Praying That Makes Sense – Even to Atheists and Agnostics

Presented to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington

December 10, 2006

Rev. Paul Ratzlaff

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, Oh Lord.”  That’s a humbling prayer for a preacher.  May I speak what needs to be heard.  May I listen deeply enough to you and to my own inner knowing, that I can speak what is needed in this moment in this congregation.  May I not be tempted to speak what is safe – what you may want to hear - especially if that’s not what is needed.  May I not succumb to speaking only what I want to say, but what you as a congregation needs to hear.  May my heart, i.e., my deepest knowing, be in tune with what you need most.  May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, Oh Lord.”  Indeed!

A country preacher was strolling through the farmland near his village church.  He happened upon the field of a parishioner.  Seeing the farmer hoeing the well-cultivated field, the preacher called out, “Brother So-and-so, what a beautiful field you and the Lord have made!”  The farmer replied, “Well you should have seen it when it was just the Lord’s.”

Prayer never plowed a field.  “Oh, Lord, remove these stones and stumps, plow the soil, plant the seeds and hoe the weeds…and I will give you all the glory!”  I don’t think so. 

 As someone has said, prayer doesn’t change the world.  It changes you.  And you, in turn, change the world.  Prayer changes you.  You change the world.

Now of course, the preacher was also right.  Most of the conditions that lead to a bountiful crop are out of the farmer’s control.  They’re in “God’s hands” to use a metaphor.  Think about it for a moment.  Nothing grows without the sun, which is not in the farmer’s control.  Think of all the other factors, earth, rain, bacteria, insects…and on and on.  An aware farmer, like an aware doctor, knows that she or he doesn’t grow or heal anything.  All they do is maximize the conditions that allow for growing crops and healing bodies.

Prayer changes you.  Whatever you call it, there are three spirit-nourishing aspects to “prayer:” praise and gratitude; aspiration and self-examination; and compassion.  To live a full life, you will want to practice these three things.  A regular prayer life is one way to do it, but there are other ways as well.  They may not be called “prayer,” but they serve the same function.  What’s important is that you do it, not what you call it.

Cultivate gratitude.  Remind yourself, even when you’re not feeling particularly thankful what you could be thankful for.  This is the powerful part of saying grace before starting a meal.  It’s taking time to pay attention to all that took place to get this food on the table – from the sun, earth and rains – to the generations of seed – the farmers, harvesters, food processors, truck drivers, shelf stackers, cashiers, cooks and table-setters to mention a few.  When you consider all that it takes to get you food to eat, how can you help but feel thankful?  How can you help but praise? 

Many among us might say that we never pray.  I would note that we UUs sing our prayers.  “For the earth forever turning; for the skies, for every sea; for our lives, for all we cherish, sing we our joyful song of peace.”  Is that not a prayer of thanksgiving?

The American poet John Ciardi says this of praise in his poem White Heron:

What lifts the heron leaning on the air
I praise without a name. A crouch, a flare,
a long stroke through the cumulus of trees,
a shaped thought at the sky — then gone. O rare!
Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees,
would have cried Father! Cry anything you please

But praise. By any name or none. But praise
the white original burst that lights
the heron on his two soft kissing kites.
When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays,
I sit by pond scums till the air recites
Its heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.

—John Ciardi, in "Marry Me", Rutgers University Press, 1958

Cultivating gratitude and praise changes us.  It makes us more generous and appreciative.  That will change how we act in the world.  Prayer changes us; we change the world.

Prayer also serves to remind us of what we value, of what we aspire to be.  In confession we acknowledge our regret that we have not lived by what we hold precious, and we set our intention to live differently in the future.  Think of the song we sing nearly every Sunday as a prayer of aspiration.  “Spirit of Life, come unto me.”  I want to be alive, enthused, radiating vitality – enough of passivity and depression.  May I be enthused and delighted with the gift of life.  “Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.”  I pray that my heart may be open; may it stretch to embrace all!  “Move in the hand giving life the shape of justice.”  I pray that I may live my values, bringing justice and equality and peacefulness and beauty to all that I touch.  “Roots hold me close; wings set me free.” May I be confident enough that I can be creative, stretching for new ways of being both for myself and for others.  “Spirit of life, come to me, come to me.”

Another Sunday I could do a whole sermon about “confession.”  All I want to say today is that confession is integral to aspiration.  It’s the ruthless self-examination that a recovering substance abuser commits to as part of her or his healing.  Spending some time each day reflecting on how one is living – am I truly living our seven principles? – is the second way that prayer, or its equivalent, can nourish your spirit.

Keeping our aspirations and intentions in front of our minds changes us.  It will lead us to live our lives with more purpose and commitment.  Prayer changes us; we change the world.

The third aspect is to develop compassion.  That part of prayer that brings each loved person to your mind is a way of keeping your heart-awareness attuned.  When we pray for families of the dead and wounded on all sides of the Iraq war, we keep our hearts open.  When we pray for the victims of genocide in Darfur, we keep our hearts open to them.  When we pray for the millions of unknown children suffering from HIV/AIDs throughout the world, and especially in Africa, we keep our hearts open.  That’s how we deepen our compassion, which will change how we act.  As I said in the beginning, I don’t expect our prayers to heal sick kids in Kenya.  I do expect our prayers to change us so that we give our money, and elect our leaders, and in many other ways support those who will change what happens in Kenya.  Prayer changes us; we change the world.

I love the lines from this morning’s poem “On Prayer” by Czeslaw Milosz.  “You ask me how to pray to someone who is not./  All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge…[where] the word is/Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned./  Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,/Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh/And knows that if there is no other shore/They will walk that aerial bridge all the same.”

Praying as a way of cultivating gratitude and praise, as a way of setting intention and aspiration, and as a way of deepening compassion can make sense even to atheists and agnostics, because each of us, regardless of our theology, will blossom with thanksgiving, guiding values and empathy.  In a sense that’s the easy part of prayer.

But, what about prayers of desperation?  Prayers when we’re at wits end; when we have no where else to turn?  “Dear, dear God, you’ve got to help my son who’s checked himself out of the treatment program, and is calling me every minute drunk out of his mind.”  “Dear God, please let my child live.  The doctors tell me it’s hopeless, but I cannot give up hope.  Please, God, please.”  “God, I have no one else to turn to.  My family’s given up on me; hell, I’ve given up on me – look at what I’ve become.  God please don’t give up on me now.”  Or the prayers of desperation facing overwhelming distress in the larger world.  “Lord, shake some sense into those government bureaucrats who are holding up the money to rebuild New Orleans!”  “Oh Lord shake some sense into those too-rich, too-fat Americans who throw more food away than it would take to feel all the starving children of the world.”  “God, shake some sense into those Sunnis and Shias who would rather kill one another than live together.”

What about these prayers of desperation?  Prayers crying out of despair?  Even here there’s a very human reaching for something, someone outside? Greater than? Beyond? Oneself.  What words capture this best?  When I put words around it that make sense to me, I speak of my little self, and the greater Self.  By “little self” I mean all the components of my ego – my particular set of genes, the history of my family, my location in this culture in this time.  All of that forms my identity as “Paul Ratzlaff.”  But this is not the sum and essence of me, I believe.  Along with this, what I’m calling “little self,” there is a much more expansive consciousness that lives through me.  At moments in my spiritual practice, my little self tastes this greater Self – especially in those moments that I have compassion for whatever is happening in my little world.  For example, when I’m feeling anxious about not preaching well enough, I sometimes can hold that in a much larger consciousness.  “Oh my, here’s that anxiety, dear one.  Let’s hold it close and get to know what it really is in its totality.”  And when I hold it – or, if you prefer, give it over to the Greater Self, to God, to love divine, whatever you name it – I find it less fearsome.  I find a way to move forward.

These prayers of desperation (what some call “petitionary: prayers, or “intercessory” prayers) are human yearning coming up against human limits.  It’s confronting when we are out of control.  I think it’s necessary for us to face these moments head on.  Only a charmed life never confronts them.  The rest of us, regardless of theology, face these limits all the time.  Indeed, I would suggest that it’s precisely because we’ve been there that we open our hearts to others in compassion as they, too, face those moments of despair.

I, personally, don’t believe in a supernatural force that will change the world around to address my suffering.  No matter how faithfully I pray, I don’t believe that God is going to strike down the football teams that are playing the Giants the rest of this season.

It is said that one of President Reagan’s favorite stories is the one about the minister’s son who was taken out camping….  His companion warned him not to stray too far from the campfire because the woods were full of wild beasts….  The young boy had every intention…of following that advice but inevitably he was drawn by curiosity and wandered farther and farther from the fire.  Suddenly, he found himself face to face with a very large and very powerful-looking bear.  He saw no means of escape and seeing the bear advance rather menacingly towards him, the minister’s son did what he had been taught to do.  He knelt down to pray for deliverance.  He closed his eyes tightly, but opened them a few moments later and was delighted to see the bear was also kneeling in prayer right in front of him.  And he said, “Oh, bear, isn’t this wonderful!  Here we are with such different viewpoints and such different lives and such different perceptions of life and we’re both praying to the same Lord.”  The bear said evenly, “Son, I don’t know about you, but I’m saying grace.”  (King Duncan, Mule Eggs and Topknots, 1991, Seven Worlds Press, Knoxville, TN, pg. 277.)

As I said, I personally don’t believe in a supernatural power that will deliver me from harm that I have got myself into by wandering off into the wild.  I do believe that there’s a kind of spiritual power in acknowledging that I’m barely hanging on, that I don’t know what to do, that I’m totally lost and confused, and that I reach ?”out” ?”in deep” to be in that greater consciousness that holds me from the first breath of my life to the last, and every breath in between.  I name it “lovingkindness” and “insight” because I find inspiration in a Buddhist path.  You might name it “transpersonal consciousness.”  You might name it “God,” or “Allah,” or “Atman.”  Whatever we name it, most all of us will experience those moments of despair and desperation, and we will reach for something greater than ourselves in that moment to sustain us.

May we never scoff at the person who in desperation cries out, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” for all of us will experience that desperation at some point in our lives.  A daily prayer life that includes embracing the whole of life, both its exquisite delights, and its excruciating pain, prepares one for those bleak times.

Again, I think of a prayer we sing.  “Come sing a song with me…that I might know your mind. And I’ll bring you hope when hope is hard to find, and I’ll bring a song of love, and a rose in the winter time.”

Can prayer be abused?  Surely.  Just as I said last week about spirituality, we humans are ingenious when it comes to distorting good things.  Jim Grant tells this story about prayer.

 An overweight business associate of mine decided it was time to shed some excess pounds.  He took his new diet seriously, even changing his driving route to avoid his favorite bakery.  One morning, however, he arrived at work carrying a gigantic coffee-cake.  We all scolded him, but his smile remained cherubic.

“This is a very special coffeecake,” he explained.  “I accidentally drove by the bakery this morning and there in the window were a host of goodies.  I felt this was no accident, so I prayed, ‘Lord, if you want me to have one of these delicious coffeecakes, let me have a parking place directly in front of the bakery.’

“And sure enough,” he continued, “the eighth time around the block, there it was!” (Jim Grant in Reader’s Digest, collected in King Duncan’s Mule Eggs and Topknots, 1991, Seven Worlds Press, Knoxville, TN, pg. 277.)

Prayer changes us; we change the world.  Even our prayers out of desperation can open our hearts in compassion.  Out of such compassion we will act differently in the world, bringing more peace into it.

How else to conclude a sermon about prayer, but with a prayer!

May we be ever grateful.

May we ever strive for that which is most precious and worthy in our lives.

May our hearts widen and deepen as we embrace both the joy and pain of living.

May we trust that beyond our particular lives, there is a larger Life that sustains us and moves through us when we open ourselves to its use of us.  May we ever be of use.  Amen.