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.