DO WE HAVE A PRAYER?
A sermon delivered by the Reverend John H. Nichols to the First Parish in Wayland on June 1, 2014.
Once a friend of mine persuaded me to coach a Little League baseball team. The other coaches were very pleased to have a preacher to elevate their image in town, and perhaps they thought I was an easy mark. Which I was. When I went to the first coaches meeting while the other men were going nose to nose over the fate of promising eleven-year-old
pitchers I said just give me any fifteen kids and we’ll have a good season.
We had a 50-50 good season and at the end they asked me to give the invocation at the annual banquet. Being young and idealistic I wanted to make the point that some of us had allowed the desire to win to get a little out of hand, and so as a part of my invocation I asked God to help us keep the fun of playing the game as our central perspective.
All agreed, afterwards, that this was a wonderful message and they told me so, including one coach who had protested a game in which my team beat his, because, he said, the pitching rubber was six inches off the regulation distance to the plate.
I was asked to invoke the same banquet for several more years. I took every opportunity to sharpen my message about keeping competition in perspective. They seemed to love the message every time they heard it although it had absolutely no effect on their behavior. Finally I understood. They wanted me to address this thought to God, because my doing so seemed to absolve them from ever having to put the same sentiments into practice.
People are funny about public prayer. Most banquet prayers have less effect than the roles and the salad, which will be served as soon as the preacher stops talking. Yet banquet prayer survives, perhaps, as a very modest ritual atonement for our lapses in thankfulness generally. And too often it becomes an opportunity for the praying preacher to try to make the case that he really should have been asked to be the main speaking event.
Private prayer is another matter entirely. In it, we confront the history of our own relationships with power or with the absence of power. Were we made to feel guilty about our prayers or the lack of them? Did we ever pray for something with all of our hearts and then it did not happen? Did we ever wonder if our prayers were not heeded, because we were not
acceptable in God’s sight? Or were we taught that only weak people need to pray; that strong people have no reason to do so, because they use the power to reason everything out.
Perhaps we felt the inclination to pray but did not because to pray would have made us feel less competent or less intellectually acute. Many years ago as I was leaving the bedside of a seriously ill parishioner I said something like, “I’ll be thinking of you.” She responded with a twinkle in her eye, “That’s what all of my liberal friends say. But if you’ve also got any prayers, I’d be happy to have you pray for me.” This brought me up short. Why had I not offered the one thing that belongs to my profession in such situations? I was afraid of appearing unsophisticated or of suggesting a faith in something less concrete than medical science. And yet I notice even in this congregation – where the word God sends shivers up and down some spines – during Joys and Sorrows we are often invited to put someone in our prayers. Perhaps there is a lot of latent belief in prayer around.
Some time later I bought a book on the scientific basis of prayer. Before I purchased it I investigated the author to make sure he was not one of those flakes who wrote books about prayer. He checked out fine, but my own conflicts with this topic were such that I put this book aside and read approximately thirty other books before I finally picked it up again. I probably wouldn’t have read it at all if I had not paid good money for it when I bought it.
I found out, however, that prayer can have a powerful biological and psychological effect on people. We will probably never know exactly why and we don’t have to know why it has that effect. It appears that some forms of prayer extends us into the mysteries of unseen connections, between ourselves and a larger encompassing reality that we cannot begin to comprehend connections that defy our understanding.
In controlled studies prayer has helped to heal both individuals who knew they were being prayed for and those who did not know. It has helped heal both individuals who were in the same locality as the prayer group and those who were thousands of miles away. It is also true that not everyone who is ill is helped by prayer, and not all prayer is effective. We don’t know why. But much of the evidence seems to point to a power that exists tantalizingly, maddeningly beyond the reach of our questions or explanations.
In a play I saw many years ago a Unitarian Universalist dies and upon discovering that he has been admitted to heaven, declares, “If I had known this, I would have remained a Methodist. “ As it turns out, from all of the studies, it doesn’t really matter what religious colors we wear. The studies reflect prayers that were given in different languages by different religious groups both Western and non-Western and by non-believers. All studies – twenty years of them – reflect that God apparently is not interested in religious boundaries. Religious boundaries are a human preoccupation. Any sincere response that lifts us out of concern for our own predicament is a prayer that matters and may do some good.
How do we understand all of this? We may have to abandon some of the images we have used to think about God and prayer. It appears that prayer is not like sending a wish list email to God.
We have grown up with this picture in the back of our minds. God is sitting at a large desk behind a huge stack of prayers. There are two trays on this desk: one for the prayers God answers and one for the others. God must spend at least half of his day working through these stacks and sending out action memos to the angels.
It is generally assumed that the prayers of clergy go to the top of the accept pile. How else do we understand the standard joke used with clergy everywhere: “Thought you could have gotten us some better weather for the fish fry Reverend, ha, ha, ha.” Really, it’s not surprising that we tend to think in these images since it often feels as though the decisions or the judgments that most affect our lives are made by someone “upstairs.” This does not seem to be the case, however, with prayer.
Those who have come to believe that some prayer connects with power do not believe in a God who is “up there” or “out there”. They believe there is a Divine energy that touches upon the border of every life. You feel it when a group you are in really gels and suddenly there is a palpable feeling of oneness uniting very separate individuals. You feel it when you are united in thought with someone very dear to you. Every caring thought toward others or toward life itself connects with this source of life, or strength or, some would say, healing. Who knows – perhaps it connects with God.
A prayer that begins, “Please God help me get this promotion,” is a prayer that does not reach beyond the order of one person’s concerns. The key word here is “caring.” A prayer or caring thought for someone else does connect with the love that many believe is the source of life and the only real support for the quality of our lives together.
How often have you heard a story of parents and children or of siblings or old friends, situated in different parts of the country, who suddenly, mysteriously “know” that a message of some kind has been sent to them. The message usually is that someone they love needs their support. This is not an unusual phenomenon. This reaching out without words is so common it no longer rates as a coincidence.
Nor is it unusual for people to sense that someone they love has said good-bye to them, but not know until later that a death had actually occurred at the precise moment they thought they had received a message of good-bye. This also happens often. It happened in my own family. One way to understand it is conjecture that we are not really that isolated from each other or from God by time or distance. We are connected in often mysterious ways both by the depth of our caring for this life and for those with whom we share it.
I tell the following story for those who will appreciate it, and knowing some will probably not. There was a study done at Duke University of the fifty or more instances in which lost pets found their way home. Usually this is attributed to some sort of homing instinct, which might not be all that remarkable, but in many of these stories, pets find their owners in homes the pets have never seen.
Typically, of these stories is that of “Bobby the Dog.” Bobby’s family was moving from Ohio to Oregon. Bobby got out at a rest area, chased a squirrel, got lost and for some reason could not be found. After doing a lot of things one does when one loses a pet, the family sadly made their way to their new home in Oregon, but of course they could not help thinking of their lost pet and hoping that he would somehow be found. Three months later Bobby arrived at their new home in Oregon, clearly and unmistakably the dog they had lost in Indiana, a dog who had no other beacon to follow than the love and longing of his family in Oregon.
To be sure all prayers are not answered in the way we would prefer. Sometimes the prayers we pray with the purest, warmest motives are not answered as we hope. Sometimes tragedies that human beings set in motion cannot be stopped by prayer or anything else. Aging and illness, once sufficiently advanced, has a certain inevitability. So do hurricanes and tornados.
Religious cults put forward the message that “If you join us you will learn the proper way to ask for and receive most of what you want.” It’s just not true. Every life has its limitations and should have them. There is no power in Heaven or on earth that could give us all that we want, and that is probably a good thing. As we learn to live with our limitations, and sometimes with pain, we become wiser, more compassionate people.
That said, it also appears that sometimes there is a spiritual response to our caring and effort that strengthens and sometimes, to some extent, can heal us. Modern medicine is a blessing and a gift. People should consult their doctors and take them seriously. At the same time new doctors at many medical schools are being encouraged to discover whether their patients have a religious faith, and if they do, to take it very seriously. One of my former parishioners taught such a course at Harvard.
Finallly, like most people, I suppose, I used to assume that prayer is something that is done by professionals at certain times and in certain ways. I now believe that a prayer is every sincere expression of caring for something beyond our own lives. In this larger frame of reference it seems possible that being moved by singing a hymn together with others, or becoming caught up in a choral piece that is particularly well done is prayer. It certainly can be for me.
At times working easily with other people has been prayer or an evening spent with close friends. Active listening has sometimes been prayer, and often, for me, laboring to express myself on paper has taken me far enough out of my own internal world and its anxieties that it became a kind of prayer. Family celebrations can become a form of prayer though they can sometimes be a fete of endurance. And in my own family, the brief moment during which we hold hands silently before the evening meal has always been a moment of prayer for me.
Prayer is what draws us from ourselves and toward others – hence toward the source of caring which is Life or Creation itself. Religious institutions offer disciplines, which serve as prayer for hundreds of thousands of people, but not for everyone. In the final analysis no one can say what will draw you or me toward others most effectively. Each us needs to find that path for ourselves and that path will be our prayer.
I think we can believe that our deepest longing and caring, our working and our singing, our hoping and our praying connect with a mysterious strength which all religious traditions recognize as ultimate reality. Our deepest hopes and dreams, our less selfish acts and kinder thoughts can accomplish more than we know. Do we have a prayer? Most of us do. The task is to appreciate what it really is.
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