PRAYING BADLY IS THE BEST THING WE CAN DO

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 20^th 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.

 But that doesn’t matter.

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.

 So the greatest benefit of prayer is the change it works in us.

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.

 The 17^th Century Anglican poet-priest, George Herbert,

         called prayer, “God’s breath in man returning to his birth.”

The Spirit is the Lord the Giver of Life.

 Genesis says, the Spirit, the breath of God swept across

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.

ISHMAEL AND WILLY LOMAN

I cannot think of a more poignant story than Ishmael’s.

Abraham cast Hagar and her baby out into the desert

            with nothing but a loaf of bread and a skin of water.

When the water ran out, Hagar laid the child

            under a bush and left him there alone

because she could not bear to watch him die.

But God heard the baby’s cry,

            sent Hagar back to her son, gave them water,

and made Ishmael’s descendants a great nation.

I stand in awe of that moment when baby Ishmael has lost everything

-- father, mother, food, water, shelter – all gone.

He has nothing – absolutely nothing – but the grace of God.

  

Then my mind leaps from Ishmael to his opposite

–      Willy Loman in The Death Of A Salesman.

In Thomas Dumm’s recent book, Loneliness As A Way Of Life,

            he describes Willy Loman as lonely, alienated

-- cut off even from himself.

-- trapped in the ceaseless struggle to acquire,

            to succeed by amassing possessions, to have, have, have –

because the alternative to having is to be had.

We trust owning things to insure our well-being and our freedom.

We want to be people “of independent means.”

But Dumm says that the life of having is empty.

As Wordsworth put it,

            “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

             Little we see in nature that is ours.”

It’s like Citizen Kane dying with the word “Rosebud,”

            the name of his boyhood sled, on his lips

He had built an empire but died longing

for the simple innocent humanity he had lost.

Psychoanalyst Eric Fromm wrote in his book, To Have Or To Be.

that Western culture had gone off track,

            promising happiness through material possessions,

            but that life of getting, spending, having, and clutching

had failed to make us happy.

It had drawn us away from authentic experience.

It had cut us off from our real selves, cut us off like Citizen Kane

            and Willy Loman from our humanity,

            reduced us to  jumping through economic hoops.

But Fromm says there is another way.

It is possible to live deeply and happily

            through participation in the whole dance of humanity.

He calls that experience “being” and says we develop the capacity for being

            -- the capacity for life -- through letting go of possessions

            in order to connect with each other.

Fromm’s compelling  diagnosis of our psychological malaise

            seems to grow out of an older book by French philosopher

            Gabriel Marcel, Being And Having.

But Marcel says the problem isn’t just material possessions.

It’s how we relate to everything.

It’s treating the world, even our own bodies and ideas,

            as something we can watch, dominate , possess, manipulate.

That’s what Gabriel Marcel means by “having.”

We can have our families as well as having our homes.

The problem, according to Marcel, is that we stand back

one step removed from everything,

using it instead of celebrating it.

So the vegan yoga-practicing purist in patched jeans

            can be just as caught up in having his spirituality

            as the investor is in having his mutual fund.

“Having” is about control and credentials.

The opposite of “having” is what Fromm and Marcel call “being.”

It’s the real life that comes from participation, from joining the dance.

It happens when we give ourselves away.

Being is as vulnerable as baby Ishmael under the bush.

Authentic life is vulnerable precisely because

it is engaged with others, participating rather than controlling,

                        giving our money, our time, our attention, and our hearts

                        to a life that often doesn’t go our way.

It’s surfing. We don’t control the frothy waves. We ride them.

In between Ishmael, homeless and alone in the desert

but surviving by the grace of God,

and Willy Loman, dying in a car wreck

on the very day his house was paid off,

there was another character – Jesus.

Jesus’ disciples had left everything follow him.

They left their jobs, their homes, their families, their communities.

After awhile they asked Jesus,

“Now what will we get? What’s our reward?”

Jesus told them they still had more to give.

They’d have to take up their cross.

Then he said, “Whoever finds his life will lose it;

            but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

The word we have translated as life is actually psyche.

It means the very core of a person, their identity,

            what makes them get up in the morning.

It’s in the ballpark of what Buddhists mean

            when they talk about surrendering the ego.

I used to be a Buddhist talking about surrendering my ego ad nauseum.

I was pretty proud of how much ego I had surrendered.

Then I ran across God who wanted me to surrender real stuff

            like money, time, emotional energy

-- and I discovered I  still had some attachments break loose.

Jesus invites us to let go of what we cling to most tightly,

            because those things are our chains.

The more we give away, the less we have,

            but the more fully alive we become.

If we give our money, our time, our attention, our labor

            for Jesus’ sake, it opens up a place in our souls

                        where we can breathe.

We can lighten up.

We can get light enough to join the dance, to surf the waves.

Everything we do in the Church is about getting free

from the prison of having

            so we can plunge into being

-- that spontaneous flowing state of appreciation and gratitude.

We place our offering of money, bread, and wine

unconditionally on God’s altar.

These tokens represent all we have and all we are.

We give it all to God.

Then our gifts are blessed, broken, and shared with one another.

Holy Communion is the ritual of giving up what we have

            in order to participate in life.

It is the exchange of having for being.

In Holy Communion we recall Abraham leaving his land and people

            to follow God; then Moses; then Jesus; and the followers of Jesus.

Like them, we do not come to Church to “get something out of it.”

We come to Church to give ourselves to God

            and open our hearts to life.

Meister Eckhart, one of the greatest spiritual masters of the Middle Ages,

said, “The person who is full of things is empty of God;       

            but the person who is empty of things is full of God.”

He also said,

            “No one ever gave so much of himself away

            that he did not have more to give.”

So think today on what you have given away for the love of God.

Remember how that felt.

Then ask what you have left that you might yet give.

Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s time, maybe it’s attention.

What might you give that would set you just a little freer,

            that would give you a bit more peace,

            that would open your heart a little wider to life and joy?

Giving ourselves away, giving away even a little of what we have,

            is a risk, a leap.

It is also godly action.

The word for God, theos, comes from a root that means “to leap.”

God leaps into our lives when we make a space for him.

John 3:16 recounts that godly leap of love,

            “For God so loved the world that he gave . . . . – he gave.”

We love the world and we love God when we give back.

That’s what eucharist means -- a thankful giving back in love.

It is the love puts a heart in our life.