one and the prayer of another. They did not make a distinction between the act and the content of prayer. For the desert fathers, then, prayer is as much a part of life as breathing, the sharing of the common source of life.

Perhaps we could begin to see prayer not as monologue, but as dialogue, and if we understand that it is the relationship with the Other that we are after, then we will come as we are, in whatever mood or reality that that is ours at the moment: we may be bored or anxious or angry or distracted. We understand that we do not have to be perfect before God, because we no longer see the Mystery as some kind of giant judge in the sky, but rather What Is. We need not be afraid. We speak as to a friend, or as to our beloved. There is a rhythm to it. We pause to listen, we remain sometimes in friendly silence, we voice both our agonies and our joys, anxiety rises within us as new truth knocks at the door of our certainties, we feel ourselves pulling back and we accept that as normal, we think of one we love and thanksgiving rises up unexpectedly. And so it goes in this rhythm of friendly give and take. Prayer like this is prayer that acknowledges your partnership with God. It’s immediate. It’s real. Prayer like this can emerge any time, any place. You do not need an appointment for this kind of prayer.

How do we get to a place where our spiritual life is not just something we "do" at church—or just at a designated time and place where we do our spiritual practice?

My spiritual director, who is a Ph.D. in philosophy and a Catholic nun, tells me she prays all the time. I understand her to mean that she walks in the Spirit so comfortably that she never feels herself out of the presence of God. It’s like being in love and feeling yourself so bound to another that you feel in that loving presence wherever you are. She has such a closeness to this Presence that an easy exchange takes place about all manner of things. She told me once that she was driving along and she felt suddenly led to go to Pendleton Woolen Mills. Well, that was a long way from where she lived, and she didn’t particularly want to make the trip. But there was an insistence about this urging that she couldn’t dismiss, and so she drove to Pendleton. There she found a big pile of beautiful woolen garments for women in an extra-extra large size, which fit her sister perfectly. These garments were on sale for $1.00 each. So she bought the clothing and went back to the convent. Now I don’t have this kind of experience, and I can’t judge it. I just know what she told me. The cynic in me says, "Does God give shopping tips?" But the woman of faith says, "Isn’t that interesting? What can I learn here?"

As I experience my daily life, the usual ordinary events, I find myself wondering in what ways could prayer be cultivated—or perhaps I should use the word "acknowledged." Perhaps we all are in a state of prayer more times than we realize. We are praying in a sense when we iron the sleeve of a shirt of someone we love and with each warm touch of the iron, we dwell in that love. Or when we see the wind moving in the branches of the cedar and we feel graced by that beauty and at one with the tree. Or when we see the sleeping child and cannot imagine a holiness greater than this. Perhaps we pray whenever we are thankful. Whenever we love. Whenever delight awakens our senses. Whenever our heart aches at another’s pain. Whenever we ourselves are in pain, and we cry out.

As Frederick Buechner says, ". . . prayer is the breaking of silence. It is the need to be known and the need to know. Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness. . . . something terrible happens, and you might say, "God help us," or "Jesus Christ"—the poor, crippled prayers that are hidden in the minor blasphemes of people for whom in every sense God is dead except that they still have to speak to <God> if only through clenched teeth. . . . . People pray because they cannot help it."

If prayer is the breaking of silence, there are also on the other hand ways we can silence our prayers. As I watch my everyday goings about, I’m beginning to notice when I push the Spirit away. It all has to do with some sort of closing down of the heart: despair, gossip, judgment, thoughtlessness, anger, fear, revenge, envy, grasping, self-justification. These are all states in which we are not allowing ourselves to be fully alive, not allowing ourselves be-ing and presence.

Gerald May, physician and spiritual director at Shalem Institute, tells of his experience of seeing a stag in the woods. "He nipped at branches and nibbled at grass, but frequently he stopped and stood still for a long time. In these extended stillnesses he was smelling the air, listening to the sounds, looking, seeing all around. I sensed," writes May, " his feeling the ground beneath his hooves, feeling the sensations inside his strong, good body. He shook his antlers with immense dignity and seeming pleasure. My vision of him was of his savoring his essential male-deer-ness." Advising us about presence, May continues, ". . . you must take many times to stand very still in the midst of whatever you are doing. . . . you must stop and become very attentive. Lift your head; look and see what is around you. Perk your ears; listen and hear. Sniff the air. Feel your body. . . . shake your horns a little, paw the ground a bit, take one breath that is deeper than most. . . . The stillness inside must become exquisite; it must deepen into a moment of absolutely pure, utterly simple wakefulness in which your whole being is vitally present. In this stillness, you exist in beauty, and your next movement is perfectly clear."

Does God care who wins the Super Bowl? I don’t think so. But then that’s not what prayer is about. It is about your wholeness, your aliveness, your ability to love. It’s not about shaping up. It’s about giving in. It’s about the cry from your very being that says, "I am!" Every desire, every hope, every spontaneous gush of compassion—these are prayers. You don’t have to call them forth. Just don’t try to shush them up. Just don’t try to tame them. Let them be, in their radical wildness. So be it. Amen.

Copyright © 2000, Reverend Dr. Marilyn Sewell. All rights reserved.