First Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray "
Prayer changed my life. Two weeks ago, I told you about a time in my 30s when I was in a lot of pain. I was desperately trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life, and everything I was trying was failing. On a hilltop in Berkeley, about 14 years ago, I finally surrendered – I gave up. I poured out my need to a God in whom I didn’t even really believe. And help came, eventually. The “milk of loving” – to quote the poem Rumi whom I mentioned two weeks ago– began to flow toward me, and I opened my mouth wide and drank
Now, it was both that simple, and not that simple. Some of you may know that newborn babies don’t automatically know how to nurse. There is a basic suckling instinct that all human beings – indeed, all mammals – are born with. That instinct is very strong. Babies begin sucking their thumb in the womb, before they are even born. Good thing, too, that we’d have this instinct because we’d die without it. But learning to “latch on” is a bit of an art, and a learned skill. Some babies get it right away, some don’t. And for either sort of infant, nursing gets a lot easier with practice.
Like a newborn, I had to learn how to drink. And that happened primarily, for me, when I learned to pray. For years I had been drawn to silent prayer, to meditation. I would occasionally get a book, read it, and then attempt to do it myself. Those attempts lasted, on average, about two days. Sometimes more. Often less. I certainly had the instinct, the desire to be fed in this way – but I didn’t quite have the skill. I couldn’t quite latch on.
At least not on my own. Grace came into my life when, a few months after my hilltop surrender, I discovered Hesed, a Christian meditation community only 10 minutes from where I lived at the time. For almost four months, I went to Hesed two to three times a week to pray. And with just a bit of guidance and the supportive presence of other meditators, I got it. In this community of grace, I was able to practice praying until I could do it on my own.
I still inwardly gasp when I reflect on how much prayer changed my life. Within a year of taking up this practice, I heard a call to ministry. My vocation had found me. And I found myself released from the anxieties and compulsions that had hounded me for much of my adult life. When I read over my pre-prayer journals, I can almost not recognize the young woman who was so hard on herself, so unsure of the validity of her existence. Through prayer, I became aware of a desire in me that went deeper that even finding a vocation. A short poem by the writer Raymond Carver, written weeks before he died of cancer, summarized that desire. I kept the poem tacked on the shelf above my desk. Called “Late Fragment,” it read:
And did you get what
You wanted form this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
Beloved on the earth.
I wanted to call and feel myself beloved on the earth. I wanted the milk of loving to flow, and I wanted to know how to drink it. And, through prayer, I did learn. And I did – and feel myself beloved on this earth.
Prayer can change your life. Maybe not right away. But, slowly, over time, prayer can lead us into the deepest heart of God, into the heart of creation, into the heart of ourselves. I believe that, with all my heart.
But I also know that prayer, while simple, is not that simple. For we’re not newborns, after all, with an uncomplicated desire for prayer. Most of us have two, three, four decades of experience that cloud that simple desire, that make it difficult to just be present to the Presence in whom we live and move and have our being.
What keeps us from that presence? A couple of Sundays ago during Education Hour, Tina Rieman told of a remarkable practice at her workplace called “clearing.” At the beginning of every shift, each staffperson meets for 10 minutes with their supervisor to answer the question, “What is keeping you from being fully present here today?” It’s a chance to clear the air – to vent about something that happened on the way to work that day, to process a bad interaction with a co-worker from the day before.
So let’s do a “clearing” with prayer. Let’s name those obstacles to presence. We may not get rid of them, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe the point is to make a prayer of them. To take a “long, loving look” – as one person has defined prayer -- at our obstacles to prayer.
(Pick up clock) Time. This is perhaps one of the first obstacles that pop up when we start thinking about prayer. We’re just too busy, aren’t we? Who has time to pray? Who has time to learn how to pray? Who has the discipline to get up early to do something they may feel ambivalent about doing anyway?
Let’s take a long, loving look at time. We wake up, looking at the clock, and already our mind starts spinning with the things we must do. Time tasks us. It trails us. We trail it. Like a cat trying to catch her own tail, we never quite get there – never quite get to that moment of spaciousness, that moment beyond time where we can just breathe and be. That time seems always beyond reach.
Let’s take a deep breath. Again. There. That didn’t take too much time, did it? That prayer of preparation we did? That was about five minutes. Can we trust that in the midst of our tail-chasing, eternity waits for us? Like the cat who stops running in circles and finds a soft pillow in the sunshine – we, too, can stop and bathe in the glow of eternal time any time we want. Can we trust that there is always, always time enough for prayer?
(Pick up bag). Baggage. Specifically, theological baggage (cross on bag). There’s a lot in this bag. Let’s take a long, loving look at it.
(gavel) Judgment. We may not want to pray to a God, or to be in the presence of a God whom we primarily see as a judgmental, authoritarian figure. And who can blame us? If that’s who God is for us -- a judge who is interested in us only when we are bad, a “parent” in whose presence we feel like a naughty child deserving punishment -- then not praying is a gift of grace. Can we turn a compassionate gaze toward that image of a judging God? Can we lovingly look at the child who was taught to believe in it? Can we attempt to see the God beyond this image, the one who weeps that Her face has been so distorted?
(photo) What’s this? Why, it’s a photograph of Rick Warren. Rick Warren, thanks to Barack Obama, is probably the most famous evangelical in the United States right now. I know that for some of us, his prayer at the inauguration made us want to cringe. If he represents what “Christian prayer” is about, then, please, can we just skip ahead to Joseph Lowery? That will make us feel less like putting a bag over our head for being Christian.
Many progressive Mennonites and Protestants have big baggage with prayer that has developed out of a reaction to evangelicalism. Joe Driskill, no relation to our Ed, is a professor at the Pacific School of Religion. He tells a story about a time he gave a guest sermon on prayer at a mainline Protestant church. Afterward, an older woman came up to him. For 25 years this woman told him, she had been getting up in the middle of the night to take care of a son with special needs. As she climbed the stairs back to her bedroom, she would often sit down to catch her breath. Over time, this rest became a time of prayer for her. In the quiet stillness of her home, she would draw near to God. It gradually became the most important time of her day, the time she received the strength she needed to carry on with her responsibilities.
“I have been praying this way for 20 years,” she told Joe, “and never once have I felt I could tell anyone in this church about this experience. I was afraid they would think I was a Bible thumper if I said anything about it.”[1]
I cringe when I think that perhaps some of you have a story like this woman and have felt unable to share it here, for fear of the same reaction. I pray that isn’t the case, but I wonder.
So, let’s take a long, loving look at this baggage about evangelicalism and prayer. One of the foundations of evangelical prayer is that a loving God pays attention to me; that I can have a personal relationship with a deity who cares about what happens in my life. So, we can go to this Deity in prayer. I think some of us have a problem with this. We have a hard time believing the Creator of the Universe would bother with the mundane matters of our life. How can we justify such a belief, especially when such great suffering in the world goes unmet? If God is not saving the victims of genocide in Darfur, then why would God mess around with my relatively little concerns?
If we look long enough, we see in these questions a deep compassion for those who suffer, a holy anger at all that is not right in the world, a longing for justice and peace.
I wonder, too, if we have a reaction to evangelical prayer because it sometimes seems a bit too certain, even idolatrous. How can they be so sure they know what God wants? How did they get a hotline to God? If we look long enough at this, we see a deep sense of the holiness and mystery of God. And we can also see a humble recognition of our propensity toward sin – that is, a recognition that we humans miss the mark. That we may think we know what God wants but may, in reality, we may be far off.
Can we hold onto that longing for justice and that recognition of God’s mystery and still believe that we can have an experiential relationship with the holy? Can we open our hearts to the possibility that this God of justice and mystery may, in fact, want to a relationship with us? Many of us love the hymn “I sought the Lord.” Perhaps our love for that hymn is testament to the fact that we do believe, or want to believe, this. Listen to its words, and sing with me if you wish…. “I sought the Lord and afterward I knew, He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me. It t’was not I who found, O Saviour true. No, I was found of Thee.”
And that brings us to our final obstacle. There are certainly more. The bag still has stuff in it. But this is the last one I’ll mention today. (get out mask). Perhaps we don’t want to be found by God or Jesus. Perhaps we don’t want to take off the mask and be seen for who we really are. Perhaps that just feels too vulnerable. Too scary. And so, let’s take a long, loving look at that fear. We don’t have to coax it, or convince it, or cajole it. But can we look at it? Can we, perhaps, love it?
“I find, I walk, I love, but oh the whole of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee! For thou wert long beforehand with my soul, always thou lovedst me.” (verse 3 of “I sought the Lord”
Amen.
[1] This story comes from Joe’s book Protestant Spiritual Exercises: Theology, History and Practice.