To Whom it May Concern:
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The very first prayer I ever learned as a child was a bedtime prayer, taught to me by my grandmother. It went like this: “God bless me and keep me a good boy, and spare me for a good end. Amen.”
Granny, an old-country Irish widow who lived with us when I was growing up, was a very devout Catholic woman, and although she was never showy about it, she was a world-class champion prayer.
Prayer was my grandmother’s instinctive response to all of life’s primary situations. She prayed when she was happy, she prayed when she was sad, she prayed when she was frightened or worried or puzzled or grateful or hopeful. She would utter a quick grace before every meal. And she had a habit of whispering a silent prayer whenever she heard a siren go by. When I asked why she did that, thinking it must just be some little superstition of hers, she said, “No, not at all. A siren always means that some poor soul is in some kind of crisis; a little prayer for them can’t hurt.” Indeed, I am sure that a prayer from my grandmother, for any poor soul, carried a lot of weight.
My grandmother’s understanding of prayer was very clear and traditionally
Catholic and Christian in concept. To her, prayer was a spoken or silent reverent communication from a person to a personal God. According to my grandmother’s faith, the relationship of God to human was a parental relationship of Father to child, and one spoke to God as to a father, literally.
One communicated one’s fears, concerns, gratitudes, and hopes. And God, in return, like a wise and loving father, would listen to our prayers, and provide for us as only He in His Divine wisdom knew best. Sometimes prayers would seem to be answered—the wishes expressed in the prayers would seem to be granted. Sometimes, however, our wishes were not to be granted. This, we were to assume, was because God had, well, other plans for us.
My colleague Thomas Schade at our church in Worcester, MA, wrote:
Our faith advances not by paying attention to all that we doubt, but by paying attention to what makes us sigh, what makes us groan, what makes us tear up, what makes us shudder, what makes us gasp, what startles us and surprises us. What makes us ache. Where once we cherished our doubts, now we need to name our longings.
To name our longings. Prayer is naming our loves, healing our hurts, confiding our fears. My late colleague Rudy Nemser once wrote that all prayer can be summarized in four simple words: Thanks! Oops! Gimme! and Wow!
Church is where we bring the sometimes inarticulate prayers and the sometimes silent alleluias of our lives. It is where we bring the imperfect, unfinished stuff of our lives to be blessed, strengthened, fortified, and transformed. Thanks! Oops! Gimme! and Wow!
I am absolutely certain that my grandmother’s rockbound faith never wavered one iota on the outcome of any prayer she ever offered. She had a difficult life, with many setbacks, many hardships, many sorrows and disappointments. But she always prayed her next prayer with the same sincerity, and the same complete confidence that she had God’s personal ear.
Having grown up with my grandmother’s example and in my grandmother’s church, I never questioned much her teaching about prayer until the time came when I first doubted the existence of a personal God, Father or Mother. If one’s definition of prayer is limited to the concept of a personal conversation, however reverent and sincere, between two distinct beings, then prayer made little sense once God was de-personalized. Or so I reasoned at the time.
The problem with such an analysis is that it concentrates on criticizing the form of prayer over the substance. What I should have heard, in my grandmother’s myriad prayers, was her exquisite ability to articulate through prayer her feelings of joy, gratitude, hope, love, regret, fear, and praise that sprang forth from her poetic soul.
But because the form of her expressions usually began with words like, “Our Father” or “Dear Lord” or “Dear God,” as a young man I arrogantly disregarded the deep and moving content of those prayers as meaningless or misdirected or purposeless. Of course, that kind of critique is the classic case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. It is the most shallow and simplistic of theological analyses. It hears the words of prayer, but it fails utterly to hear the music of prayer. It condemns the form of faith without honoring the witness of faith.
What my grandmother really understood, and what she was never afraid to demonstrate to us, was that there are times when a human soul cries out in mourning, and there are times when a human soul sings forth in gratitude for the sheer joy of life. (i thank You God for most this amazing/ day, for:the leaping greenly spirits of trees/ and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything/ which is natural which is infinite which is yes)
There are moments in every life of sheer terror, and there are confessional moments, too, of regret and inadequacy and alienation and loneliness, and the awareness that we have hurt others or “made choices of lesser goods,” in Von Ogden Vogt’s memorable phrase.
There are moments when the beauty of the earth is almost overwhelming to us. Recall Edna St. Vincent Millay’s great line, “Lord, I fear Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year…prithee, let not one leaf fall.” And there are also moments when we know the frustration and the desperation of tragedy, when we would invoke every power in the universe to change the course of some disastrous event. (Rage, rage against the dying of the light. )
Whether those elemental human feelings and expressions are sent forth in the form of personal address to a godly being, or whether they are held in a more inward acknowledgement, as in meditation, the substance and the necessity of prayer in the religious life remain the same. A religious life that deals with the fullness of existence, from joy through bitterness, from celebration through grief, must give voice to these varied scenes of the human journey.
That, properly understood, is what prayer is about: “giving voice to the human predicament.” Reinhold Niebuhr’s original line about prayer has been reworked any number of times by different theologians, but it bears repeating here:
Prayer does not change things; prayer changes people, and people change things…Prayer is not hearing voices, prayer is acquiring a voice.
One of the most powerful experiences I ever had with prayer as “an acquired voice” happened when I was still a student minister working as a chaplain in a hospital in Chicago. Late one night I was called to the bedside of an elderly patient, a Black Baptist woman, who had asked to see the chaplain on the evening prior to her surgery. I was still very much a wet-behind-the-ears minister-in-formation at the time, not at all sure of my calling, and not at all sure what my own personal theology was.
I introduced myself as the chaplain, and in my best Rogerian listening style, tried to get the woman to talk to me about what was on her mind. Nothing worked. I could see she was nervous and upset, but I couldn’t seem to get her talking. Finally, I asked her if there was anything at all I could do for her. She looked at me straight on and said, “Would you say a prayer for me right now?”
And I was stuck. I knew, of course, that theologically the woman and I were light years apart, and that any prayer I might be able to stutter forth from my young agnostic Unitarian heart of that moment was not likely to offer much comfort to her old Baptist soul. You see, it had been a long time since I had talked to her God. I did not wish to be disrespectful to her need at that moment, but neither did I want to be inauthentic with my own beliefs.
In a moment of—what? inspiration? desperation?—I said, “Tell you what, let’s you and me hold hands, and you say the words of the prayer.” So we did. And talk about an “acquired voice”! Off she went.
Lord, I know you hear my prayer now, because I have your man the Reverend here with me, and I know you won’t ever ignore his prayer! Here’s all I’m asking of you, God: I’m frightened, Lord. I’m really scared of this surgery tomorrow. I’m only asking you for courage, God. I can take whatever your will is for me, God. I’m just asking you to make me unafraid, so I can do this with dignity. I’m asking you in Jesus’ name. Thank you. Amen.
And I tell you true, I have never said Amen myself with more sincerity than I did at the end of that woman’s prayer. “Thank you, Reverend,” she said with tears coming down her cheeks. “I needed that prayer,” she said. So did I, I told her. So did I.
She has been with me through a lot of years of ministry, that old woman of faith. She felt unable to tell any other human being about the deepest fear in her heart, but prayer gave her an acquired voice, a self-permission, to articulate her greatest need on that frightening night. And just incidentally, in the process she taught a very unsure ministry student a profoundly humbling lesson, not only about the power of prayer, but also about the trust that his office carries for many people.
In any Unitarian Universalist congregation, with our diverse theological understandings and approaches, prayer can be a somewhat tricky business. Most of the Unitarian Universalist ministers I know spend more time than you might ever assume composing good inclusive-type prayers for hyper-fussy congregations. It isn’t easy. Of course, the Atheists and capital “H” Humanists in the crowd are always sorely challenged to tolerate even the notion of prayer, let alone the word itself. The word “meditation” is a much more comfortable notion for many UUs to digest than the word “prayer.”
Meanwhile, capital “T” Theists in a UU congregation squirm just as much at the various contortions of the language employed in an effort to avoid mention of the word “God” in many UU prayers. For example, I confess I get pretty fidgety with prayers that begin with “Oh, Great Essence of Life.” To me that sounds like a perfume ad. And in honesty, I must tell you I am no more comfortable addressing deity as “Mother” or “Goddess” than I am with “Father” or “Lord.” But still, I would rather look for the intention beneath the words than feel there is only one “right way” to pray.
After many years of wrestling with the notion of prayer, I find myself at this point in my life more appreciative of its value and potential power, respectful of the faith which calls it forth, increasingly tolerant of the limits of language which make almost any prayer seem awkward or inadequate.
I like the fact that our UU diversity of beliefs makes us choose our words of prayer carefully. In the Jewish tradition, the name of Yahweh is not spoken aloud, even in prayer. I think there’s a certain religious wisdom in that. Even in an acquired voice there is sometimes that which cannot be given a name.
Cultural differences are often profoundly obvious in prayer forms, of course. I had a friend from the Isle of Man whose family owned the same farmland for 800 years. He remembers his father teaching him as a boy that before the ground is to be plowed, a prayer is always offered to the earth, asking forgiveness for the intrusion of the plow and for a warm reception of the seed. Native American religions typically have similar reverence for (and comparable dialogue with) the natural world.
Some prayers address a god, some speak to the earth or the universe, some invoke a simple blessing, some are phrased in masculine imagery and some in feminine, and some in impersonal images. Some prayers come from a Western religious understanding, some come from other cultures.
Some prayers, of course, are not even meant to be spoken aloud. In Japan, in Shinto tradition, prayers and blessings are sometimes calligraphed on paper streamers, which are tied to branches and bushes. As the streamers wave in the wind, the blessing is said then to fly out over the world.
In Tibetan custom, prayers are carved into wooden wheels which are spun like a top, sending the prayers up to the sky. The wheels are sometimes positioned in a stream so that the water current spins the prayers even without human assistance.
One of the Five Pillars of Islamic practice is the requirement of prayer five times every day, facing Mecca. In medieval Catholicism, monastic orders who took vows of total silence endowed the simplest work of their hands with the status of prayer. The motto of the Cistercian monks was, Laborare Est Orare—to work is to pray. Their entire lives were offered as a single unending prayer to their God.
And in the Hebrew Scriptures, as in the story of Cain and Abel, reference is made to the smoke of sacrificial fires rising up to God as a prayer. The idea continues in the imagery of incense used in some church rituals to this day.
But whether we see ourselves in relationship with a personal god, or whether prayer for us is the pouring out of an acquired voice, I would suggest to you that prayer has a powerful and potentially significant place in the life of religious liberals. It may indeed be something quite different for us than what we learned from our parents or grandparents. Or it may be exactly what we learned from them in essence, only given our own form, and our own voice. Human experience hasn’t changed so very greatly, not on the deepest levels—and neither has our human need to give voice to our living.
There’s an old joke that we Unitarian Universalists begin all our prayers with the phrase, “To Whom It May Concern.” I realize that is meant to be a slap at our open theology, but, in truth, that feels to me like a very honest salutation for a prayer. I respectfully suggest that “Whomever It Does Concern” will appreciate our hesitation, and She might even appreciate our humility!
Somebody say Amen!
- To Whom it May Concern: - November 1, 2012
