Prayer beads for UUs

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
May 1, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

How might UUs use prayer beads? What is prayer for UUs? How does having something tangible in in our hand help our mind and spirit?

Call to Worship

from “Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers”
by Anne Lamott

Gorgeous, amazing things come into our lives when we are paying attention: mangoes, grandnieces, Bach, ponds. This happens more often when we have as little expectation as possible. If you say, “Well, that’s pretty much what I thought I’d see,” you are in trouble. At that point you have to ask yourself why you are even here. […] Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

Meditation

by Annie Dillard

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Sermon

You were given three beads as you came in this morning. What we are going to do is talk about prayer beads. The reason for beads is that people want to pray. We want to meditate. We want to slow down and take ten deep breaths for our blood pressure, but we don’t. We want to remember to say kind things to our partner or spouse, we want to say the lovingkindness meditation during the week, but we don’t. Beads are there as a tangible reminder, something to hold, to help us keep track, to catch our attention, to ground us with their texture in our hand, to connect our meditation with our senses.

Beads have been used from time immemorial to help people pray. Of course they don’t know for sure when people began using beads to pray. There are beads that look like prayer beads from Egypt as early as 3200 B.C.E. In a museum in central Europe, there is a fossil of a necklace of shell and bone. We don’t know if it was used just for decoration or for prayer. These days, most of the world’s inhabitants — nearly two-thirds of the planet’s population — pray with beads. Maybe they relate to the abacus. Maybe ancient people did what the Christian third century Desert Mothers and Fathers did, carrying a particular number of pebbles in their pockets, which they dropped one by one on the ground as they said each of their prayers.

INDIA
In India, sandstone carvings dating from 185 B.C.E. show people holding prayer beads. The same strand of prayer beads, called a japa mala, is still used, designed for wear around the neck. It has 108 beads for repeating mantras or counting one’s breaths. Japa means saying the name of God, and mala means “rose” or “garland” in Sanskrit.

BUDDHISM
Buddhists inherited the mala from Hinduism, since Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. They use 108 beads or a number of beads that goes into 108, so you would go around the circle of beads twice or three times to make the 108. In Tibet, malas of inlaid bone originally included the skeleton parts of holy men, to remind their users to live lives worthy of the next level of enlightenment. Today’s bone malas are made of yak bone, which is sometimes inlaid with turquoise and coral.

The 108 beads represent the number of worldly desires or negative emotions that must be overcome before attaining nirvana. Buddhists believe that saying a prayer for each fleshly failing will purify a person.

CHRISTIAN
It’s interesting that the word mala means “rose,” or “garland.” Roman Catholics and Anglicans use a Rosary as prayer beads. It’s name comes from the Latin “rosarium,” meaning “rose garden.” The beads were also sometimes made of crushed and cooked rose petals. Praying the rosary is a traditional devotion of the Roman Catholic Church, combining prayer and meditation in sequences (called “decades”) of one Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be to the Father, as well as a number of other prayers (such as the Apostle’s Creed and the Hail Holy Queen) at the beginning and end. The Desert Fathers (third to fifth century) switched from using stones to using knotted ropes or a piece of leather to count prayers, typically the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”) The rosary is given ceremonially to a Greek Orthodox monk as the second step in the monastic life. It is called his ‘spiritual sword’.”

ISLAM
In Islam, prayer beads are referred to as Misbaha, and contain 99 beads, corresponding to the 99 Names of Allah.

NATIVE AMERICAN
Beads have always had a spiritual significance to Native Americans; neck medallions as early as A.D. 800 served as talismans. Certain items of jewelry and other ornamentation using beads were often central in healing ceremonies.

AFRICAN
The Yoruba believe that using beads enhances the power of ritual objects. The Masai find beads so meaningful to their culture that their language includes more than 40 words for different kinds of beadwork.

PRAYER
We’re Unitarian Universalists. How do we pray? From not at all through all types of meditation to traditional asking God for help. 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 think prayer is putting our focus, our energy toward something, or being grateful for something or just holding something in our heart and mind. I think there is something important about paying attention, and that is a big part of praying. Paying attention to the thing. Anne Lamott says there are only three prayers you need: Thanks. Wow. And Help! Do you need to have traditional beliefs to be in a position to say “Help!” No. I like to believe that there is a river of love running through the world that I call God, and that I can call out to love for help. Does it come from outside me? Inside? From other people, from the animals, the rocks, the trees and the stars? From spirits of people who have died? From particles smaller than the bosun that respond to desperation with some kind of release of energy? Or is it just good for me to acknowledge that I need help? Does any of that really matter, when you’re desperate for help and some help arrives? But maybe it doesn’t arrive, and then you are left telling yourself stories about why it didn’t…. Choosing your beliefs is fraught with joy and heartbreak.

REPEATING PRAYERS
Maybe prayer, like ritual, is one way to change your consciousness at will. Medieval monks wrote that after several weeks of repeating a prayer for many hours a day, they entered an altered state. They said they could see a powerful light around them. One mystic described the condition as a “most pleasant heat,” a “joyful boiling.”

In the early 1970’s, Dr. Herbert Benson, president and founder of the Mind/Body Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School, documented a phenomenon he dubbed “the relaxation response”.

Benson experimented using Sanskrit mantras. He told his subjects to sit quietly and repeat the mantra either silently or aloud for ten to twenty minutes, to breathe regularly and to let all thoughts pass by, inviting the mind to be blank.

Benson found that those who repeated the Sanskrit mantras, for as little as ten minutes a day, experienced physiological changes-reduced heart rate, lower stress levels and slower metabolism. Repeating the mantras also lowered the blood pressure of those who had high blood pressure and generally decreased the subjects’ oxygen consumption (indicating that the body was in a restful state). Benson and his colleagues also tested other prayers, including “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, and found that they had the same effect. Even words like “one,” “ocean,” “love” and “peace” produced the response. It appears that Benson and his colleagues had uncovered a universal principle: repetitive prayer allows human beings to enter a relaxed state. More recently, researchers at U Mass and other institutions have discovered that meditation can lead to the thickening of certain regions of the brain. Gray matter is actually produced. There is a benefit to prayer that has little to do with belief at all.

We could use the three beads to: do the Buddhist prayer
1. yourself,
2. one you love
3. one you have trouble with

OR Do one thing you’re grateful for, one thing you are asking for, one thing you will give

OR Sets of ten deep breaths

I want you to think about the mission of this congregation. You could use the first bead to think about how your soul has been nourished, what nourishment it needs, how you have nourished the souls of others, and how you could do that today. The second bead is all about transformation. How has your life been transformed today, if it has? What kind of transformation would you like to experience? Could you help transform someone else’s life today? The third is the justice bead. How have you done justice today? What kind of justice do you need? Can you support someone else who is doing justice? We are not all activists every day: sometimes we are called to be in support. This is something you practice. I invite you to try it.

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