In our
Epistle, St. Paul says we don’t really know how to pray,
but we pray anyway because when we do
something happens.
The Spirit
is at work in our prayer no matter how we do it,
and the Spirit us up to something important.
“Prayer is
at the heart of all religion,” says John Macquarrie
the greatest 20th Century
Episcopal theologian.
And the
greatest Roman Catholic theologian of that century,
Karl Rahner concurred, saying:
“Prayer is the great religious act.
What [a person] fundamentally is in the depths of his being, . . .
that is prayer.
It is the acceptance of the prime fact of being created
. . .
It is the all-pervasive longing for
happiness . . .”
In Thomas
Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward Angel,
the hero,
young Eugene Gant, a bright
intellectual young man,
doesn’t know what to believe in, if
anything.
But as his
older brother Ben is dying, Eugene prays,
and the description of his prayer
is one of the greatest passages in
American literature:
“Eugene . . . fell upon his knees. He
began to pray.
He did not believe in God, nor in
Heaven or Hell,
but he was afraid they might be true. .
.
He did not believe in devils or angels
but he was afraid they might be true. .
.
All that he had read in books, all the
tranquil wisdom
he had professed so glibly in his
philosophy course,
and the great names of Plato and
Plotinus,
of Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, of Hegel
and Descartes,
left him now . . .
So, with insane sing-song repetition,
he began to mutter over and over again,
‘Whoever
You Are, be good to Ben tonight.
Show him the way. . .”
He lost count of the minutes, the
hours:
he heard only the feeble rattle of
dying breath,
and his own synchronic prayer.”
I have
known praying agnostics like Eugene
and
I have known Christians who do not pray.
The
agnostics are closer to God.
Prayer is
the very heart of religion.
But what is
it? How does it work? Does it work for that matter?
Paul said, most
of our prayers are not wise,
mature,
or theologically sound.
We are not
spiritual masters.
Our hearts
and minds are ensnared in worldly assumptions and values.
So either we
pray badly out of our worldly assumptions and values
or we pray badly by lying, pretending to
be more spiritual than we are.
Prayer
works its purpose in spite of us.
The
greatest purpose of prayer is communion with God,
the Source and Destiny of our lives.
St. Thomas
Aquinas said something about the benefit of prayer
and Lauren Winner gives us a great
picture of what he said,
in her book, Girl Meets God. She says:
“Aquinas
wrote, ‘Prayer is profitable because it makes us the
familiars of God.’ I like that language.[Winter says.]
It conjures up God with me as his little black
cat
everywhere
under foot.”
Through prayer,
we encounter God and are changed by that
encounter.
Acquaintance
with God makes us holy.
Kenneth
Leech said,
“To pray is to open oneself to the
possibility of sainthood,
to the possibility of being set on fire
by the Spirit.”
That
matters – not just for us but also for the world.
Simone Weil
said the world needs saints
like a plague-stricken city needs
doctors.
Look around
you. You’ll see she’s right.
But prayer
is also effective in bringing healing, mercy, and justice
to others in concrete human situations.
Prayer
isn’t magic.
It isn’t a
voodoo incantation to impose our will by paranormal means.
We don’t
conjure God up like a genie from a bottle to do our bidding.
Yet, our
prayer is part of God’s grace.
Today’s
lesson from Romans hints at how that works;
but it requires understanding some
basic Christian doctrine.
Our God is
not the Supreme Being, not the Cosmic Patriarch,
not the Puppet Master of the Universe.
Our God is
the Trinity – a field of relationship
– a personal procreative relationship
that gives birth to all reality.
That
relational God is present in all
situations, not controlling them,
but influencing them, calling them,
luring and cajoling
them toward healing, mercy,
and justice.
The Triune God is a swirling vortex of love
drawing all people and all situations
into itself.
And here’s
the kicker.
When we
pray, we become part of that vortex.
St. Paul
said,
The Spirit helps us in our weakness
for we do not know how to pray as we
ought,
but that very Spirit intercedes with
sighs too deep for words.
The Spirit
prays with us and through us.
No matter
how inept or wrongheaded our ego-warped prayers may be,
the Spirit breaths through us back into
the Father and the Son,
the Serene Center and the Compassionate
Heart of Reality.
Our prayer
is a conduit in the flow of Trinitarian love.
We lend our
energy, our wills, our thoughts and feelings,
to the swirling vortex.
In the act
of prayer, we are drawn into the Trinity
and we expand the perimeter of its
influence,
stretching it deeper into the situation
for which we pray.
St. John of
the Cross said,
“God has so ordained to sanctify us
through the frail instrumentality of
each other.”
God has so
ordained to speak to Godself through our prayer,
and in that speaking, breathing,
sighing
to extend divine love farther
into the world.
called prayer, “God’s breath in man
returning to his birth.”
The Spirit
is the Lord the Giver of Life.
the
flowing wetness of rivers, streams, and ocean tides
into Adam’s nostrils giving him life.
We live
because God breathes into us.
Prayer is
our way of breathing back into God.
It disposes
our will toward God.
It turns our
attention toward God.
We
acknowledge that we are leaves on the Tree of Life.
That
disposition of the will, turning of the attention,
acknowledgment of the relationship
makes the connection.
We consent
to let God breathe through us back to Godself.
Am I saying
that if we do not pray that God is less able to help?
Frankly,
yes, I am saying just that.
God creates
the world by allowing it to be free of his power.
To the
extent the world does not freely submit itself in prayer,
the world eludes his gracious mercy.
When we
submit to God in prayer,
we draw the world with us into a nearer
communion
with its source and add a
channel of grace.
A friend
and fellow bishop has a young adult daughter who suffered stroke.
She was in
a coma for a long time.
After that,
she was hospitalized in a vegetative state for months.
During
those months we prayed for her every day.
A few weeks
ago, she moved her hands for the first time.
She moved
her hands in American Sign Language.
She signed,
“Pray for me.”
Today she
is back home making good progress.
Prayer
isn’t magic. It’s mystery.
We don’t
control its results.
We often
don’t even see its results.
But prayer
is real.
In the act
of prayer we are changed
and the world is brightened by a spark
of hope,
revitalized
by the breath of life itself.
