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Rev. Meg Barnhouse
July, 20, 2014
What is prayer for Unitarian Universalists? What good does it do? To whom do we pray? In what ways might we pray? Is it all magical thinking? Why do so many of us keep practicing things our mind doesn’t quite support?
There is great rejoicing in the land today because my phone, which was lost, has now been found. It could only have been in one of two places: the camp site or the car. I’d been taking pictures coming down the mountain toward the campground, and then I’d hopped out of the car to claim the site while my beloved went to register us. I’d been reading Rumpole of the Bailey stories from an actual paper book while I waited for her. We set up camp and got back in the car to go on an adventure. I looked around for my phone, because more beauty was coming and I wanted to be ready.
“I must have had it over by the tent,” I said, and went to look. It was a fairly simple camp site, and easy to search. The phone was nowhere. Over the course of the next few days, we took the car apart, took the bins full of clothes and gear apart, took the camp site apart. It was in picking up the tent sack to feel to see whether my phone was in there that I met a huge tarantula. Fortunately we were both pretty laid back, and the enormous spider had an adventure that day as a lesson for some Mennonite homeschoolers before being set gently back in the dry scrub. I will tell that story another day.
We were in my Civic because the keys to our camping van had disappeared ten minutes before we were supposed to leave town. My love looked everywhere. Three times. They’d vanished. This kind of thing happens to us enough that we call it “gremlins.” We look in the usual places, over and over. Most people who believe in the laws of thermodynamics would look once, eliminate that place, and go on to the next one. Five or six times, though, we’ve had the experience of looking in an obvious place just one more time and there it is, big as life and looking casual, the thing that was lost. The gremlins have put it back, and they’re giggling or doing a jig or whatever it is gremlins do. We still believe in the laws of thermodynamics, of course. They work so often. I’m sure there are scientific explanations for each time something lost has popped up in plain sight in a place that’s already been scoured. It’s easy to see, however, how people can start thinking magically when matter persists occasionally in behaving – well – magically. My faith is in science, but I try to keep an open mind.
When something is lost I pray to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. I started this when I was Presbyterian, although Presbyterians don’t believe in saints. I do not believe that prayer is begging the Divine to do something s/he/it/they would not ordinarily do, as if someone were sitting “up there,” arms crossed, waiting for you to ask before help was given, and then only if you asked in just the right way. I do not believe that prayer is only for the person praying, either. I think it’s a kind of energy not yet understood. I do not think it’s always harmless, as people pray sometimes instead of doing something sensible they might otherwise do, were they not waiting on the Divine to act. I don’t really even believe in praying to St. Anthony. All that said, we prayed to St. Anthony to help us find the keys, but they would not be found. We had looked everywhere. Finally we transferred all the gear to the Civic, packed it to the gills, and took off for West Texas. The next day, getting towels from a tub that had been searched twice, we heard the keys jingling. There they were. “Gremlins,” we said to each other. Then, the way one does, we thought aloud that maybe there was a reason we needed to know we could camp just as well in the Civic as in the van. This is another place where my day to day behavior is a bit at odds with my theology. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. I can’t hold on to a belief that would sound abhorrent if it were spoken in a refugee camp in front of a child whose parents had been killed by the Janjaweed. In a multi-layered mind, though, one’s theology may not be strictly held by every layer of that mind. Some of my layers persist in wondering about the reason things happen.
Most of us use our phones for everything: email, music, home library and research portal, camera, social media, and calendar. We drove home without listening to my favorite music. I felt the loss of the photos I’d taken of the desert mountains. Coming back to the world, I felt its lack keenly. What was on my schedule for the day? Who knew. Was I free October 25th to speak at a colleagues installation or was I doing a wedding that day? Good question. No answer. My office computer hadn’t backed up my calendar the way I thought it would. I didn’t pray to St. Anthony about my phone. I think I was still sulking about the keys. Now an unbeliever, I went to the phone store at lunch time to replace the thing, but I got so annoyed at the wait and the speed at which the staff were moving that I left. After work that afternoon I went to a different store, got out of the car, and said waspishly, “St. Anthony, this is your last chance to talk to those gremlins and give me back my phone. I would really like that as I hate setting up a new phone, and I love my phone, and I don’t really have time for this.” I decided to look one more time under the passenger seat where I’d been sitting while taking those last pictures before the phone went missing. I’d looked under there twice before and so had my beloved. I reached my hand to pat around under there, and my fingers closed around the cool smooth face of my phone. “gremlins!” St. Anthony! Yes, I will be your playmate. I wondered what the lesson was here even though my theology says this life is not a school and there isn’t necessarily a lesson in everything. Laughing to myself and shaking my head, I sing hymns of gratitude to the mysterious, mischievous multiverse.
People think and talk about prayer in such different ways. For most religious people of every faith, prayer is asking God to do something. You beseech the Lord, you beg, you plead. Some people teach that God is a good parent, that God knows what you need without being asked, but that the asking is for your benefit. That is how I was taught. Other people act like God is an arrogant and forgetful king, who could do anything he wanted to do for you, but, unless you beg pretty, unless you do everything exactly right and say just the right thing, with just the right tone, just the right level of faith, having sent seed money to the right religious enterprise, God will not do what you need for him to do. I have told many of you the story of gathering around my mother as she was being prayed over for healing. The new minister of her church said that, if we had the right faith, she would be healed of her cancer. He said if anyone didn’t believe that it was the Lord’s will that she be healed, they should leave the circle, because their lack of faith could keep the prayers from being effective. I had lost hope that she would be healed. She had cancer for five years and she was near the end. I had begged God to take her cancer away. It did leave, then it came back, then it would leave, then it would come back. I didn’t believe any more. I didn’t have any more hope. I left the circle.
Now I look at that, stunned that someone could love a God like that, who would be able to heal someone but wouldn’t because there was someone in the room with doubts. What a cruel and capricious God. What a stupid God.
Lady who heard God say “I’ll take it from here,” and so she let go of the steering wheel. Her car swerved and hit a motorcyclist.
I don’t believe that prayer is asking God for something.
Yesterday when I was driving around looking for the Christmas in Action crew, I had our new puppy riding with me. Apparently she gets car sick, and after we had driven around for an hour (I had memorized the route I would take, but I didn’t bring the map with me, and the route I had memorized didn’t work any more with Spartanburg’s new configurations, or something) and after she had thrown up in my car three times, I drove on home. I prayed, though. To St. Anthony, actually, the patron saint of lost things. You pray “St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around, my ring is lost, and it must be found.” So I was praying “St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around, my church people are lost and they must be found.” Probably it didn’t work because I was the one who was lost. And I was saying “Please help her tummy feel better, please help her not throw up again. Oh no.”
I don’t believe (in my theology, which, most of the time, informs by practice) that prayer is asking or begging God to do something God would not otherwise do for us. The prayers that seem to cross denominational and religious lines is “Thank you.” and “Thy will be done,” and holding the person In love and light. The prayer that seems to be the most effective is a holding the person in love. Saying “Thy will be done” Or “whatever.” Paying attention in an attitude of surrender.
Surrender to what? I don’t know. To the way things work? The books on near death experiences say that “The Light’ asks you what you did to serve in love, and it asks you did you learn the way things work. I don’t know a lot about the way things work, except that you reap what you sow, the same bad things that happen to other people can happen to you, it’s better to understand than to be understood, you can’t make people do right, and even when folks ask for your help they don’t always want it. Surrender – maybe it’s just an attitude of knowing that you are not controlling things. Surrender to the Highest Good, to the Will of Heaven, to the Tao,- seems to be a powerful act that makes things happen. There is a pagan song of surrender that goes: “The river is flowing, flowing and growing the river Is flowing down to the sea. Mother carry me, your child I will always be. Mother carry me down to the sea.”
I have prayed with some of my church people. I had one couple where he was a Christian and she was an atheist. She got pretty sick, and I sat by her bed with him. I told him I would pray a Christian prayer with him, and she and I did an Atheist prayer, where we joined pinkies and agreed on what we wanted to have happen. We hold hands, we may close our eyes or we may not, we may both speak words or it could just be me. Doing it feels right. I have some beliefs that inform this practice, and I want to start by talking about those. I believe that when we become clear in our intentions, things start to move. They don’t necessarily move the way we want them to, but they do move. When several people are clear in a single intention, I believe that has power. Sometimes when I am praying with someone I will ask a question. “So we agree together that what we want for you in this situation is clarity, and patience, and whatever else we decided was important, after talking. Intending something together is a strong action. Is that just because it’s good to get your mind clear on something? Maybe. That would be the Humanist view, which is fine. There may be more to it. I think clarity and will are forces in and of themselves. I think prayer is a force. I don’t think any of this is supernatural. I don’t believe in a supernatural. Maybe this is semantics, just playing with words, but I believe that the natural world has mysteries in it we don’t yet understand. People talk about “the natural world” as if what they mean is “the world we understand and can measure.” I think there are more things than we can measure. Yet. Things people experience and talk about. God, peace, miracles, ghosts, telepathy. So many people experience those things. A person with a scientific mind that’s open might say “well, those are phenomena which appear over and over in human experience. Maybe one day we will understand them.”
As UUs we can pray. Some of us don’t feel comfortable with the old ways of praying anymore, even though some still do. So we stop doing it altogether, as if that were the only way to do it. It’s not. We can agree on things, we can say what we hope, what we wish for. Lots of folks here believe in a Force, a stream of energy or love that we can align ourselves with. Maybe clarity helps you align with it. Maybe clarity is a magnet for the energy of the universe. Maybe loving intention is a magnet for that energy. Forgiveness, love, effort, sacrifice, maybe those things attract the stream of the good, the true, the loving. Maybe surrender of the illusion of control attracts or changes the stream. Is the stream something we can call God or Goddess? I think so. Is it the creator of the universe? I don’t know. I do know, for me, that the stream of energy is the creative force in the universe…. It stimulates ideas and change. It has the good of the whole at heart.
One person in another congregation who called herself an atheist surmised that the stream was the collective energy of all the love and truth given out and received by all the human and animal spirits that have lived. Maybe when we die our loving stays behind, and makes up what people call God, and as the millennia pass, it grows. I call myself a theist, but I agree with her. I think that’s what it is. Our job is to align with it. Our job is to make it grow when we leave this place, with all the loving and kindness and forgiveness and truth-telling we’ve done.
Maybe we can just be still, and that is prayer enough. Maybe we can make long lists of our hopes and our goals, and let that be our prayer of clarity. Maybe we can meditate and never ask for a thing. Or maybe we can just say Thank you. That is prayer enough. Or we can stop saying and listen. Who will we hear? Our own wisdom? A thought from the collective unconscious? A thought or feeling from the oversoul, the one soul of all things? IT’s worth an experiment.
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