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Rev. Meg Barnhouse, Minister Emerita
and Rev. Michelle LaGrave
November 24, 2024
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Some thoughts on prayer from a person who used to be really good at praying, but now has many theories and thoughts about it. Lots of people are praying for me since I am sick, and I don’t know how to feel about it.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark.” That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.
– Rebecca Solnit
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Sermon
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
Kyia and I are so thrilled to be here. It’s wonderful to see you all again. We live in Bryan College Station now. Rev Kyia is the Minister of the Brazos Valley UU church and it’s growing. It’s got about a hundred members and 33 children. And we have a lot of ex-mormons, hence all the children. It’s wonderful. That’s wonderful.
And so we used to go swimming before I got a little bit sicker. We used to go swimming at the adult rec center there, and I’m in the pool. And there are all these older ladies in there. So it’s a bunch of us older ladies in there. And it’s kind of echo-y in there, but everybody shouts. So you can hear each other. And they were talking loudly about all the different kinds of cancer they’d had. And they looked at me, and they said, “Do you have cancer?”
And I said, “Yes, ma’am, I do.”
They said, “Oh, what kind?”
And I just said, “Terminal.”
And they went, “Oh.”
I’m like, “Yeah.”
And this lady said, “I had a miracle healing.”
And I said, “You did? Tell me about it.”
And she said, “Well, I had cancer inside my belly, and the doctor said he might find it everywhere else, he didn’t know. And then when he went in to look, he just found a couple little places and he took them out and now I don’t have cancer anymore, so that’s a miracle.”
And I was like, hmm…
She said, “Can I pray for you?”
And I said, “Okay.”
So I had managed to get out of the pool so I’m sitting in my wheelchair and she comes over and she puts her hand on me, I think just on my arm, not on my head or my shoulder, which would be very irritating. So she prayed that I would have a miracle. And that’s nice, that’s nice. Yeah.
I have this neighbor who comes over, she’s a wonderful cook and she’s like a very slender yoga teacher looking person. And she uses essential oils and things like that. And she cooks for people, she’s a home chef. And so she always brings over some flowers from her yard which is gorgeous and some soup or whatever and it’s really good. And pretty far, well at the first part of our friendship, she asked if she could pray for me. Because she says to me with very intense eyes, “Jesus is real Meg. Jesus is real.”
And I’m like, “Okay, that’s it. That’s your argument, so okay. (audience laughing)
I said, “You know what? You know the parable of the sower where he’s throwing seeds to try to grow them on the ground and some ground is hard packed and the seeds don’t come up and some ground is covered with brambles and the seeds can’t come up and some ground is fertile ground and the seeds can come up.” I said, “My heart when it comes to Christianity is hard packed.” (audience laughing) Hard packed. I said, “People have been over it, and over it, and over it, and over it, and over it, and over it.” I said, “I just can’t even hear it anymore, basically.”
And then after a couple more visits, she has this neighbor that has huge Trump flags in the yard. And she said, “Oh, that’s a text from my neighbor.” And she put the phone down.
I said, “Oh, your Trump neighbor?” ‘Cause I had made assumptions, Because she was a, you know, sweet, kind of hippie-ish, cooking oils person.
She said, “I’m going to vote for Trump.”
And I was just like, I felt like I was going to throw up. And so I didn’t say anything to her about it.
And then I texted her and said, “I promise not to argue with you. If you can come over and just give me your reasoning. I promise just to sit and listen because I just want to hear why somebody I respect that I think is nice and kind is going to vote for that man.”
And so she agreed to do that and we had that talk and whatever. And so it turns out she is just a willingly under informed voter. Willingly under informed. She doesn’t watch the news. She watches YouTube news, and she just didn’t want to know about anything but pro-life. She didn’t want to know.
And so I’m just not sure this friendship is going to survive. But I hear people say, you know, you should be friends with people who just views differ from yours. I just don’t know. Kyia doesn’t want her in the house, which I think is reasonable.
She kept telling me to be open to miracles And then this Rebecca Solnit quote That Michelle, Reverend Michelle, read in the morning in the first part of the service was, she said open the door to the unknown, to darkness, and I feel guilty in myself because I think maybe she means keep the door open for miracles, and people really want me to believe in miracles. They really want it. And they keep saying, “You’re going to get better.”
And I’m just like, “What?”
It’s hard on the doctors when I do that because they’re so hopeful and they just don’t know what to do.
But I don’t think people know how painful it is to leave the door open for miracles, to think that there’s a miracle somehow just hanging over your head that could come down some time and make you well. I find it much more deepening to leave the door open and explore acceptance and living every day with as much love as I can live.
There’s a woman at our church, who used to be a nun for 14 years. She’s got a very peaceful aspect. She says she prays for me, which is okay, I love her. And I asked her the other day how she prays for me, what she means when she says she prays for me.
And she just said said, “I just,” she went like this with her hands, “I just lift you up and Kyia. I pray for you and Kyia at the same time because you’re one. I lift you up and just ask that you be surrounded with strength and courage and love.”
And I’m like, “Thank you. ’cause she’s not like, self-aggrandizing. Like, I am gonna heal you and pray for you.
I had a bad experience when I was younger, in seminary. I think I’ve told you all this story before, where my mother was very sick with cancer. She had, she was about three months from dying. and the minister from a church in Philadelphia came out and we had a prayer circle, they had a prayer circle for her with all the people that were there.
And this minister said, “If you don’t have the faith that she could be healed right now, you could ruin our prayer.”
And I, being in the middle year of seminary, where you lose your faith completely. Everybody does it. I gritted my teeth and I got up and left. I’m still mad about it. ‘Cause of course it didn’t work. It didn’t work.
Seems like there are a lot of rules like that about praying. I mean, I was a really good prayer when I was a kid. I remember one time when I was little, I was in bed, put to bed at my aunt, Mabel’s house, and there were a bunch of, you know, cousins and old adults sitting in the room, in the living room. And I had prayed and prayed and prayed for what seemed like a really long time. I just covered everybody. And I was so excited that I padded out to the living room in my nightgown, and I said, “I just prayed for an hour.”
And I was so disappointed because they were all like, “Uh-huh, okay, good, good, good, good, good, good bit.”
And I heard a lot about praying when I was growing up, Associate Reform Presbyterian, and then Presbyterian, I went to Intervarsity when I was in college, and they had rules, I mean, you had to have this much praise at the beginning of the prayer, and then you had to have adoration, and then you had to have an intercession where you prayed for other people, and then some more praise, and then you could ask for things for yourself, and then I can’t even remember all the rules.
But you had to have a pure heart, pure heart, and no doubts. And I just thought, I’m in big trouble. I don’t even know what a pure heart is. I don’t even know anybody who has one. A pure heart.
And so all those rules felt fake. And it felt like superstition. And it felt like they were praying to this God who was supposedly a God of love and who would sit up there in heaven and go, “I could heal you, but I’m not going to. Even though I love you and I am love, I’m not going to because you haven’t prayed properly. And I’m just going to wait here until you pray properly and then maybe I’ll heal you and maybe I won’t.”
And I just thought that God is not the one I want to believe in. You know, I don’t like that.
And I had a client one time who was also a Presbyterian, and she said, “I just feel like God is waiting for me to leave a loophole in my prayers. So like I pray for each of my children for each step along the way for them and I pray that you know I pray like that they would be safe going to the school bus and safe on the school bus and then safe going to class and the safe in class and then if I forget to pray for any part of their day I feel like God’s gonna use that as a loophole and hurt my child.”
I was like, Jesus, help this lady. She was really worshiping a mean, mean God. And I think a lot of people do.
I know that belief, that your belief does have a lot to do with what your body does. It can. I think if you, you know, there are certain, there are certain people in the medical field who just say, “This person got better, I don’t understand how.”
And but I don’t think it happens a lot. But I think, you know, if you believe hard enough, maybe, Maybe, I don’t know, it can help you, but that’s not available to me.
And I watched this show called Rituals Around the World, and I watched these beautiful people in a South American country, I think it was Guatemala, And they had paid a lot of money to go to this miracle lake, and they had a shaman there who was working with them. And just the hope in their eyes, and the belief in their eyes was striking. And I thought, you know, he had lots of blankets on, and then he would rattle the rattles and then he would he had a mouthful of rum that he would spit on the people and then they would go wash in the lake and I thought I really hope that the people who have that culture in their blood and bones can have enough belief so that that’ll work for them.
I am a white lady from the United States in my late 60s and I just can’t wash that off. And so I worried that, you know, you put yourself in certain situations when you’re watching rituals, and where I would just put myself in there, I’d be sitting there like this. So I don’t want to go there because I don’t want to ruin it for them. And I admired that. I yearned for that kind of hope in a ritual.
And I would love to believe in a world that’s full of magic, and I kind of do. I mean, I’ve had prayers work before. I’ve had making an altar for something work before. Not always work the way I thought it was going to work, and yet this whole praying for healing thing is confusing for me.
But I feel like It goes with my view of God, and so my view of God. So I think of God as a river of love running through the universe. And I think that this is my belief, you don’t have to believe this at all. But I feel like every act of lovingness, of loving kindness between humans, between humans and animals, between humans and plants and trees, water, rocks, between animals and each other, all Love is added to that river of love and that in that way we help create God by adding love to that river of love and so I figured that I would just say Yes to being prayed for even if it’s not by someone that I love already. And I’m gonna think of it as getting a little splash from the river of love. That those people are, they mean it in a loving way, most of them, I think.
If somebody like that minister came to pray for me and said everybody had to get out, they didn’t believe, I would say you need to get out because this is ridiculous. But most people don’t do that to me. So the ones who say they wanna pray for me, I’m okay.
I’m sorry to go off on this tangent, but so I was telling one of the people at our church who’s this woman who is trans and a philosophy major so she’s like prodigious in her thinking and I said what would you do somebody said they were going to pray for you.
And she said, I would say, that’s fine. I just want to lead the prayer.
And I said, “how would you lead it? And she would say, “I’d grasp their hands and I’d go, hail Satan.” I wasn’t going to tell you about that, but now I have. I’m not going to do that to anybody.
And so this song that I wrote All Will Be Well. That is my number one hit across the UU world. I wrote it 25 years ago, a long time ago, and I’ve had people write to me about it, like how it’s helped them, or their questions about it, or things like that, which means a lot to me.
And so, excuse me, I say at the end, “love never ends.” And I see people who are listening kind of go, “Really, ’cause I’ve had love end.”
And what I’m saying, I think, I mean, Kyia will say this is true, and I’m sure Brent too, whoever of y’all writes songs. Sometimes you write a song and you just don’t know what it’s about until years later.
And so I figured out The more I thought about it, that the song was about the river of love, and how love never ends because the river is always going to be there, because people are always going to be loving each other, loving their animal companions, loving their friends, and the animals are going to be loving each other. You can just go on TikTok and see lots of animal friends. Not that I go on TikTok.
And so I’ve been having this argument with St. Julian of Norwich for a long time and love for you to sing with me. I just lay out to her all the things that are wrong in the world and she says “All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.”
So let’s sing it now.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Closing Reading
To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender…
– Rebecca Solnit
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