The Soul on Its Knees
- Details
- Created on Sunday, 31 July 2011 01:00
- Written by Karen Lewis Foley
The Readings - How Prayer Happened:
Some thoughts about a few experiences of prayer in my own life; and
Excerpts from Roberta C. Bondi’s account of being unable to pray while spending large amounts of time with her friend with fourth stage cancer. When a psychiatrist told her she was “in shock” she realized, “My mind had been rendered blank by shock, so it made sense that shock would affect my prayer also….” But she also realized that, in being present to her friend and holding her constantly in mind and heart, she had “never felt God’s absence.” She “actually was praying twenty-four hours a day.” [“When We Can’t Seem to Pray,” in Weavings, Sept-Oct/1998]
The Sermon:
Victor Hugo said, “There are times when, no matter what the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.” Have you ever been thrown to your knees in prayer—in body or in soul? How has that happened? I don’t ask how you pray; I ask how you get brought to prayer. What sends you to your knees before the great mystery at the heart of life? Are you, like many, and like me for many years, unable to bend your knees?
Even for people who pray every day, sometimes prayer just dries up, or stops dead in the face of great pain or fear. Roberta Bondi was unable to pray when her friend was traumatically ill. But then she realized that her prayer life was in shock—just as she was. But, while she attended so completely to her friend, her life became a constant act of prayer. Because the heart of prayer is attention. Where there is devoted attention, there is prayer.
But many of us never learned to pray; it’s simply never been part of many lives. Or, for many—like me—childhood prayers grew hollow when we began to think for ourselves in adolescence and really listened to the words of the ritual prayers. Or a traumatic loss leads us to reject a God who would let a thing like that happen. A high school classmate of mine, a brilliant boy destined to become a top notch scientist, died of cancer a few days after graduation. I went reeling down the halls of disbelief. Or maybe we keep praying for a way out of addiction or depression, or for a radical life change, and prayer doesn’t seem to work. Or maybe we just no longer have much to say to God; or we’re not sure there’s anyone—anything—really listening.
Like most Unitarian Universalists I dislike the image of God projected by some pious people: God-as-Good-Buddy, or All-Powerful-Benevolent-Daddy. As if they know God personally, as well as what God wants. Prayers that say, “O God teach us” and go on to mention things the prayer leader thinks we ought to learn tell us a lot more about the prayer leader than about God or even what we actually need to learn.
So—just what is a reasonable person to do about praying? Roberta Bondi talks about “figuring out the discrepancies between the theology in our heads and our actual working theology and facing that theology head on.”. [“Learning to Pray,” Christian Century, March 20-27, 1996] When I first began to pray again after an entire young adulthood of refusing to do so, I felt a lot like Unitarian Universalist minister Frances West, who said, “When I pray, the humanist in me is patient but nonplused, asking who I think I am talking to, and I reply that I don’t know, but I do it anyway, my breath casting words into the seemingly unanswering air.” [CLF newsletter, June, 1991]
How do you pray if you don’t believe in God? I’ve been asked that question, and I have lived it! I have come to believe that it is when praying as we have known it becomes difficult or meaningless, that we are most ready to open up and evolve into deeper prayer—but this may not be what we would, at first, even recognize as prayer. Like that moment when I stumbled downstairs at four a.m., unable to sleep, my mind racing, and, stopped in my tracks by the great, shining star in the east, was suddenly at peace.
A woman once told me that she doesn’t believe in the words of her childhood prayers. But, she said, when I’m really in trouble or pain I find myself saying them, and they make me feel better! “Is that all right?” she wanted to know. Of course it was! Those prayers got her in touch with the heart of her inner reality. That’s what deeply ingrained ritual does. The theology in her head that “didn’t believe” was out of sync with her working theology of heartfelt faith (to which those prayers gave voice)—and this made her think there was something wrong with praying.
That’s what is going on when our behavior counters our intellectual belief. Some people don’t believe in God but live as if they’re following all the great religious commandments. You know people like that. Some people believe and pray traditionally, but cheat on their taxes or spouses. My own head theology, which I think is fairly integrated with my working theology, tells me I’m secure and the universe is trustworthy. But let me lose an important document, my printer jam and my internet connection evaporate, and a defective strand in my working theology threatens to strangle me. That little voice I haven’t quite got rid of says, “Of course the universe will do you in—you really aren’t worth much.”
What sends the soul to its knees? A terrible loss, or the threat of loss, a dreadful diagnosis, a ruptured relationship we can’t repair. A moment of awe in the face of nature or a newborn baby. A deep yearning for something—courage, a way to change our life, or simply, sometimes, a good night’s sleep. A wash of gratitude for something we didn’t expect or earn but were given anyway—like love from an unexpected source, kindness from a stranger, children who grow up to be healthy, contributing members of society.
Many of you here have heard Gary Smith talk about four kinds of prayer—“please,” (petition or intercession) “thank you,” (gratitude and sometimes awe) “oops, I’m sorry,” (need for forgiveness) and “WOW!” (sheer awe) Well, there are variations on that theme, but I agree that prayers generally follow those lines. We could say that “I’m sorry” is a kind of “please” prayer. As in “Please forgive me for what I’ve done, what I haven’t done, how I’ve failed to be my best.”
There are times when we beg “please” in prayer, even if we don’t say it as a formal prayer. In the hospital waiting room while someone you love is in surgery. When your teenager isn’t home by curfew. And times when we’re breathing “thank you” even if we don’t recognize it. I think my first “thank you” prayer happened when I saw my newborn daughter’s eyes gazing about the delivery room, a brand new life from my inadequate self. And those times of amazement when all we can do is worship, whether or not we know it’s what we’re doing. A cousin with whom I hiked in a bright California spring full of wildflowers kept yelling WOW as we rounded every corner—and finally she just stopped and said, “It’s enough to make you believe in God.” I think her soul was on its knees.
“Please” can turn into what Kathleen Norris calls “gimme gimme” prayers—at their worst: the little boy who wants a bicycle for Christmas, hides a picture of the Virgin Mary under his bed, and says, “OK, God, if you ever want to see your mother again….” Or they become utilitarian, and if we get what we want, we say our prayers “worked.” So if you don’t get cured, your prayers didn’t work? Because they weren’t good enough? You didn’t do it right? God plays favorites? I don’t think so!
I’ve struggled a lot with intercession, “please” prayers, because I do pray for people, and I don’t think it’s wrong to ask for what you want, and I know that miracles have occurred; yet I can not regard God or the cosmos as a big holy vending machine. When I pray for people I focus my attention on them in light and love, and ask for their peace and well-being. The imagery may be different for different people—the Buddhist lovingkindness meditation is an intercessory practice in which we ask that a person be happy, well, free from suffering, peaceful and at ease. We don’t prescribe a specific outcome. When “please” praying, I try to remember that I very likely do not know the “right” outcome.
But I have to admit, if it’s about something deeply personal, I’ll be down on my literal knees begging for a miracle. And when I’m thrown to my knees over a terrible loss I’m not rational; I don’t have the wherewithal to ask simply to be held in God’s love. When the man I was going to marry many years ago died, I yelled at God to give him back. I really did. I didn’t expect him back, I knew I was irrational, but I now know what I was doing. In the extremity of grief we may need to scream out our anger, desire, sense of injustice, perplexity. I needed to know that all my emotions, and I myself, were held by something larger than myself.
I’m sure I could yell at God because I already had a prayer relationship with God and knew my anger and despair were safe there. Just as in a secure human relationship we can yell, pour out our despair and know we’re safe. Do you see where this is going? Yes. Prayer is relationship. A priest friend once told me, “Our relationship with God is only as good as our best relationship with a human being.” That made me reflect soberly on my relationships!
And I believe that we can be in relationship with a sense of the holy that is not in personal form. It might be connection with humanity, or community, or the natural world, or being at home in the cosmos. A humanist friend said that she did not experience a sense of relationship with a quasi-personal god as I did, but had instead a sense of deep connection with all people and with the earth. There was little difference in the quality of our experiences of relationship with a great mystery at the heart of life. I was awed by her connection with spirit because it shone from her whole being.
Almost all of us experience “thank you.” Often it comes along with awe and wonder. But it doesn’t have to come in a thunderstroke. It can come in the simplest moments. David Steindl-Rast, in Gratefulness: The Heart of Prayer, talks about the difference between pro forma prayer and spontaneous prayer. You might sit through your regular prayer practice and nothing happens, he says. You don’t feel connected even though you’re saying all the right words. But later, well maybe you’re watering some violets, and something—the light on the leaves, the sound of the water touching the soil—enters your heart and you are lifted up and out of yourself. You are at one with the flowers, the light, the water, and you are flooded with gratitude for this moment. Then, he says, you are really praying. The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you ever pray in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ it is enough.”
“Thank you” is more powerful than we realize. Think of its power among ourselves. How it feels to be thanked. And just for a moment let’s imagine that the mystery at the heart of the cosmos is actually affected by our impact upon it—process theologians say that everything is caused by something and causes something else, and that God is the creative possibility as one event flows into and affects the next. In a sense, then, we are co-creators with God or the creative force because our actions can affect everything that happens. Another way to put this: we and what moves the universe exist in mutual relationship.
Someone once told me a very simple prayer for any situation: “Thank you for bringing me to this time and place.” It’s hard to be thankful for some times and places, but even in a place of loss, alienation and despair, this prayer expresses our sense of being accompanied, of not being wholly alone in the universe. A not particularly religious man who was dying said he’d begun to pray. Asked what he prayed for, he said, “I don’t pray for anything. How would I know what to ask for?” His questioner was puzzled and insisted: “If prayer is not for asking, what is it for?” “It isn’t ‘for’ anything,” he said. “It mainly reminds me I am not alone.” [Larry Dossey, Healing Words]
It mainly reminds me I’m not alone. That’s been my experience. In my own prayer the most consistent experience is simply one of presence. A presence with and in which I exist all the time. but of which I constantly lose awareness in the dailiness of living. This presence is more important than getting an answer or result, though I sometimes find answers and results do occur. It’s the presence that matters. I once spent a three-day personal retreat sitting in a chapel for many hours each day, forty minutes of each hour in prayer, broken by twenty minutes of walking, reading, or resting. But in those forty-minute periods with my eyes closed, my mind wandered, invented stories, got sleepy. All this time, a candle was burning. Now and then I’d open my eyes and notice the candle flame, still there. It occurred to me that each time I got up and left the chapel for twenty minutes, the flame was still there when I came back. And then it hit me: every time my attention wandered away, and I brought it back, God was still there. “God doesn’t go away,” I said suddenly. “I do! And all I have to do is come back!” I guess I needed those intense days of sitting to realize something so simple about that relationship.
We know relationship is reciprocal. Those who think prayer is “talking to God” have only half the picture. Imagine getting together with a friend and doing all the talking! Our relationship with the deep mystery of life is like our relationship with another person: we have to listen if it’s going to do its work in us. This means being quiet. It means knowing we don’t know everything, sometimes not even what’s best for us. It means—oh how counter-cultural this is—being humble. There is a point in prayer—just as there are times in the most intimate human relationship—when words end in silence, when thoughts feather out to simple awareness, when we don’t need to do anything but be, our beings at one, our soul on its knees. One writer [Paul Evdokimov] has said, “It is not enough to say prayers; one must become, be prayer, prayer incarnate.” When our soul is on its knees, we become the prayer that our life is praying all the time.