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"I Don't
Know How to Pray"
by the Rev. Rich Smith
February 17, 2008
Romans 8:26-27, Matthew
6:1-13
During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, with the
delegates locked in bitter disagreement, Benjamin Franklin proposed
that they seek divine guidance by opening the sessions with
prayer. The delegates rejected his proposal -- not because they
did not believe in prayer, but because they did not have enough money
to hire a chaplain. No prayers were offered, at least no formal
public prayers, because no one felt sufficiently fluent in the language
of prayer. In other words, they thought they didn't know how to
pray.
That's a story that gives me some strange comfort
whenever I assume that our generation has forgotten -- or maybe never
learned how to pray. I tend to think that previous generations
were more godly, more pious, more ready to converse with God, more in
touch with the divine presence. But that may not be true.
What is true, is that currently there seems to be a
resurgent interest in things spiritual. People are seeking divine
guidance more intentionally. People are wanting to learn how to
pray. But, enough about the Democrats! Even people in
churches are doing this - maybe especially people in church!
Labyrinths, Taize services, candles, etc....
As a so-called "spiritual leader", I suppose I
should rejoice in all this new found yearning -- it should keep me in
business for a while -- except of course that an awful lot of these
folks are seeking their spiritual guidance outside the institutional
church. Just go into Borders or Barnes & Noble and see how
big and diverse and non-traditional the "Spirituality" section
is. Nose around and discover how many groups, in many settings,
are devoted to helping people have better spiritual lives, and how many
of them are outside the Church. Maybe we haven't done a very good
job in this area, and the yearning is so great that it will seek
fulfillment, if not in the church, then somewhere.
And, as a spiritual leader (who has to spend a lot
of time doing things that just don't seem very spiritual), I feel like
I'm supposed to know how to help people have better spiritual lives, be
able to teach them to pray. I feel like I should set a shining
example of how to be a prayerful person, when there are some days that
Garrison Keillor's observation about Lake Wobegon's Pastor Inqvist
rings true: You spend so much time helping others to have a spiritual
life that you realize that you don't have one of your own.
Well, I do have a spiritual life -- it may not be a
conventional spiritual life, or a traditional one, but what's
that? Every person's spiritual life, or prayer life, is unique,
and maybe we're all unconventional. It is very personal, after
all. And it's also constantly growing and changing, like any good
relationship. And the bottom line was well expressed by St. Paul,
who knew well that "we don't know how to pray as we ought...but the
Spirit intercedes for us in our weakness with sighs too deep for
words."
The Spirit has been interceding for me for a long
time, which has certainly been my salvation, but I think of that not so
much of as a weakness, but as a part of being human. Yes, there
are spiritual giants, and I have known some, people who probably serve
God in an advisory capacity... well, not really, but at least they seem
to be on pretty intimate terms with the Almighty. There are
people who simply radiate God's presence, people who can tell tales of
prayers answered in spectacular ways, people who don't really seem to
need the Spirit's help. That's great and we can learn from them.
But sometimes I think the story of a more ordinary spiritual journey
may be more useful, something that we can more easily relate to.
It's kind of like the reason I give for keeping my desk in such a messy
condition. When people see it, they feel better about their own
lives. If my desk was tidy and clear of clutter, people might
feel intimidated by my assumed perfection. So what I offer is a
messy, imperfect, human story, a work in progress.
I guess you could say I've been learning to pray all
my life, from those days of early childhood when I learned the
traditional bedtime prayers, and maybe even before that -- after all,
what are an infant's cries, if not some natural yearning to connect
with something larger? Okay, maybe dinner, or wanting to be held;
but that’s still connecting with the source of Grace!
I grew up nurtured by a mother who read Guideposts
magazine, and a grandmother who in the quiet of the morning rose and
read The Daily Word. We didn't have formal prayers in my family,
except for my grandfather's table blessing. It was always the
same one, and I never completely understood what he said. It
began simply enough, "Father, we thank thee for this food..." but then
became unintelligible -- It sounded like "Blessedtoitchusetts" (rhymes
with Massachusetts) "...in thy service. Forgive us our sins and save
us, we beg for Christ's sake." He said this for 97 years, up to
three times a day. It was only after his death that some of us in
the family got together and figured out that what he actually said
about the food was, "Bless it to its uses in thy service..." My
uncle, who'd heard this prayer all his life, never understood it.
But of course what my grandfather actually said didn't really matter --
it was the act of praying that was important, the recognition
that sitting down to eat was a holy moment, that God's presence was
recognized. It was more about the relationship than the words.
And true prayer is really like that -- beyond
words. You don't have to feel fluent in the language of prayer to
be able to pray. Not that we don't appreciate the beautiful
prayers that Bob and Sharon and others offer here. But true
prayer transcends those words. It's about relationship.
It's like being on the same intimate terms with God that two people are
who have been married so long that they can be together and not talk
all the time, and when they do, they can finish each other's sentences.
Well, that was the environment of prayer that I grew
up in. And I was further nurtured, ironically, by my first grade
teacher, Mrs. Englander, who taught the entire class the Lord's Prayer
along with the "Pledge of Allegiance" and several verses of scripture,
and we recited them for morning devotions. This was before the Supreme
Court outlawed this, and looking back, I wonder how the three Jewish
children in the class felt about it. (And, by the way, just
because it’s outlawed doesn’t mean prayer is out of the schools.
In my experience, as long as there is algebra, there will be prayer!)
I was in the sixth grade when the Cuban missile
crisis struck, and recall vividly the ominous TV news reports, and
seeing the map on the front page of the paper, showing where the
nuclear missiles were and where they could go and the headline, "We're
in range". We practiced "duck and cover" in the classroom, as if
hiding under our desks and turning away from the windows would protect
us. There were lessons in how to use a Geiger counter. I
would wake up at four in the morning, all the images running through my
head, scared to death, unable to get back to sleep, but too big to
crawl into my parents' bed, and besides, how would that look to my
younger brothers and sister?
I think it was then that I really began learning how
to pray. My recollection is that my prayers were not asking for
things to be different -- I don't think I said, "Please God, take away
the missiles" or "Don't let them be aimed at Phoenix." I'm not
even sure they were prayers for wisdom for President Kennedy.
They were just more of a conversation with God, a feeling of God's
protection and presence and love. And I remember that after a
time of praying, and always closing with the Lord's Prayer, I felt a
great sense of peace, and I was able to go back to sleep
again.
In high school my spiritual life was nurtured by
being part of the youth group, where we sang a lot, and got involved in
service projects. That was where I learned that the mystical has
to be complemented by the muscular, that prayer that doesn't result in
action on my part is not much of a prayer. That's where I was
taught to "pray to God like everything depends upon God and then act
like everything depends upon you." Prayer was action, or as
social reformer Dorothy Day puts it, "I believe people pray through the
witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they
have, the love they offer people and receive from people." Or as
Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, "He prayeth best who loveth best."
It was also the beginning of what I call "everyday
spirituality", a learning to see and sense the sacred in all things, a
discovery of the holy in the midst of the world. Now I had also
grown up spending a lot of time out doors, and it was relatively easy
to sense God's presence in nature, natural to feel connected to
something of Some One larger than my self. I treasure this quote
from John Muir:
As long as I live, I'll hear
waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I'll interpret the rocks,
learn the language of the flood, storm and the avalanche. I'll
acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the
heart of the world as I can.
I still find that simply being outside, whether it's working in my
garden or hiking along the Tow Path or fishing on some pristine trout
stream, is one of the best spiritual experiences I can have -- getting
near the heart of the world and the heart of God. It helps me
re-center, re-connect, become refreshed. If I spend too much time
locked indoors, I start to feel cut off, adrift, not fully alive.
But I have learned to expand that, so that more and
more I can sense God just about anywhere, and that's what I call
everyday spirituality. I don't have to go off to a mountaintop,
although it certainly helps. I come more and more to agree with
St. Ignatius of Loyola, who said, "Everything that one turns in the
direction of God is prayer." And Jewish mystic David Cooper says,
"The Sufis believe that every aspect of daily life has potential as a
devotional practice. Every bodily movement has its source in the
divine. Everything we do, everything seen or heard, tasted or
touched, can be undertaken as a devotional practice."
So you see, prayer understood this way is not so
much about technique as it is about attitude. When someone says
"I don't know how to pray," the first thing I would do would not be to
offer a step-by-step guide on "how to", but rather simply try to foster
an enlarged attitude about what prayer is. Even breathing can be
a form of prayer, if we make it so. And what could be more
natural than breathing, although anyone who’s every been in a choir
will tell you that you can learn to breathe more effectively. In
fact I found thousands of websites that tell you how....
Now if we had time, I'd tell you in more detail
about my college experiences of learning to pray through music, and of
sitting at feet of a number of spiritual giants, like Howard Thurman,
in particular. He was a great black mystic and when he recited
the 139th Psalm, you knew that this man really was on intimate terms
with the Divine -- "O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known
me..." (He still used the King James English he'd learned at his
mother's knee.) "Thou knowest when I rise up and when I fall
down... If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost
parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall find me, and thy right hand
shall hold me.... Search me, O God and know my heart, try me and know
my thoughts; see if there be any wicked way in me and lead me in the
way everlasting..." When he was through with those words, you
KNEW that there was no place you could go that God was not, and you had
the feeling that Thurman had been to a lot of places and was living
testimony to that truth. So, in short, through some of my college
experiences I learned to me more musical and more mystical.
I'm not sure I had too many spiritual awakenings in
seminary. I know a lot of my horizons were expanded further, my
mind was stretched. I preached some sermons that I hope no one
remembers. I did have a field education supervisor who called on
me and the other students working in his church to pray publicly and
extemporaneously at every opportunity -- good training for being
in the ministry and being a sort of professional pray-er, called upon
to bless everything from marriages and meals to city council meetings
and -- as happened in Tombstone -- the groundbreaking of the new sewer
system.
But I have learned that public prayer is just the
tip of the iceberg, as it were. Those formal moments of prayer
are fine and I hope helpful, but they are no substitute for the life of
prayer, or for the practice of God's presence in all things, or for
following the practice of Jesus, who criticized those who made a show
of prayer and who gave his disciples those words we call “the Lord’s
Prayer.”.
Fast-forward 30 years: These years in Washington I
have found to be good for my prayer life, for how else does one cope
when September 11 happens in one’s second week on the job? Or
when practically every autumn has presented some public disaster – the
sniper, a hurricane... Nationally there have been campus
shootings which leave one stunned, Hurricane Katrina, the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, the hard realities of global warming, and threats of
future terror. All of this challenges one’s faith, and stretches
our compassion. I’m not sure how any of us can cope with these in
a faithful fashion apart from prayer. I know that I am sustained
and strengthened by my prayer life, however you want to define that,
and I have been further strengthen by the knowledge that we are all in
this together, that we are a community of faith. As much as I
would like to pray for particular outcomes, mostly I pray for wisdom
and strength, and that I might be a reflection of God's love in this
world. And as difficult the times might be, I hope someday to
look back on it --Isn't there a country song that goes, "I'm looking
forward to looking back on this?" -- as a time of struggle, to be sure,
but also as a time of great learning, of great trusting, of great
growing, of great praying -- of looking back and saying, "Wow! I really
came to be alive to God's presence -- and alive IN God's presence -- in
those days."
Perhaps we do not know how to pray as we ought, but
the Spirit indeed intercedes for us with sighs too deep for
words. There is so much more we could say – but during this
Lenten season I will have another sermon on prayer, Bob will offer a
seminar, and we will have one “contemplative” type service where we
actually practice different forms of prayer. Meanwhile I leave
you with this: Over a century ago, these words were found on the body
of a Confederate soldier:
I asked God for strength that I might achieve;
I was made weak, that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health that I might do great things;
I was given infirmity that I might do better things.
I asked for riches that I might be happy;
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.
I asked for power that I might have the praise of persons;
I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God.
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life;
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for -- but everything I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself my unspoken prayers were answered,
I am among all persons, most richly blessed!
.
Last updated Wednesday, Februrary 29, 2008
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