Eternal Parent or Eternal Partner? A Sermon on Prayer (revisited)
Written by Gary E. Smith Sunday, 08 March 2009 00:00
It was six or seven years ago that I came across a definition of prayer that resonated with me, and some of you will remember that I shared this definition with you at that time. The words came from one of my colleagues, Rudy Nemser. Prayer, he had said, falls into one of four categories: Thanks. Ooops. Gimme. Wow. And I remember thinking at the time, there’s a sermon here somewhere. With all due respect to Rudy, I have now rearranged his categories into my own Gary Smith levels of spiritual development. For reasons I’ll explain as I go along, I think the order should be: Prayer as gimme. Prayer as ooops. Prayer as wow. Prayer as thanks.
My first memories of prayer came from the Protestant prayers I said every night as a child: “Now I lay me down to sleep,” I would pray just before bed. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Could I have known what I was saying? If I did, I only remember that my prayer hastily went on to a list of people whom I wished to bless: my mother and father, my brothers, my grandparents, my dog, if I wanted to prolong the time until the lights went out. And at meals: “Bless this food to our use and us to thy loving service.” I learned the Lord’s Prayer in Sunday School, and could we have said the Lord’s Prayer at the Brook Street Elementary School? I remember a regular substitute teacher who taught us the 23rd Psalm. I was at Brook Street School when “under God” suddenly got added to the Pledge of Allegiance.
I grew up, responding to a God with a Big Eye. This kind of God calls for the prayers that begin: “Give me, give me, give me. Help me, help me, help me.” This is a familiar stage, a common part of religious development, mine and maybe yours, not only in childhood, but in our adulthood, too, cycling back at unexpected moments. I think we move through these four stages of prayer, “gimme, oops, wow, thanks,” over and over in our lifetime. I discovered Brendan Halpin’s book IT TAKES A WORRIED MAN on the BBC World Service overnight some years ago. Brendan was a secondary school teacher in the Boston area; attended, it turned out, the Unitarian church in Jamaica Plain, and wrote this book out of journals he kept as his wife fought stage-four breast cancer. It’s a funny, poignant, disarmingly honest, sometimes expletive-filled account of his life and their lives through this time. Throughout the book, he wrestles with the meaning of prayer. Early on in the book, he talks about a prayer group he attended at the Jamaica Plain church.
“While I like to pray,” he says, “I need to go to [this] group because I am too lazy to [pray] by myself. I started to have doubts, though. I know prayer makes me feel good, and I believe it’s effective, but if God can intervene in the world, I guess I wonder why he doesn’t do it more often. If God intervenes, where was he in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, etc? Therefore God doesn’t intervene. So why am I asking him to look out for people, or grant healing to people, or to bring somebody home safely? What am I doing? Does it matter? I think,” he says, “I have now officially become a Unitarian. I am too tied in knots intellectually to pray.” And then he adds, and this foreshadows the “prayer as ‘gimme’ in adulthood” part: “[My] crisis of faith comes before – before, mind you – the Diagnosis.” Small wonder: after the diagnosis of cancer, why not prayer?
Brendan says the prayer group begins with them all chanting the 23rd Psalm, “patriarchal language and all.” “Thinking of yourself as a sheep being led around by a benevolent God is a pretty comforting thought when things are tough,” he writes. Brendan Halpin, meet Gail Godwin. “Addressing, questioning, calling on another who is not we, a being beyond our [knowledge],” Gail Godwin writes, “enables us to move beyond our autobiographical boundaries. We are more than we know… This is what I hoped to convey at the end of my novel FATHER MELANCHOLY’S DAUGHTER, when twenty-two-year old Margaret Gower, having chronicled her personal history to date, addresses she knows not Whom in her diary. ‘Oh, You. Who are You? What do You want of me? What will I be doing on this day next year?… Do You know yourself, or is it left partly to me? Are you withholding my life from me, or unfolding it with me? Are you an eternal parent or are we eternal partners?’”
And that last question, “Are you an eternal parent or are we eternal partners?” is precisely the question that moved me out beyond the “gimme, gimme” of my childhood prayers and the “oops” of my adolescence when I called on God, the Big Eye, to somehow intervene in my life to make things right again. I moved through adolescence and youth groups, annual Youth Sundays, church camps, and all the while, I was, in Brendan Halpin’s words, “too tied in knots intellectually to pray.” I was a Unitarian and did not know it. On my way to theological school, I was praying words others might have expected to hear, fulfilling other people’s expectations. If I had saved any of these prayers I did pray, I would blush now for the young man I was, earnest and self-righteous, in my early twenties, not yet ready to pray. I led prayers in a national park campground ministry for two summers, I prayed in hospital rooms in a summer of hospital chaplaincy training. But it was self-conscious; it was awkward. I was w-a-a-y over my head.
I began my ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ in which I, when leading worship, used some of the familiar prayers from my childhood, prayers from the back of the hymnbook, prayers from Dag Hammarskjold, prayers from whatever passed in those days for the Cliff Notes of Prayer. I was entering an understanding of prayer that came between the first two, “gimme” and “oops”, and the later prayers of “wow” and “thanks”; that is, I was firmly in the stage of rebellion, a stage of spiritual development that, for me, lasted, oh say, twenty-five years or so. During the worst parts of this stage, when others would lead prayer, I would not bow my head. I would not close my eyes. I would show them. I would show God in whom I firmly did not believe. But I would show God anyway.
“Are you an eternal parent or are we eternal partners?” was the question that took me from the United Church of Christ ministry to a ministry within Unitarian Universalism, a dawning recognition for me that religion was becoming too great to be small, my understanding of whatever God was, was becoming too wide to be narrow. I was moving away from my faith in, my understanding of, a personal God, a God to whom one could address prayers. I am talking, so who is listening, I would ask. I am praying, so who is hearing.
I should not leave you believing that I did not grow in my understandings during this long period of what I am calling my stage of rebellion. I did grow. Henri Nouwen was an important teacher for me during this time, talking about prayer as a way of being, rather than a particular moment in time, a particular set of words. He would talk, both in lectures and in his books, about living prayerfully, attentively, living with awareness. I did grow. Michael Luckens, the rabbi at Kerem Shalom, gave me many years ago a copy of SONG OF THE HEART, the Shabbat Prayerbook the Jewish community here in Concord uses in their worship. In it I found this prayer, and it was a transformational moment for me when I read it because it captured for me what prayer meant. We used this prayer last fall when we were guests there in the synagogue.
“We cannot merely pray to You to end war; for we know You made the world in a way that we must find our own paths to peace within ourselves and with our neighbors.
We cannot merely pray to You to end starvation; for You have already given us the resources with which to feed the entire world, if we would only use them wisely.”
And the prayer continues, “We cannot merely pray to You to root out prejudice… to end despair…to end disease. Therefore,” the prayer concludes,
“We pray to You instead for strength, determination, and willpower, to do instead of just to pray, to become instead of merely to wish, for Your sake and for ours, speedily and soon, that our land may be safe, and that our lives may be blessed.”
“We pray to You… to do instead of just to pray,” and when I first read those words, some piece of me opened, and I knew that, from that point on, I could bow my head in prayer or keep my head up, I could close my eyes or I could keep my eyes open. It did not matter. It does not matter. What does matter in prayer is how authentic we are, I think, how real we are, what it is in you and is in me that enables us to reach down and touch all that is holy for us, reach up for the sky, reach out to others. I was no longer praying for God or “to whom it may concern” to do something for us, but rather I would be praying for strength and determination to handle the doing ourselves.
All this led me, I think, to the later stages in my understanding of prayer, the categories of “wow” and “thanks”. I mean by “all this” the need I had to rebel, to turn away from, to find my own way to the “wow” of recognition and awareness, find my own way to the “thanks” of gratitude and acceptance. “At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains,” writes Annie Dillard, “Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive… The silence is all there is. It is the alpha and the omega. It is God’s brooding over the face of the waters; it is the blending note of the ten thousand things, the whine of wings… Pray without ceasing,” she says.
I stand here, knowing full well that I may, at any moment, have to return to the prayers of gimme and oops. It happens without warning, I know that much. But the palette of prayer is fuller for me now: astonishment and gratitude, prayers without words, are now part of my spiritual life. I love the metaphor from the poet Jenny read earlier: “You ask me to pray to someone who is not. All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge and walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard, above landscapes the color of ripe gold transformed by a magic stopping of the sun. That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal where everything is just the opposite and the word is unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned. Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately, feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh and knows that if there is no other shore they will walk that aerial bridge all the same.”
“Prayer constructs a velvet bridge… and … if there is no other shore [we] will walk that aerial bridge all the same.” I am privileged to walk that bridge with you. Jenny told me once of a prayer by Thomas Merton, by way of Carl Scovel, and with it, slightly adapted, I close: “I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. But I know you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.” A velvet bridge indeed.
Czeslaw Milosz - On Prayer
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same