Second Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray"
[Psalm 136]
A poem from Rumi:
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer from the wall.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundreds ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. There are a hundred ways to pray. In fact, since I believe that it’s true that anything can be prayer – depending on what consciousness we’re bringing to what we are doing – then, certainly there are more than a hundred.
But, we tend to put prayer in a box. We limit it to just a few, religiously sanctioned activities. Unfortunately, I think the church may reinforce the perception that there are far fewer than 100 ways to pray. Most prayer in churches is done one way: verbally, in a prayer that is addressed to a personal deity usually known as God, although sometimes Jesus or Spirit. We’ve been practicing a different one, too, during Lent – the cave of the heart prayer. But if prayer is not just something that begins with “O God” and ends with “In Jesus’ name”…. if prayer is not just ringing a bell and sitting in silent contemplation… if prayer is not just pleading to God to heal our loved one who has cancer… then what is it?
I want us to imagine prayer as a wheel. At the center of the wheel is the hub, and radiating out from it are a spokes. The spokes represent the many ways of entering the hub, the center, of prayer. The spokes represent the practices or forms of prayer, and the theologies of prayer that get us into that center. There’s a lot of spokes that radiate toward that hub; there’s one hub.
I want to talk about that hub in the simplest way we can. I think it’s helpful to distill confusing things (which I think prayer is for some of us) down to its simplest form, so that you can see it more clearly. So I want to offer a distilled definition of prayer that we can dress up later with specific theologies and specific practices. First, a story.
As you know, years ago, I learned to meditate, and it changed my life. But, post-Patrick, I have simply not had the time. If I want to get in other forms of self-care, like exercise in the morning, my prayer life has to give. My compromise with myself is that I meditate or do some form of prayer three mornings a week and exercise the other two mornings.
I was talking about this compromise recently to a friend of mine from New Mexico, Geneva, who is studying to become a spiritual director at San Francisco Theological Seminary. She told me that that day, one of her professors had given her a definition of prayer. Prayer, at its most simple, was “intentional awareness.” At its core, prayer is simply about intentionally being aware – it doesn’t even say what we’re aware of. That’s the beauty of it. For you, it might be being aware of the presence of Christ; for you, it might be awareness of the present moment; for you, it might be presence of the animating force in creation; for you, it might be awareness of Love. Prayer is intentionally bringing our usual mode of perception or awareness or consciousness to another level.
When I heard this definition from my friend, I thought of my spiritual director saying that she prays while she is walking. Now, I’m sure in part, she’s walking to get exercise. But, as she’s walking, she’s not focusing her awareness on keeping her heart rate up, making sure she’s across the aerobic threshold, and she’s also not going over her shopping list or to-do list. As she walks, she intentionally centers her awareness on the Divine – on Spirit, on however she talks about that. And, as she walks, she holds her directees and others in that awareness, in that presence of the something more she’s aware of.
Now, I’ve heard this definition of prayer as intentional awareness before, and it always made sense to me. But somehow, hearing it again just recently, broke something open in me. Some boxes I had put around prayer in my mind fell apart. I started laughing, and I realize what a nut I had been to say that I pray three times a week, and the other two days I exercise. Because of course, my Jazzercise is my prayer, too. In fact, some of my deepest moments of prayer lately have come as I’m dancing to some idiotic Britney Spears song. I’ll be dancing, moving my hips, and I’ll find myself being so grateful. Grateful for a body that can still do this….
Those moments of grace – where I fall into prayer without intending to do so – made me realize even more that it was nutty to segment my mornings into prayer and nonpayer mornings, it could all be prayer. And so, I still go to exercise class, but now I intentionally do it with an “attitude of gratitude” and joy. I say, in my heart, “God, this is my prayer to you. Thanks that I can still pray in this way.” And on those mornings when I don’t even feel like I have time to pray whether through exercise or meditation, I try to remember to at least not go to the study right away and begin reading or answer emails or thinking about my sermon. I try to remember to light a candle or ring my meditation bell or say a small inward prayer, “God, this day is yours. Let everything I do today be a part of helping your realm come on earth as it is in heaven.” Or I try to feel my own breath, or hear the silence around me. To notice a bird singing. I stop, briefly, to kneel and kiss the ground. And then I begin.
That’s why I said last week that we always, always have time enough to pray. Because all it takes is setting our intentional awareness, of dropping our consciousness down to a different place. (Not that this is something you are going to get right awy – it’s why practicing a form of prayer over time is so helpful, because changing our consciousness to the “heart” level, to the “prayer” level, takes practice.)
Three hundred years ago, a man named Nicholas Herman, living in France, entered a Carmelite monastery and discovered the power of intentional awareness. Now, Brother Lawrence – as he came to be known – was perhaps not what you might have thought of as a very good religious person, as a very good pray-er. He himself said that books on the spiritual life only served to confuse him. He also, he said, was no good at the daily prayers the monks went through. While he “dutifully completed the three hours of prayer and meditation required of the monks in his order each day, he confessed that afterward he could not have said what it had all been about.”[1]
Because he found the usual talk and practice of prayer so confusing, he resolved simply to give himself wholly to God no matter what he was doing. And so, he made pancakes thinking of God, bought wine thinking of God, and cobbled shoes thinking of God. He kept his attention, as much as he could, aware of God’s presence. We don’t know precisely what “God” meant to him – what image or concept did that bring to mind? But it is clear that, whatever his image or concept of God, the presence was one of love.
By practicing the presence of Love, Brother Lawrence said that he discovered such joy “that in order to restrain it and keep from revealing it, I am forced into childish actions that appear more like madness than devotion.” If he had to describe this joy he experienced, he said, he would call it being nursed by God, for the indescribable sweetness that he experienced at God’s breast. Ironically enough, the man who was confused by spiritual books ended up writing a small volume called “The Practice of the Presence of God” that has become a spiritual classic.
The writer Barbara Brown Taylor was once called one of the top ten preachers in the English language. She calls herself an absolute failure at any sort of conventional prayer, and takes great solace in Brother Lawrence’s idea of “practicing the presence of God.” Prayer, then, she says, is simply “waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing. When I am fully alert to whatever or whoever is right in front of me; when I am electrically aware of the tremendous gift of being alive; when I am able to give myself wholly to the moment I am in, then I am in prayer. Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.”
Each of us is going to come into that presence, come into that state of awareness in different ways. Each of us is going to find that certain things we do, certain practices, help us enter that state of awareness more readily than other things. That’s where you get books like “50 Ways to Pray.” And each of us is going to name that presence, that awareness, in different ways. God, Christ, Spirit, Ground of Being, Compassion, Divine Mother, the present moment, the… We’re going to talk more those different practices and different theologies next Sunday, when we talk about our different prayer personalities.
Now, I am aware that this expansive definition of prayer as intentional awareness does not answer – in fact doesn’t even try to answer -- the most perplexing question we may have about prayer, namely: Does it work? And the question may even seem sort of nonsensical in light of the definition. Does intentional awareness work? Work what? Intentional awareness is the point in and of itself. (Joseph Campbell story, being interviewed by Bill Moyers.)
But, having said that – when our child is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease – you can bet we want to know if prayer works. It’s not an irrelevant question. So, we’re going to talk about this during Education Hour – because I think that question is best answered when we talk from our own lived experience, share our own stories.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Or confused, distracted. Or expectant. Happy to greet the day. Don’t open the door to your office, or the kitchen, or your car and begin working. Don’t immediately open your mind to all that must be done today, accomplished, faced. Take down the dulcimer. Sing a song. Walk in the park. Stroke your child’s cheek. Eat an orange. Go into the cave of your heart, and open it to the beauty of all that is. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Amen.
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[1] From Barbara Brown Taylor’s book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.