Pray without Ceasing: Creativity, Spirituality and Prayer

We met in the parlor of the church last week
And it was quiet.
Mid week, mid winter, mid day
We sat in a circle,
Mostly women, one brave gentleman,
We sat,
Working with our hands on whatever we had brought
A scarf to knit, a block of a quilt to sew, a rug to braid.
In the parlor.
The room is warm and quiet,
the colors of the rug are rich and red.
It’s easy to lose track of time there,
Easy to lose track of lists and schedules and
All that seems so urgent in the world outside.
It is peaceful in this circle,
With the clock ticking,
Our hands moving,
And silence all around.

* * * * * *

This is a drop-in class I’m giving this winter.
“Spirituality and Creativity” I called it.
It is part of our Wright Tavern Center for Spiritual Renewal.
Creativity comes in mysterious shapes and guises.
It even comes to those of us who don’t think we are “creative” at all.
I number myself in that company.
You don’t have to be a concert pianist or great painter.
It comes with being human,
This desire to make something out of nothing.
We make music; we make a meal, a quilt, a boat, a bench.
Whatever it is, a little bit of our spirit put out into the world in new shape.

* * * * * *

We speak here at First Parish about two central threads of our life together.
Going inward:
We encourage one another to go deeper,
to get below the surface details and grow spiritually.
And going outward:
We go out into the world to act for justice.
Next week in worship, our theme is “be an activist”
and we’ll celebrate social action.
So this week, I decided to focus on the inward journey,
the spiritual work we hold up as essential
in our task of growing and changing

* * * *

In the circle in the parlor our conversation ranged far and wide.
One woman said that after 9-11,it is difficult for her NOT to knit.
“It makes me feel grounded,” she said, “spiritually grounded.’
Another says that creativity helps her connect with her own inner voice.
One woman said that she is always active, rarely stays put in one place.
She took up knitting again recently.
 “It is good for me,” she said simply.
“I don’t why, it’s good for me to sit down in one place and be quiet.”
She paused for a minute, adding softly
“it calms my soul.”

* * * * *

I am sure I offered this class on creativity in part to try and
force myself to get back to it
Like many of you, it’s hard to give myself permission
to put aside the dishes and the bills, get someone else to drive the carpool or make dinner, so that I can simply sit and sew.
For me, it doesn’t have to be anything big or fancy.
It is simply the sitting down, the quiet pull and tug of needle through cloth that can do wonders for my spirit.
But the day to day pushes in on all of us.

Funny, isn’t it?
We get our bodies to the gym (sometimes).
We get healthy food to our mouths (sometimes).
We spend time with people who are important to us (sometimes).
Yet when it comes to tending the soul, it gets so elusive.

The word “spiritual” can certainly trip us up.
We have used it so much it has lost its meaning.
I know that for some of our older members this talk of “spirituality” is a mysterious and not always welcome development within Unitarian Universalism in these last 20 years. I won’t attempt a precise definition but point us towards those experiences that help us feel more alive.
When we talk about these things, our voices get animated,
our eyes sparkle. We are getting close to things of the spirit

* * *

“To pray,” wrote W. H. Auden, “it is to pay attention
To something or someone other than oneself.
Whenever a man concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol or the True God-so that he
completely forgets his own ego and desires,
He is praying.”

Doug Baker, our sexton, historian extraordinaire and resident artist once gave me this quote, typed out on a piece of paper. I taped it up on a filing cabinet next to my desk and have never forgotten it. To me, it opens up a whole new way of thinking of the word “prayer” Where are the places in our life when we lose all sense of ourselves and time drops away.

It may be physical places we return to—
Island, lake, mountain, shore.
Beloved places, we get there.
We are lost in the scene before our eyes, lost in the wind,
snow on mountain peak, the lapping lull of lake water across rock.

It may be hobbies, pursuits, avocations that draw you.
When you are doing them, you lose all sense of time.
Hammering in the workshop. Kneading dough at the kitchen counter. Watering a pink camellia in your greenhouse
At the loom. In the yoga studio. At the piano

Sometimes, I think, we hear words like “spirituality”
And think we need to add something to our lives
Our hearts sink because life is so full already.
I’m not sure we need to add anything but take a step back and look at what is already there, return to those places that Auden talks about where ego disappears and time drops away. Auden would say this is prayer and mystics in all the world’s traditions agree with him, from the Christian desert fathers and mothers to Meister Eckhart in the middle Ages.
to 20th century Quaker mystic Thomas Kelly.

“Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice,
to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts
Pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny. Calling us home unto itself. Yielding to these persuasions…is the beginning of true life.”

* * * * *

So a new way to think about prayer, but still,
 there is no denying that prayer is difficult for many of us.
Prayer is a problem for many Unitarian Universalists.
We are uneasy around it. Ambivalent, and for good reason.
For some of us it is a holdover from childhood with a religion that was painful or confusing or just didn’t seem to have much to do with our real lives. If we don’t use the word God, then to whom or what are we praying?
Or if we do turn to God or Goddess, we don’t believe in a divine who “hears” our prayers and then doles out favors.
As the great preacher Henry Emerson Fosdick once said,
“God is not some kind of cosmic bellhop.”

“Prayer and I were strangers once,”
Writes the Rev. Elizabeth Tarbox
“But prayer called to me over the ocean
And I went to her in my good wool suit, high-heeled shoes
And a silk blouse that seemed to freeze on my skin.”
She writes of going down to the sea in winter to try to pray.
“Prayer and I were strangers once.”
That’s true for me, and perhaps for you as well, as awkward as it is for me to be an ordained clergyperson
and admit it.
Will that affect my performance evaluation, I wonder,
If I confess to you that my prayer life is fitful, at best.
seems to come and go in fits and starts, can be shallow or dry for stretches of time.

The Russian Orthodox Archbishop of London, Anthony Bloom, told a story about an old woman who came up to him once and said she’d been praying for 14 years and had never gotten a sense of God’s presence.  “Since you’ve just been ordained,” she said, “and probably know nothing, I thought you might possibly blunder out the right thing to tell me.”

“That’s a very encouraging situation I thought” and then I said to her,  “Get up in the morning and put your room to rights, and light the little lamp in front of your icon and then take out your knitting and for 15 minutes, knit before the face of God. Don’t say one word of prayer. Just knit and try to enjoy the peace of your room.”

Well the woman didn’t think it was very pious advice but she went away and after a while she came back and said, “Well I did what you told me. I got up and washed and put my room to right and then I sat in my armchair and I knit.
I tried to knit before the face of God. And after a while,
the peace of the room began to seep into my bones
and the silence soothed me, and
after a time I felt the presence of God.”

Prayer is far from self-evident. There are times in life when even if we think we can pray, it just doesn’t seem to be working. There are times we don’t feel spiritual or anything close to it, times when we can’t or don’t pray.
There are dry stretches. But if I can’t pray, I tell myself after remembering Anthony Bloom’s story, if I can’t pray, I can always knit.

* * * *

 Sometimes when I visit with you in the hospital, at your home, in my office we’ll talk for a while and then, if intuition tells me, I’ll ask, “do you want to pray?”
It isn’t easy to do this. Having been around Unitarian Universalists for most of my life I know just how wrong this question could be for some people, irrelevant, touching a nerve, even offensive.

So I admit I get timid and let the opportunity go by, but sometimes I do ask the question. I get some polite nods, and a lot more yeses. I explain that I’ll start the prayer and then I’ll leave some space. And if there is something they want to say in the silence they can, and if not, it’s fine

I am always surprised at what happens, at what the other person says, but also, I’m surprised at what comes out of my own mouth.” I’m scared,” people will say in this prayer time
when they haven’t said it before. I’m scared; I’m so worried about this test I’m about to have or this diagnosis I have just received. I didn’t know life was going to turn out like this
I’m confused. Or “thank you. Thank you god for this person.
I love her so much, I’m so worried about her.”
There is vulnerability in this prayer time in me and in you
that we don’t always get to in the rational, analytical part of life. It seems to me sitting there in the quiet with you that somehow we’ve gone from being more in our head. (That is important, analyzing a situation, trying to make a good decision, choosing how to respond to whatever it is life has handed us all of a sudden.) We go from being up here, in our heads, to down here in our hearts. We are open with one another and with God in a way we aren’t normally.
“Prayer, “ said Mahatma Gandhi, “prayer is not asking.  It is a longing of the soul.  It is daily admission of one’s weaknesses…it is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

It’s risky, it isn’t easy and it isn’t exactly fun.
But as Rev. Richard Kellaway wrote in his book The Trying Out, only by going into our own heart of darkness do we stand a chance of coming out the other side shaken, changed, illuminated, made more human.

If prayer can lead us to these tender, holy places inside me and you. If prayer can lead us to a place where we find ourselves becoming more awake, more awake to both the pain and the wonder of life, than this might be something we want to run towards, instead of something we want to flee.

I characterize my prayer life these days as intermittent at best, and then I think of Karen Foley’s words
“Pray as you can,” she used to tell me, “Not as you can’t”
So I pray in my car, on the treadmill at the gym, in line at the grocery store, in snatches here and there.
Because if I don’t do it this way, right now, I won’t do it at all.
It is not very deep most of the time, a muttered “thank you” and, harder for me to say, a whispered “help”
There are only two prayers Anne Lamott tells us,
“Thank you” and “help me.” She says prayer is plugging back into a conversation that has never stopped.

When I can manage to say even a word I feel the tyranny of the schedule begins to lift, if only for a moment.
I touch, oh so briefly, a wider perspective on life
than the tunnel vision which so often captures me.
I dip if only for a flash, I dip down into a river that is running,
always running, it seems, wide and deep and strong, beneath the surface details of our lives.
Eternity at our hearts, Thomas Kelly calls it.
Timelessness, W. H. Auden says.

* * * *

In the parlor
It is quiet.
We sit and work together,
Velvet cloth against silk,
Yarn against needle.
Memories of love and loss keep us company.
We sit in silence,
The clock ticking,
Time dropping away.
Perhaps, just for today,
 this will be our prayer.