"How Do I Pray, and What Does Prayer Mean To Me?" Reflection

Kenda Autumn

I was honored—and a little floored!—to be asked to talk about prayer during our Lenten series. The question from Worship Committee was, how do I pray, and what does prayer mean to me. As I was working on this, I felt like I was giving a “mini faith story!”

I think my prayer life has always been on a slightly off-balance journey. Growing up as a family, we did pray together before meals. In restaurants, I remember that we might have held hands for a moment, but that might have been more common at extended family gatherings. I do not remember praying before going to bed.

At some point in my adult life, my prayer life has come to find expression in lots of different ways. On this journey, I feel like I have been searching for a deeper connection with God. And I thought I might get to this place of deeper connection by spending time in prayer. That, “spending time in prayer,” is what has changed over the years.

Prayer started to become a major part of my life in high school. When I was a junior or senior, some of my friends and I started a morning prayer group. My interest in praying in a group probably came about because of my previous leadership at a Mennonite Camp, MennoHaven. I enjoyed leading staff devotions there, and decided to bring some of that to school. At any rate, it was like a club—we even had an advisor. This was right around the time of the “no prayer in public schools” debates. We would have some kind of devotional together, people would share, and then we would pray for each other. So here I was, carrying my Bible into school, and leading this prayer meeting. It only lasted for about two months—but our intention was good. I remember thinking that this was how a person needed to pray—with this kind of structure.

I do not remember if it was the changing of the law, or lack of interest, but at some point the group stopped meeting. My Mom was all about fighting these laws to keep this group going. That is when I pulled out the argument about “If you would fight for prayer in schools, than you would need to fight for a group that wanted to pray to Satan.” She never did know what to do with me!!

At some point, between high school and now, I started to realize that when I simply thought of people—that this is “praying” for them. It has helped me to see that I actually do have an active prayer life. It has allowed me to not beat myself up because I am not sitting and doing some guided devotional. At the same time, I also realized I would like that kind—and would find a peace with that type of prayer. But I know I do not need to berate myself for not having any meditative prayer practice, either.

Now, prayer for me is when I think of someone and lift them up to God. I hold people in my heart and wish or pray or think of God’s arms wrapped around them, loving them, and caring for them. For me, this is a meaningful way to pray. This way of holding people does not happen for me at any regular time of day. It may occur when I’m doing some repetitive function, and need a way to engage my mind. For example, when I’m working out at the gym early in the morning. I also do this form of praying when I’m biking through the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, on my way to work. Often, this turns in to a prayer of thanksgiving:

“Thank God for the beauty of nature.”
“Thank God for all the shades of GREEN!”

I moved to the Lower Haight last June. And in the rainy months, I ride the 21 bus to and from work. On my way home from work, I am blessed to get off the bus at Hayes Street—at the top of Alamo Square Park. I am always amazed when I look around. I stand and look out over the city skyline—as though I am seeing it for the very first time.

“Thank God I live in San Francisco!” is the thought that runs through my mind.

And every time I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge and enjoy the rugged landscape, I am in awe of creation, of God’s awesome power. I see these signs of beauty, and find them to be reminders of God’s love and care. I am reminded of the passage in Matthew, about the lilies of the field, and how God cares for them. And God’s care for me—for us—is much greater.

Moments such as this—a glance, a glimpse, a view—are very grounding for me. This form of “Thanksgiving” prayer helps me to remember my blessings in life. It helps keep the challenges of living and working in perspective.

I also think that it’s only been recently that this process has become true prayer for me. I think my turning point around this was probably my year of grief, when a previous relationship ended. At that time, I realized that my thoughts were the same as talking with God. It was the simple act of letting go of my control, and receiving peace. I felt like I was given a deep sense of peace when I was able to release my own thought processes and make this discovery.

During this time, I was writing a lot in a journal. I was writing about my pain and my loss, and for it to be taken from me. I wrote about wanting to be held. I remember asking to be held in an embrace of love and comfort. Not really feeling the comfort, but believing I was truly being held—like a parent would hold a newborn or a small child. The act of writing about it helped me realize that I would be fine. I had a strong sense that if I could get the negative thoughts out of my own head and heart, then they could not eat at me—or consume me—and grow. If I could release the hate and offer it to God, then I knew that it would not engulf me. So journaling, also, became a key form of prayer.

During this darker period in my life, I was spending a lot of time on the beach at Crissy Field. This, too, allowed me to find joy in God’s creation. I would stand on the beach and sing—lines of different hymns that would bring me comfort. “Great is Thy Faithfulness” is one that came to me frequently.

It was this time of remembering blessings that started to allow me to be thankful for the different parts of my life. It has shown me that prayer happens all the time when we allow God to be present in us. Prayer happens all the time, when I allow God to be present in me. For me, the still small voice is God—the Spirit of strength and peace.

"Prayer, Spirituality, and Surfing"

Fourth Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray"

Benjamin Bolanos

"If I were called in to construct a religion I should make use of water." Phillip Larkin[1]

This might come to a surprise to you but I have some trouble with meditation. I really can’t do it. I can’t sit there and try to clear my thoughts, relax, and then feel present. I kind of just get sleepy. Don’t get me wrong; I see the value in it for other people, just not for me. I’m not good at prayers either. I find it forced when I do it or meaningless or almost too ritualistic and full of language that feels contrite and prescribed. I’m a disaster to my preacher father. But there is hope for me. I find spiritual discipline in a somewhat unorthodox but common way: I physically need to be in the ocean on a 15 to 23 pound board (depending on conditions), wearing a 4/3 thick wetsuit, in 55 degree water, using all my mental and physical abilities to read waves, calculate swell direction, triangulate my position in the water, check tide changes, wind direction, currents, locate channels, rate abilities of other surfers to avoid collisions, grade the force of each wave, and then paddle into position given all these factors. Not to mention the shark factor. This is my spiritual discipline. So I should probably explain.

Surfing is the hardest and slowest learning curve of any sport. It takes dedication, discipline, courage, and physical and mental conditioning. No one will ever master surfing. No one will ever master surfing since there are so many many variables to surfing. But that in itself is the very thing keeps us surfers going. Perfecting our abilities so that we may enjoy this strange closeness to the ocean and the wave. We strive to be close to the wave. It’s this relational part of surfing that is quite remarkable.

I think all of us feel a mysterious longing for the sea as some kind of secret to our own identity or existence, says Peter Kreeft, author of Surfing and Spirituality. We pay good money to be near the ocean. We buy property. We take vacations to the beach. When we think of a respite we usually think of lying on white sand near water, basking in the sun, doing absolutely nothing but being present in that moment.

Likewise, we surfers share a love for the ocean, our playing field. But we fear the ocean, we respect it, we honor it. We pay homage to it. It's a relationship we find sometimes find extremely hard to articulate to non-surfers.

Allow me to articulate that relationship via a story. Every surfer has a story that grounded him or her for life. Here’s mine:

Joan Didion once wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."[2] But sometimes those stories begin to fail us. So we need new ones to remind ourselves that life is precious.

Spring 2005. I had the day off and decided to head to Pacifica. I had checked the report and the tide was a mid tide, which is good for parts in Pacifica, swell was from the NW and I could tell from the wave intervals from the buoys that they had some size to them. It was raining too. I know when it rains the winds change and move south to southwest, which in Pacifica creates some clean glassy waves. Perfect ideal conditions. I checked the line up and saw where the peaks were breaking and paddled out. I was dialed in that day. I knew where to position myself correctly and I knew how much paddling speed I needed to match the wave velocity. It was as if I could tell the future and make it happened. I was catching wave after wave, bottom turning and ripping it.

Then it happened. I was getting cocky. Humility comes at a price sometimes. The wave roaring toward me was a "living memory." It was born some thousand of miles away when a change in temperature produced a change in pressure. Air moves from an area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. That’s wind. When the wind flickers on the ocean surface it creates small ripples. Then those small ripples become larger and larger into they become waves, which makes this whole thing weird since it’s not the water itself traveling across the ocean but merely the memory of the original wind’s energy transmitted from one water particle to the next. So as I was catching that fateful wave, I was really hearing the sound of the past arriving in the present with me directly in its path.[3] Ummm. That can cause problems.

Toward the end of my session, I paddled into that wave. Now ideally you want to position yourself so that you get close to the peak of the wave but not too close. The peak is where the lip of the wave is about to crash and here is where the greatest transfer of energy is and getting to one’s feet beneath the lip requires a little nimbleness. You need to move from a flat position to an upright position in the shattering "micro-moments" it takes for this transfer to occur. Technically this requires a leap of faith. You need to push yourself up from the front of the board with your hands and simultaneously pushing the board downward into the steep wave, in my case I was pushing myself off a cliff. I made an error. As I raced down the wave and tried to bottom turn, which is a taking the whole energy of the initial drop, turning from the bottom of the wave and hoping you have the momentum to race up to the top of the wave and speed down the line,[4] the wave began to pitched forward. I looked up and it was a lot bigger than before and my first thought were not "oh wow, what a cool physical representation of wind and memory." It was more like "Blank blank and blank. Sweet Jesus! Get me out of this now!"

It was bad. It was like a house falling on top of me. I was tossed around like a sock caught in a washing machine. When I came up for air, I realized I was in the impact zone. I went under 4 times and the whole thing repeated itself again an again. I was losing air. I was getting tired. I was scared. I needed to relax but couldn’t. After the last submersion I had to make a break for it. I mustered all my remaining strength and jumped on my board and paddled like a madman over the approaching waves. I don’t remember how I made it out but I did. As a soon as I went over the last wave, everything stopped, as if Jesus had outstretched his hands and in one moment, he stilled the waters. Silence. Panting, gasping, lying on my board, I looked around and everyone had the same look and position as I had. I then saw some dolphins a distance away. I saw a bird swoop down and hit the ocean surface and fly out with a fish in its beak. A seal popped its head up and just stared. It stopped raining. And I lay there dumbfounded, wondering how I managed to survive. I sat up, thanked God and in my own way gave my respects to the sea and honored it. I felt strangely centered and at peace.

The calm and the storm. Humility. Solitude. "From a Jewish perspective, the ocean, the first thing God created, is the most powerful force in the world."[5] Thus, the ocean is a natural force stronger than the individual, a force that requires the athlete to surrender himself. To give in, to submit to the will of the God, to be humbled, to understand that god is the ocean, the vast sea where we seek solace, comfort, and wisdom. Thus surfers are part athletes, artists, and spiritual seekers.

Rabbi Nachum Shifren, author of "Surfing Rabbi: A Kabbalistic Quest for Soul," is a tall bearded man who rides a longboard with such grace, writes "If you want to know God, learn to surf. Do you think Tennis players feel like they’re getting spiritual fulfillment out of their matches? Does the mail department at Gun World have a hard time handling the letters from readers about the spirituality of firing a .357?" Surfing is really a transformative spiritual journey. Surfers believe since the ocean is where life began on this planet, the act of riding a wave is momentarily a connection to this living memory. It’s the real deal.

"Surfing has more moving parts than any other sport, and because of that it requires the same laser pinpoint focused concentration to ride a wave as it does to meditate."[6] When you take off on a wave, you are now at the mercy of the sea. In a split second, those surfing variables disappear. You disappear. You begin to dance on the board on a wave as you move to stay in trim, stay in the wave. You shift your body, feet, your concentration is so sharp that for just 10 seconds you become one with the vast sea and now glide through water like birds in the sky. And that moment is breathless, powerful, and very transformative. You feel that power of the ocean; you can hear it roar behind you and simultaneously feel its gentleness. It is this "presence" that surfers yearn for over and over. It calls to them.

My favorite time to surf is sundown or sunrise. It’s quiet, no wind, no people, no sound but just the crashing of waves. Just me, my board, and hopefully God. I think about patience, harmony, my kids, my wife, my parents, love, fear, impermanence, death, my childhood, my purpose, joys, or sometimes nothing at all. I just sit, wait and catch a wave. And I understand that every time I take off on a wave, I am partaking in the last moments of a wave that began thousands of miles away. It’s an awesome transformative experience.

Every time I leave the ocean or surfers leave the ocean, carrying his or her board, head down, board in one hand pressed against the hips, slowly walking back across the sand, the movement of the walk is contemplative, as if in a trance. As if the body and mind were renewed. And if you wait long enough, you’ll see a surfer turn around, watch the ocean for some time and in their own way give thanks and then head home. That image speaks volumes to me.

"So I, the surfer, in the sea symbolizes the soul, with which I 'surf' in God. The sea is God. The beach is the path to God. Surfing is the experience of God, or the spiritual life."[7]

_________________

[1] First line from Larkin’s Poem "Water"

[2] Joan Didion. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. Collection of nonfiction stories. Piece is also in "The White Album." Some of the stories reflect her loss of both parents, spouse, then daughter.

[3] Living memory concept comes from parts of Steven Kotler’s West of Jesus Novel. Description of wave and wind memory was captivating.

[4] Ibid., writing about surfing technique is hard and I find it boring. Kotler wrote those pieces quite nicely. However, wipe out stories are so common that they inevitably have common quotes and descriptions. Oh well.

[5] From "SurfingRabbi.com: A Kabbalistic Quest for Soul"

[6] Most sports have this component to them but it’s labeled "in the zone" or some other term. It’s the feeling of completely letting go as if it becomes automatic.

[7] Peter Kreeft. "Surfing and Spirituality" Catholic Education Resource Center.

"Prayer Personalities"

Third Sunday of Lent: "Teach us, Lord, to Pray"
[Psalm 119 ]

Last Sunday, I invited you to think about prayer as a wheel… All these spokes radiate into the center, the hub. The hub of the wheel of prayer is what I called intentional awareness. Or an awareness of the Divine Presence. I was intentionally trying to use very simple, almost untheological language, because I wanted to look at prayer’s essence.

We’re going to talk about the spokes today. What leads us into that hub? What leads us into this awareness, into this Presence? What concepts about God and Divinity will resonate most with us? Creator God, brother Jesus, Spirit? Do we think of God as our Ground of Being, as Beloved Friend, as Liberator? Do we tend not to think of God in personal terms at all? Or does it have to be made concrete for us? What forms of prayer will lead us into this hub, into an awareness of Presence? Will it be silent meditation, small group sharing, reading and journaling, acts of service or justice-making?

Fittingly, given our wheel metaphor, there is a way of talking about these different prayer personalities that also uses the metaphor of the wheel. It’s been made popular by a writer named Corinne Ware.[1]

I want to first talk about these horizontal and vertical lines and the four quadrants they make. Each of those four quadrants represents a different spiritual type. I’ll also explain the funny-sounding words like apophatic and kataphatic. I was going to replace these words with more common ones, but I have a great fondness for exotic words. I think we need to use them from time to time to make sure they don’t go extinct.

The vertical axis is labeled speculative and affective. These two poles pose the question of how one goes about knowing. Do we know through via our rational mind? That’s the speculative pole. Or do we know through accessing our feelings? That’s the affective pole. For those of you familiar with the Myers Briggs personality test, these poles would correspond with the thinking/feeling functions. “Head” and “heart” would be another way to describe it. So, a “speculative” or “head” person would tend to gain their information about God, and life in general, through emphasizing logic and accumulated facts. A “heart” or “affective” person would tend to gain their information via instinct and intuitive feeling.

The horizontal line represents how we conceptualize Divinity. On the left, you have apophatic, from a Greek word that means “negative.” It refers to a person or a spiritual discipline that tends to think of God in non-concrete ways. God is more of a mystery, and any attempt to box God in by confining the Mystery to a particular image or concept is resisted. The purpose of apophatic spiritual disciplines is to empty oneself, empty the mind of concepts so that the God beyond all concepts can be experienced. Apophatic folks tend to be drawn to meditation: Zen, forms of Christian meditation. An apophatic-type person might really love the name God gives to Godself in story of burning bush: “I am who I am.” Or “I am Who I am Becoming.” That can be quite meaningful to an apophatic person, whereas it might leave a more kataphatic person quite cold. God as “Ground of Being.”

Apophatic spiritualities do use symbols for the Divine —they have to – but they will tend to be less anthropomorphic, and not as concrete. Perhaps creation-centered. Those metaphors we use for Spirit will probably work better: Wind, Fire, Breath.

At the opposite end of this scale is the Greek word kataphatic, translated as affirmative. It refers to the method of thinking most familiar to Western culture, in which God is revealed and knowable. In this way of thinking, we tend to see God or the Divine in concrete, often anthropomorphic terms – God is friend, the one who walks with us in the Garden in the cool of the evening. (The Bible is quite kataphatic, although it has its apophatic moments.) Or God is incarnate in Jesus, who walks with us, breaks bread with us, whom we can know and talk to. The hymn “What a friend we have in Jesus” is a very typical kataphatic hymn.

I tend toward the apophatic, and when I first came here as pastor, I had a bit of trouble with the joys and concerns prayer. That sort of verbal prayer, addressed to a person-like God, was not completely natural for me. But I didn’t think it would be OK to come up here, have you share your prayer concerns, and then just stand in silence and say my mantra. So I adjusted. And, in fact, my own understandings of how I can pray and my concepts of God were stretched. Though you may identify with one type, it is always good to be stretched.

So, let’s talk about the four quadrants these two continuums create, and the different spiritual types they represent. These descriptions are, of necessity, going to be a bit overdrawn. No one, I’m guessing, is just one spiritual type. We may likely have a dominant type, but we’ll also contain some of the other quadrants, too. My sense is also that at different times in our life, we may gravitate toward a certain spiritual type more than other.

This typology is used not only to talk about individuals but congregations. Congregations will tend toward one or two types. Perhaps even whole denominations. This will of necessity be brief, but we can talk about it more during Education Hour.

Type 1: Speculative/Kataphatic. Head Spirituality. Theologian.

• They want to understand, make sense. If God and prayer are not presented to them in ways that make sense, forget about it. The intellect, in a way, is a kind of gate that their spiritual self must walk through before they can get to anything else.
• This person loves intellectual order. They like things to be logical and consistent. They will examine the texts of our hymns to see if we are singing what we actually believe.
• Highest spiritual moments might have come when you heard something that stirred you to understanding or in reading a passage that seemed to say exactly what felt true to you.
• Jewish ideal of study-as-worship. They like Bible studies that dig deep. What was life like for the Biblical community when a given book or passage was written? What does that word mean in Greek and where and in what context is it used elsewhere in the Bible?
• While types 2 or 3 “experience the Holy,” this type tries to make sense of that experience and name it. They codify and so preserve the faith story from generation to generation. They are our theologians, our scholars. Denominations: many mainline Protestant denominations, especially Presbyterians, who do things “decently and in good order.”

Prayer/Spiritual Juice: They will seek spiritual guidance mainly from words – sermons, books, scripture, study groups. Prayer in this quadrant is almost always language or word-based prayer, whether aloud or silent. “Reading can be the avenue of God’s speech.” They may want to learn Hebrew or Greek so they can read Bible in original language.

Danger: The danger is that faith can become a “head trip,” overly focused on the rational or the intellectual; avoiding feeling, or an interior connection with God. They might come across as dogmatic or dry.

Type 2: Affective/Kataphatic. Heart Spirituality.

• God is still view in kataphatic terms – concrete terms – but now we’ve dropped into affective, or feeling, half of circle. It is heart combined with the concrete, real-life stuff.
• Lot of feeling here. Lots of devotion. Experiences highs and lows in religious feeling. They are looking for things that will give them an emotionally moving experience. Think charismatic churches, and evangelical churches, both African-American and white.
• Their theology emphasizes the anthropomorphic representation of God. A type 2 person may talk about their “daily walk with Jesus.” Rumi, whom I like to quote, is, I believe,also a type 2 spiritual person. He talks about the Divine as his Friend, his Beloved, as the lap on whom he lays his head. Very relational, very intimate.

Prayer/Spiritual Juice: Worship may include a lot of music, and a feeling of warmth, energy and freedom of expression. Prayer is still mainly with words in this quadrant, but less formal than in type 1. Prayers in church or alone often extemporaneous, as opposed to the theologically correct prayers from the prayer book of type 1. Drawn to singing, use of memory and imagination.

Danger: Pietism. While a kataphatic of the mind may say, “My doctrine is purer than yours,” a kataphatic of the heart may say: “My walk with Jesus is closer than yours.”
Smugness about how real their relationship with Jesus/God is, and they may believe that anyone who doesn’t have their emotional energy is second rate. You have to relate to my God my way. If you’ve not had the “born again” experience then you’re not really saved.

Type 3: Affective/Apophatic. Mystic Spirituality.

• Still within the feeling experience, but move into apophatic knowing. Instead of God that possesses characteristic to humans, God is ineffable, unnamable, vast. God’s statement to Moses: “I am who I am” makes perfect sense to this person. Or they may tend to see God as the Creative Force.
• The aim is union with the Holy, even when one knows that this is not completely achievable. Ware: These people seem to be perpetually on a journey. In fact journey is one of their favorite words.
• Contemplative, introspective, intuitive. Great gift is they can penetrate past the temporal, to engage in a “deeper sort of knowing.”
• They are pretty comfortable with things not making sense, whereas type1 isn’t satisfied until they can understand. Prefer prayer group to study group.

Prayer: Like simplicity and silence in worship. Empty mind, simply be in presence of the Holy. Whereas type 2 might like the stimulation of praise band, this type might recoil. It’s too much. They can’t hear internally when it’s too loud out there. Prayer is less about what I’m expressing or saying, than it is about being receptive. Here “hearing from God” rather than “speaking to God” is prominent.

Danger: Quietism, an exaggerated retreat from reality and interaction with world. Go into my cave and be alone there. They have to guard against being too self-absorbed and self-protective. Not want to share gifts with world because that’s messy and distracting.

Type 4: Speculative/Apophatic. Kingdom spirituality.

• Smallest group. The mystical, apophatic experience coupled with an intellectual mode of gathering data produces an active visionary who is single-minded – has a deeply focused, almost crusading type of spirituality.
• They like intellectual stimulation – people with original ideas, especially on anything connected with issues they care about and social change.
• They care less about affiliation with organized religion than either types 1 or 2 – many faith communities simply aren’t engaged enough in changing society for them.
• Their aim is to simply obey God and to witness to God’s coming reign. Concerned with justice on earth, the transformation of society. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
• They are the praying activists. Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King. Some Mennonites! Perhaps there’s a reason we’re so small…

Prayer: Action. “My work and my prayer are one.” “I pray with my hands and feet.” Need prayer more than they may think because action and hunger for results can overtake them. In prayer, they need to continue to give up control to God or they could become quite bitter and angry at how “uncaring” other Christians are, who are not as single-minded and focused on transforming society as they are. Which leads to the…

Danger: Encratism, a moralistic and unrelenting tunnel-vision. If you are not supporting the cause with the same selflessness and energy as they are, you are not a part of their world. They may make us feel guilty, even as we admire them. They offer judgment and cause others to be more responsible. But they can sometimes be overly critical, wounding, and lose support of others.

A wheel is stronger the more spokes it has. And the Christian community is stronger with all of these types. They each offer gifts. We need theologians, the exuberant witnesses to God’s love, the mystics, the crusaders. We need those people to be as fully themselves, and as fully connected to the Divine as possible. May we each come to know God deeply through our thinking, our loving, our being, our doing. Amen.
____________

[1] Discover Your Spiritual Type: A Guide to Individual and Congregational Growth, by Corinne Ware (Alban Institute, 1995).

“A Hundred Ways to Pray”

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.
___________

[1] From Barbara Brown Taylor’s book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith.

"A Long, Loving Look at Prayer"

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.