A Thousand Ways to Pray
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Early in my ministry career I interned as a religious studies teacher at Milton Academy, a prep school in New England. My supervisor and colleague in ministry, a Methodist minister, invited me to a Saturday afternoon football game with him. It was an idyllic fall afternoon. The leaves were yellow and orange and brown. A crisp breeze was in the air—not too cold, but just cool enough. It was such a perfect fall day that it was almost unreal.
Milton Academy was playing against one of its main rivals, and as the game was about to begin my colleague and I were called onto the field to lead our team in prayer. There, on that crisp fall day, we bowed our heads, and my Methodist colleague led the team in prayer.
As he did so, a rush of sarcastic comments, unbidden, went running through my head. Thoughts like: “Gee, does God really care whether one high school team beats another in football?” and “If The Lord is really willing to micro-manage things on that level, I’d like to offer some of my own prayers, too—like, God, please, please, please help me win the lottery.” But, also, on a more serious note, I found myself wondering, “What if they lose? Does that mean these teenagers have somehow fallen into disfavor with God?”
Questions and thoughts like these would likely have occurred to many Unitarian Universalists if they had been in my shoes that day. I think we, as a religious denomination, know exactly what type of prayer we’re not interested in, and for me the situation on Milton Academy’s football field exemplified it. We were
praying to an anthropomorphic deity, one that looks and acts like a person, and we were asking this deity to intervene in human affairs for the sake of a local high school football team.
At the time, the whole thing struck me as not only silly, but also potentially unhealthy. It was a dangerous approach to prayer. The message unintentionally sent when such prayers are not answered is that those who prayed might somehow be unworthy or unfit for God’s favor.
My experience at Milton illustrated one way that we human beings relate to prayer, but the reality is that there are many, many ways to pray. Some may be healthy ways of thinking about and engaging in prayer, and others may not be. But the most important thing we can notice is that there is no one single way to pray; no individual and no denomination has a monopoly in defining what prayer is.
In order to be a prayerful people, we Unitarian Universalists might take some time to think about what the term prayer means for us. And that, in turn, leads to several closely linked questions: Who are we praying to? Why are we praying? And what are we praying for?—the Who, Why, and What of prayer, if you will. How we answer these questions describes the nature of what prayer means to us, and also determines if, in fact, we are willing to engage in this pursuit.
I have been working on these questions for a long time. As a young adult in my 20s I had a lot of difficulty with the concept of prayer because I felt burned by my understandings of it, burned because answers to the “Who, Why and What” questions didn’t mesh with my experience of the world.
I grew up in an orthodox Hindu household, and as such I was surrounded by prayer all the time. My parents prayed on a daily basis, and I heard prayers expressing gratitude, hopes, and fears. While prayer was all around me, we didn’t really spend time talking about what the concept meant, so as a kid I arrived at my own conclusions. I came to believe that some deity (though being Hindu I didn’t know which one, because there are so many) must hear these prayers.
And if prayers are heard, God must acknowledge and respond in some way. No response would mean that God didn’t care about me, and I just didn’t believe that was possible. God did care about me, therefore prayers were heard. And, of course, I believed that the more sincere, the more intense the prayer, the more likely God was to hear and respond in some fashion.
That’s why, when in high school I began to perceive that I was gay, I didn’t immediately panic. Instead, I prayed. Every day. In fact, I strove to become one of the most observant Hindus on the planet, thereby hoping to earn God’s favor. As a teen of 16 or 17 years of age I routinely kept fasts, had a regular practice of prayer, and engaged in charitable acts—all in the hope that God would hear my prayer of simply wanting to be like everyone else, of not wanting to be different, of not wanting to be gay. If there was a God who could help football teams win games, then there was no reason why that same God couldn’t help someone like me who was genuinely in pain and looking for help.
Those prayers were never answered, or at least not as I had hoped. Despite praying for heterosexuality, I remained gay. And as I faced that reality I decided, a bit angrily, that God could not exist. If there was a God, there was no way such devout and heartfelt prayers as mine could be ignored. So for me coming out of the closet, an act of survival and sanity, was twinned with a crisis of faith. God stopped existing for me, and prayer was a sham.
Here’s where we might notice a pattern: my disillusionment with prayer was rooted in a theology similar to our football team prayer, in which some divine power was supposed to intervene here on earth because a human being prayed.
I have come to arrive at a radically different way of understanding prayer. What if prayer has nothing to do with a divine being that dispenses favors? If that were possible, what would be the purpose of prayer? In response, I can offer you one Unitarian Universalist perspective, my own.
Prayer seems to me to be a fundamental recognition that there are forces in this world that are utterly beyond our control. As a minister, my most intense experiences of prayer have occurred working with families in crisis. Some years ago I served as a chaplain at a pediatric hospital, and the most sincere, heartfelt prayers I witnessed in that setting were offered by the family members of young patients facing life and death. Those prayers were a recognition of our finitude. Doctors can only do so much; our knowledge and technology has limits and imperfections. In such circumstances prayer may serve the purpose of putting us in touch with those limitations and with our deepest hopes and fears.
This leaves the question of who we’re praying to. As a Unitarian Universalist, I don’t believe that God is a divine being that looks and acts like us. But I do think we can understand the term “God” metaphorically. In the broadest sense, we can think of God as that “Spirit of Life,” that universal mystery and/or energy that permeates everything. At the same time, I think we humans find it hard to conceptualize something so huge and ambiguous and abstract.
This may be why throughout the ages different traditions, including my own Hindu culture, have developed pantheons of gods, with one deity representing love, another destruction, another good fortune, another something else. These deities become concrete ways to represent and think about aspects of love, destruction or good fortune. So in concrete terms, individuals might pray to a specific god because the mythology surrounding that god both symbolizes our hopes and also simultaneously acknowledges that we are not, ultimately, in control of everything that we experience.
As I’ve personally moved towards understanding human-like representations of God as metaphorical, I have found myself increasingly comfortable in using those metaphors as a way of focusing my prayers, focusing what’s on my mind.
When I was in graduate school and worried about exams, I vocalized my fears by offering prayers to the Hindu goddess of education and the arts, Saraswati. I don’t believe that there’s a divine woman on a cloud somewhere listening to my plea, but I do believe I’m acknowledging to the universe in some fundamental and meaningful way my own recognition that I’m not really in control, that I’m afraid, and that I’m counting on a lot of external things to help get me where I want to go. Saraswati, for me, can symbolize and focus all of that in a moment of prayer.
If we can liberate ourselves from notions of prayer that don’t work for us, a new question can emerge: what understandings of prayer might actually help us? This can be challenging question, but taking on that challenge can yield a rich and meaningful spiritual practice, one that can connect us to our shared dreams, struggles and values as human beings
Rev. Manish Mishra-Marzetti is the editor of an upcoming Skinner House collection of prayers for personal spiritual reflection, and welcomes original submissions for this forthcoming volume. To submit an original prayer for consideration, or for more information about this project, please email Manish at: MMishra@aol.com
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