Come into this sacred hour, those who are weary and who seek
after rest, those who are troubled and seek after insight and peace, those who
are joyful and seek after fellows with whom to celebrate. Enter this
place and feel—for this short, intentional time—the power of a renewed
spirit. Enter feeling the power of coming into this space where you
are truly invited to be fully who you are and invited to dream fully who you
might yet be. Enter, rejoice and come in.
We light the chalice to remind us that this is a sacred space,
because we gather in faith and hope and love. And that when we hear each
other, we make the world anew.
Our first reading this morning is from Annie Dillard’s
perplexing, brilliant book, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and
Encounters. The title essay, Teaching a Stone to Talk, is in
six parts. The first part is about Annie’s island neighbor, Larry, who
lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk. Another part of
the essay is about nature’s silence. And how we are called to be
witnesses to the silence. That is why I take walks, she says at one
point, to keep an eye on things. At any rate, it is about some other things
as well—the Galapagos Islands, comparative cosmology. She ends the nine
page essay with this.
"The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the
omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the
blended note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings. You take a
step in the right direction to pray to this silence, and even to address the
prayer to "World." Distinctions blur. Quit your tents.
Pray without ceasing."
From The Growing Edge, Howard Thurmond.
Less dramatic, but just as poignant and effective, is the
experience of the individual, privately and personally, as she waits, readying
her spirit in the quietness. The sacramental moment emerges within
her. When it does, she prays. It may be that she prays for the
first time in her life, because something in her prays.
If I were to put into words what happens, it would be something
like this. There is in every one of us an inward sea. In that sea there
is an island; and on that island there is a temple. In that temple, there
is an altar; and on that altar burns a flame. Each one of us, whether we
bow our knee at an altar external to ourselves or not, is committed to the
journey that will lead him to the exploration of his inward sea, to locate his
inward island, to find the temple, and to meet, at the altar in that temple,
the God of his life. Before that altar, impurities of life are burned
away; before that altar, all the deepest intent of your spirit stands naked and
revealed; before that altar you hear the voice of holiness, giving lift to your
spirit, forgiveness for your sins, renewal for your commitment. As you
leave that altar within your temple, on your island, in your inward sea, all
the world becomes different and you know that, whatever awaits you, there is nothing
that will ever destroy you.
Before I came here, I had an office at the University of
Maryland Medical System in Baltimore City. You could take a week looking for it
and you might never find it. There are five buildings that make up
University Hospital. A new one is coming. My office was in South
Hospital, first floor, at the back of the chapel. I was a chaplain.
My name never appeared on the door. It was a makeshift office, in the
back of the chapel, for the on-call and overnight chaplains. There were a
few of us on calls, mostly seminarians. In the office, there was a futon,
a shelf of books and some Bibles. Candles, oils, three kosher
refrigerators for loaning, a computer with email. Over by the futon there
was a glow in the dark set of praying hands.
You know hospitals. They are a house for the sick, the
laid low, and at the same time, full of energy, madness, chaos. There is
tons of rushing around in hospitals. Doctors coming in and talking faster
than you can hear. Nurses poking at you at the oddest times, sometimes
with a smile, sometimes not!
Chaplains had better not add to the chaos. Chaplains had
better not rush around looking important. Chaplains are called to be a
still presence, a calming presence, a graceful presence—for the families, for
the patients, for visitors, for children full of fear, for the elderly, the
lonely, the dying. A calm presence in mostly a sea of uncertainty,
sadness, confusion, rushing around, and heartache.
On Tuesday nights, Fridays and Saturdays, I was a chaplain at
University of Maryland Medical. And I am here to tell you that office, in
the back of the chapel, was a safe haven, a God send, a refuge and
sanctuary. I would leave from there to go out and see patients and families.
And when I was done seeing them, I headed back to that quiet place.
As a chaplain, I prayed. Sometimes I did not know what to
pray and I just needed some quiet. Sometimes I bury my head in my hands and sit
still and think. Sometimes I try to clear my head of all thoughts.
I did that after I baptized the other day, a 23 week old still born, just that
close to being viable.
Sometimes, more often than you might think, I don’t know if I
know how to pray. More often than you might think, I say with Mary
Oliver, I don’t know what a prayer is. I have asked myself, countless
times, questions that matter when it comes to prayer. What is
prayer? How do you do it? Is it a good way to spend my time?
The answer may not be so easy to get at. Consider what
Annie Dillard points us toward. People wake up, she has written, if they
wake up at all, to the silence of God. The silence is all there is, the
alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. Annie Dillard, perhaps
the greatest living religious writer of our age, and this is what she has to
offer. On the other hand, she always comes back to a single, poetic
phase: Quit your tents, pray without ceasing.
So what is prayer?
I want to suggest at least two things that prayer
accomplishes. It connects us to ourselves, that is to say it connects us
to our life’s deepest issues. And second, prayer connects us to our
world, our one precious and glorious world. Let us look at these things in
turn.
First, prayer connects us to ourselves. I call that thing
prayer that provides us with a strong sense of self-awareness. Prayer
connects us to our lives, our best selves, our deepest and truest yearnings of
the heart. One morning I was driving down to Springfield, Virginia to see
friends that I have known since middle school. We grew up together in
neighboring Galesburg, Illinois. I have known Jonathon since third grade,
Tric since high school at Galesburg High. They know me as well as
anyone. I love visiting with them. I was on 395. The morning
light was luminous. The Indigo Girls were on my car’s tape player.
I was surrounded, just for a few moments, by a sense of peace and grace that is
difficult to explain. Life felt quiet, sure, and calm. I had fallen
into a kind of silence in the face of overwhelming beauty, and this was a kind
of prayer. I had been in touch with the original blessing that is
life. What moments have you known when all felt just right—your life was
a prayer.
A. Powell Davies, the great minister at All Souls in DC in the
1940s and 50s, said that we all pray in some way—every one of us, skeptic,
humanist, Buddhist, Christian. Those moments when we fall silent in the
face of beauty as I face on a simple car ride to Northern Virginia, or when we
fall silent in the face of extreme difficulties. Or when we have an AHA
moment. Or when we feel a jolt of pain in the face of knowledge of
another’s hurting. When we feel a joy rising up within us in the face ot
another’s good news.
These are all prayers in their way and they all point us toward
something closer than our breathing and something other than we can imagine.
I call that thing prayer which gives us self-awareness and I
call that thing prayer which takes us back to who we are.
I will give you an example.
In the summer of 2000, I was working at another hospital.
Peninsula Regional on the Eastern Shore, in Salisbury Maryland. Salisbury
is 30 miles from Ocean City, a major college-oriented beach. College
students take their leave over the summer and work at the many bars and
restaurants on the main strip. With so many college students, many
parties take place. Last summer, a group of students from Pennsylvania
went to one such party. They were underage. They drank
heavily. Mary, let’s call her, athletic and full of life, got tired at
some point and was ready to leave. She asked her friends to go with her,
but they weren’t ready. So she left by herself. Walking home, she
got to Ocean Boulevard, preparing to jaywalk. One step toward the road,
and a pickup truck’s mirror clipped her temple. Around 2 or 3 she was
transported by helicopter to our hospital. I came on duty at 7 a.m. and,
of course, heard about this case. There were 6 or 7 19-year-olds camped
out in the ER waiting room, awaiting the arrival of Mary’s parents.
I started talking with a friend of hers. Pray for me, he
said, God must be very angry at me. Angry? I said, hoping he would
take this opportunity to talk. I feel like God will abandon me as I
abandoned Mary. Can you say that to God, I asked. And it came out,
a story he hated to tell and had to tell, in order to begin a very long process
of reconciliation, wholeness, self-forgiveness. "I should have never
let her go along," his prayer began and the whole story came out of him, a
prayer like none I had heard before, like none I have heard since, a
heartbreaking and tender account of what he was feeling in the light of his
friend’s impending death. He learned that morning that to the extent that
he could stay with what he felt in his deepest gut, he began to feel and
believe that God could stay with what was being felt, that God could stay with
him. His prayer began this process of understanding that he also felt
abandoned, alone and afraid. In that prayer, hope began. It was
tentative and less than confident. But it was a start and the point is
that it got him to his deepest self, and in that way was true prayer, real
prayer. All prayer is autobiography.
When Louisa May Alcott was writing the introduction to the
collection of Theodore Parker’s prayers, she wrote simply. His life was
his prayer and his prayers guided us because of his life. I can’t say it
better than that. Our prayers are autobiographical, and our autobiography
points to our deepest prayer.
I call that thing prayer that gives us a glimpse of what is
deepest within us.
If prayer gives us back to our deepest selves, it also illumines
for us what it is to be a part of this world. Second, prayer connects us
to this beautiful old world.
Though we cannot understand the mystery of the world about us,
we feel its kinship with the mystery within us. The mystery too we do not
understand but we know it in our being alive. Something there is that will not
allow it to be silent; it speaks out in our own voices. I call that thing
prayer which ties the mystery of our being to the mystery of the world.
Sylvia Plath knew that feeling. I long to permeate the
matter of this world, a young Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal. What
better prayer is there than that? Every day we are given this gift of
eyes to see and ears to hear, and all around us the goodness of creation, of
which we are a part. I call that thing prayer which opens us up to the
experience of living in the world, celebrating it, nurturing it, breathing it
in. Dancing, dancing and saying to creation, I have come so that you
won’t play to an empty house! I know why the poet said that after the
creation God looked around and said, It is good indeed.
I call that thing prayer which lets us see anew everyday the
beauty of the tree outside the apartment, the Bay, the wild geese
overhead. Here is how poet Mary Oliver puts it:
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles
through the desert, repenting.
You only have to walk to let the soft animal of your body love
what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving
across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees,
The mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
Are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination,
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
Over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
The world offers itself to your imagination.
I call that thing prayer which enables us, like the poet, to
speak things from our very center, the place where we often hesitate to go but
go there we must, the place where joy and wisdom reside, that speak through the
ages out of eternity. Prayer that gives us a sense of what it is to be in
this world will give us a sense of what it is to be human, and that is
connected and relational. We are each of us caught in a network of mutuality,
Martin Luther King said, and I want to suggest that we glimpse it best when we
slow down and listen to our heart’s deepest desire.
I call that thing prayer which gives to us occasions for the
celebration of our otherness and which strips our otherness of its destructive
possibilities. When prayer works, we see, as Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh
says, that this paper contains the sun, and the rain, the field and the soil
and the tree, and the worker who tended the field, and the truck driver who drove
the tree to the processing plant and so on and so on.
I call that thing prayer which opens us to the world in all its
glory and gives us a sense of interconnectedness with all of life, all of
creation, all God’s people.
And I dare say that when we experience the world in this way, we
hear better the cries of remain with me, stay with me, watch with me.
When we wake up to the world as it is, we can stay awake when the world is not
as it should be. And we can hear the cry of the woman, the cry of the young
man, the cry of the prophet who sayd, stay awake with me because we will
already be awake.
That is all fine and good, I hear you saying. But let us
get to another, perhaps, larger issue. How do you do it? How do you begin?
I will attempt to answer such a question because it is the most
profound question before us.. We will all pray in our own way. We will
all pray in the way that makes the most sense for us. You find yourself
washing dishes in an intentional way and you’re praying. You find
yourself walking to the pool, an aha moment comes upon you and you’re
praying. You hear the cry of your neighbor. You go over to his
house and make a pot of coffee, and in that moment, your life becomes a prayer,
your life is a prayer.
Mary Oliver is right. You do not have to walk through the
desert, repenting. You do not have to go to a monastery for weeks at a
time, living on soup and bread. The minister at River Road Unitarian, the
church where I served as the youth coordinator, Scott Alexander, edited this delightful
book, Everyday Spiritual Practice. It addresses ways to bring
spirituality into your regular old life, with lacrosse practice and the gym and
work and all of the rest. Everyday life can be all about prayer.
Indeed, Powell Davies wrote that "the closer prayer is to life, the less
likely is it that what is expressed at one time will be consistent with what is
expressed at others. And it is to life above all that prayer should stay
close. It is the language of the heart, akin to poetry. Prayer goes
on where other language leaves off: it has to do with what is least known and
yet most deeply felt.
And so I want to leave you with some questions, that every once
in a while, I asked of a patient, I ask of a family member.
What does your heart tell you about….
What are your best hopes or worst fears about…
Reflect on some of what is behind your reflections…
Where or how does that touch home for you…
What might the rest of us learn from your own life…
What are you coming to see for yourself…
What invitation is there for you and for the rest of us…
Take one of those questions. Make some tea if you’d like, or do
your dishes, or climb a hill, or turn off the radio on the way to pick up your
child. Take one of those questions and just be present with it, long
enough to hear the faint cry of an answer emerging from deep within your life.
Then you will let your life speak, and then those who come after you will say
about you, His whole life, Her whole life, was a prayer.
I was a chaplain at the University of Maryland Medical System in
Baltimore. My office was a quiet, soulful, refuge where my spirit found
itself at prayer. I was surrounded by things there, but none so important
as these glow in the dark praying hands. You see, at night when the
darkness is deep around me, these praying hands light the way to the futon,
where I could find sleep and rest and comfort. Like a prayer, in deepest
night a light to show the way. And in morning when the sun has come up
and joy is all around, these praying hands continue to glow. They
accompany the light, the peace, the joy. Like a prayer of thanksgiving, a
prayer of awe. In sorrow and joy, prayer is there letting your life speak
through you. Let your life speak. I call that thing prayer that
lets your life shine.
November 03, 2002, Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa.
Roger Butts