Reading “Singing in the Night” by David O. Rankin
I love to pray, to go deep down into the silence:
To strip myself of all pride, selfishness, and
coldness of heart;
To peel off thought after thought, passion after
passion, till I reach the genuine depths of all;
To remember how short a time ago I was nothing,
and in how short a time again I will not be here;
To dwell on all joys, all ecstasies, all tender
relations that give my life zest and meaning;
To peek through a mystic window and look upon
the fabric of life—how still it breathes, how
solemn its march, how profound its perspective;
And to think how little I know, how very little,
except the calm, calm of the silence, and the
singing, singing in the night.
Prayer is the soul’s intimacy with God, the ultimate kiss.
Sermon
The sermon today is about prayer and the first source from which we Unitarian Universalists draw our inspiration, namely: “Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”
Do you pray? Do you believe your prayer is heard? From the 1960’s to the early 1990’s, many Unitarian Universalist churches did not have a time of prayer in their Sunday service. I understand that this is not true of this church since we are more traditional. Most of our churches had meditation or moments of silence. You know that we have “Prayer and Meditation” in our Order of Service.
Our history shows that we wanted an authentic religion that was true to what we believed and what made sense to us. Many if not most were not convinced that God existed. We asked, “To whom or to what are we praying?” The joke was that Unitarian Universalists began their prayers with, “To whom it may concern!”
It used to be that diversity meant a desire for more people of color in our congregations and welcoming of gay and lesbian people as part of our commitment to anti-racism and anti-oppression behaviors. In the last decade, there has also been a greater emphasis on diversity of belief and an urge for tolerance, even acceptance for different religious viewpoints. The hymnbook we now use was printed in 1993. In this edition, God was degenderized. Gone was God as Lord and Him with a capital “H” (except for in Negro spirituals). But one new hymn uses Lady! God is now referred to as just “God” or now more popularly as Spirit of Life, or Spirit of Love. “Spirit of Life” is considered a term for the sacred that each of us can define for ourselves, but then so is the word “God.” “Spirit” carries much less “baggage” for people who grew up with the concept of a white male god with a white beard who watches every move we make! So our history of engaging in what we considered “authentic” religious language led us to be careful about how we express the sacred. And now that we are more comfortable with what we have, we are trying to reclaim more of a “language of reverence.” I’m not sure how it will all work out, but I trust our collective creative process in this. You can see some of this creative process of reclaiming a language of reverence in our responsive reading of The Lord’s Prayer this morning. We have managed to keep the tradition and yet interpret it in the way we understand it in this day and age. Again, it is our attempt to be religiously authentic in the words that we say.
So what is prayer? Dr. Larry Dossey says that prayer is an “attitude of the heart” and that “Prayer is communication with the Absolute.” This is Dossey’s “Prayer for Prayer.”
May we let prayer be.
May we allow it to follow
the infinite patterns of the human heart.
May we learn to practice the most difficult art,
the art of noninterference.
May we be guided by prayer
instead of attempting to guide prayer.
May we allow prayer to be what it needs to be,
to be what it is.
May we let prayer be.
I call this type of prayer a “may you” prayer or a blessing prayer. The style comes to us from the Hindus and Buddhists. Unitarian Universalists generally like this kind of prayer, primarily because it doesn’t invoke a personal God—not that there is anything wrong with a personal God!
If you call the homes of a few people from this congregation, you will hear the message on their voice mail say, “May you be well, may you be happy,” or simply “Be well. Be happy.” This does raise the question, “Can prayer be of any use to people who are agnostics, that is, people who are skeptical about a God concept?” The answer is “Yes.” Prayer is not dependent upon a particular belief. People who believe that the world is unified by a force of some kind have an easier time praying, even if it is only using the “may you” type prayers. It all depends upon both belief and personality type. Can people with absolutely no belief in a divine concept benefit from prayer? They would likely not want to pray (except perhaps in times of personal crisis). However, a-theists have been benefited by keeping a Gratitude journal.
Larry Dossey became interested in prayer as a practice to aid healing when in the 1980’s he read of a study that indicated that when patients were prayed for they recovered much faster. Since then, “more than 130 controlled laboratory studies show in general that prayer or a prayer-like state of compassion, empathy, and love creates healthful changes in many types of living things, from humans to bacteria.” (p.49, Dossey) Although prayer did not always cure, it seemed to have beneficial effects.
There were many “double blind” studies where one group was prayed for and the other not. The group that was prayed for recovered much faster and better. This was astounding because a “double blind” study is where the patients did not know they were being prayed for and neither did the doctors and nurses. Other experiments had patients prayed for by people scattered through the country and only the name and the diagnosis was known to the ones who prayed. It made no difference whether the people who prayed were close by or far away—the patients were benefited. Other scientists say that more experiments need to be done with greater controls. One study that needs to be done is to observe whether the people who do the praying are benefited. We think that the ones that do the praying are benefited, possibly because they feel they are doing some good for others.
Dr. Jose Stevens, psychologist and spiritual teacher, says there are seven levels of prayer:
1. The first level of prayer is, kill my enemies; make me strong over them.
2. Please don’t punish me! I’ve been bad; save me. (Perhaps you saw the Dennis the Menace cartoon recently. Dennis is saying his prayers and says, “Dear God, I know you will forgive me, but can you make our neighbor, Mr. Wilson forgive me?!?”)
3. Make me rich! Gimme, gimme, gimme. You are great as long as you gimme.
4. Life is so hard! Help me, give me strength….I know you are there but why don’t you help me, damn it?
5. Thank you for providing for me. I love you!
6. Thank you for being there. Allow me to know you more….
7. You and I are one. I am peace. Make it so. I am that. I am who I am.
Jose says that most of us reading his book will likely use the last three levels and he encourages us to try to create our own prayers, always ending with listening. In the listening is the answer to what we are praying for. The prayers in his book came to him from his “listening” time following prayers and we did a prayer in the manner he advised today. He urges us to pray for a prayer on a particular subject and listen for the words to say. They will always include the “I Am.”
In his book, Simply Pray, UU minister, Erick Wikstrom, advises us to consider what Ultimate Reality is for us or what might be an image or place that inspires the sacred in us. What, for example, in the Bible fascinated you when you were growing up? For myself, I was always fascinated by the story of Moses and the Burning Bush. But it wasn’t until I heard what God truly said its name was that I realized why I was so taken with the story. God said that the name that should be told to the people was YHWH, said as Yah-Way. It means, “I Am that I Am.”
Many spiritual teachers teach us that the Hindu word AH-OHM is the name or sound of God or the universe. Jose Stevens’ book, Praying with Power is about using “I Am” in all prayers. It is not lost on me that “I Am” is closely related to OHM, which is should be A-Ohm.
Now, my sermon for you today was simply to say what prayer is and whether it works. We’ve heard what Larry Dossey said it is: It is an attitude of the heart and an encounter with the Absolute and that in the light of many studies on prayer it does work. Jose Stevens says:
“Prayers are an intensely personal communication with what anyone might consider a higher source of power. For some, this power is a vague notion of something greater than them; for many others it is a specific idea or experience of a God or Creator, and for many it is a highly defined deity or saint. Despite what some people think, it is not necessary to believe in any specific deity for prayer to produce results.” (p.2, Stevens)
Jose believes that using the “I Am” will help us to connect with our own deep self which is connected to All That Is. In this style, let us together do a prayer for Mother’s Day (and I hope you can interpret the “I Am” as your own:
Spirit, I am the child of a woman, my mother.
I give thanks for the day I was born.
I give thanks for she who bore me.
I am who I am, partly because she was who she was.
I am part of her and she is part of me.
She did her best. For this I give thanks.
I give thanks for my life so far.
I give thanks for my life that is to come.
I am the child of a woman, my mother.
I give thanks.
May all mothers and all nurturers receive blessings.
Amen (This prayer came to me while listening.)
No matter whether we pray or do not pray actively, our lives can be a prayer in the way we live, in the way we think, and the way we love. When we are aware of our oneness with one another, we can be sure that we are aware of Spirit. We may even be infused by Spirit, or at least inspired by it.
References
The following has inspired and informed this sermon:
Dossey, Larry, M.D., Prayer Is Good Medicine, San Francisco: Harper, 1996
Stevens, Jose Luis. Praying with Power, London, England: Watkins Publishing, 2005.
Wickstrom, Erick Walker. Simply Pray: a Modern Spiritual Practice to Deepen Your Life, Boston: Skinner House Books, 2005.
