"Reaching Beyond Ourselves"
(Listen to a podcast of this sermon.)
Call to Worship:
Come into this place of love
Come into this place of peace
Come as you are
With all that you are
Welcome to our celebration of life
Reading:
From Simply Pray by Erik Walk Wikstrom
“If you long to connect with the Sacred, if you desire to live a life that is more in touch with the Holy, stop listening for something and start simply listening. If you have given up on an anthropomorphic deity—the old white guy with the long white beard, or any of his stand-ins—yet can’t figure out what to put in its place, stop looking for something and start simply looking around you. Notice those places in your life where you have felt yourself in the presence of the Holy, remember those experiences in which you have heard your connectedness; seek in your own life—your own feelings, your own moments—those places where you have encountered, or are encountering, the Sacred. In other words, simply pray. Pray without any preconceived notion of what you’re doing or why. Simply do it, and see what happens.”
As the
month of November began last week, “prayer”
as the spiritual theme of the month seemed
incredibly appropriate.
First,
Hurricane Sandy came through and
Jared and I and our neighbors lost power for a week. Each
day I found myself involuntarily, and irrationally, pleading with the gods –
today, maybe today, can we have our power back? Please?
And
this past Tuesday night, as the election results rolled in, I
could almost hear the chorus of prayers, spoken and unspoken, being lifted up
to the heavens.
Engaging
in prayer as Unitarian Universalists is a
process fraught with mixed emotions. I want
to acknowledge that none of us here relates to prayer in the same way. Some
of us may have decided long ago that prayer has no place in our lives at all. Others
may have more recent wounds that have caused us to push prayer away as a
spiritual practice. And
still others may simply be curious. May be wondering how you might still find
meaning in prayer.
Our attitudes
towards prayer have a lot to do with the religious tradition of our upbringing,
if there was one, and our personal spiritual journeys that led us here, to this
sanctuary today.
I was
raised Roman Catholic and then chose Unitarian Universalism as a young adult, and, my
spiritual journey has included a process of sorting through the beliefs and
traditions I was raised with to determine what I might reject outright and what
might still hold meaning for me today.
In
this process I have grown wary and suspicious of the ways I was taught to pray
and the ways I observed others engage in prayer. The
obligatory recital of memorized lines. The
unreflective, seemingly irrational, invocations of some higher power that might
change the course of my life.
I have
shaped my life in such a manner that I am no longer surrounded by these modes
of prayer, but there are still reminders. A few
times a year, I receive an email from a family member or a friend whose
subject is something along the lines of “DO NOT DELETE” “RESPOND IMMEDIATELY”
written out in capital letters. Usually,
I can tell what type of email this is right away. It is
a chain prayer. If
you’ve never received a chain prayer in your email box before, perhaps you are
more familiar with the old-fashioned chain letter. Like a
chain letter, a chain prayer is meant to be sent along to more and more
recipients. If you
do not break the chain, something good will happen to you. The
emails don’t usually describe what will happen if you do break the
chain, but you can trust that these are consequences to be avoided.
When I
receive such an email, I generally read about half of it, thank
the person who sent it for thinking of me
and do
nothing more.
About
a year ago, I received one of these chain emails from a friend rather
unexpectedly. She is not a particularly religious person and
so it surprised me to receive such an email from her. The
instructions were to send the letter on to eight women who have touched my
life. Like
other emails of this sort that I had received in the past, I was ready to hit the
delete button. But, I
scrolled down and read the prayer, and it gave me pause. It read:
"May
today there be peace within.
May
you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May
you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself
and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love
that has been given to you.
May
you be content with yourself just the way you are.
Let
this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing,
dance, praise and love.
It is
there for each and every one of us."
Instead
of hitting delete, I chose eight women who have touched my life to share this
message with and I hit send.
In
that moment, I imagined my friend, sitting
at her computer all the way across the country and
choosing to send that message to me. And I
was reminded that I am cared for by others. I was
reminded that I wish others all that is good in life. And that goodness is
available to all of us. This
anonymous prayer spoke to that part of me that desires to connect, to
reach outside myself to those I love, to that something greater of which we are
all a part.
I
believe that prayer is a way for us as spiritual beings to reach beyond
ourselves.
And by
this I simply mean to live into the reality that we are not alone, that
we are connected to a larger human family, that
we are connected to a larger web of all existence, and
yes, that we are connected to that deep, abiding mystery of life, that has many
names and for which no name is adequate.
While
I believe deeply in this reality of our connectedness, it is sometimes easy to
forget. To
instead feel isolated. Alienated. Un-loving. And unkind.
How
many times a day do we push away those we love? Hurrying
off to begin our commute to work instead of greeting our partner or our
children. Or,
how often do we turn away from the needs of the world as we encounter them? Flipping
the channel away from a news story about the famine that is ravaging West
Africa
The
pressures and stresses of lack of time, the
inconceivability of the suffering around us, and
our own shortcomings can
pull us away from our sense of connection.
Yet,
we are called to live fully into our connectedness with others. We
yearn for this belonging. And we are full of the goodness and wholeness we seek
to create in the world.
And,
so, I believe it is crucial that we identify those spiritual practices that can
continually draw us back into that truth of who and whose we are.
One of
these practices for me is prayer.
I like
to think of prayer as an intention of the heart. In the
Christian practice of centering prayer, one sits in silence, clearing the mind,
and placing one’s intent on God. The
key to me in this practice is the intention. First
it is the attention to that place of
stillness within and
then a focus on the intentions I
hold: for
deep peace, for
the well-being of all, for
love of the world.
One
need not sit in silence to turn towards these intentions of the heart. Prayer
can indeed take many forms.
Although
I have already mentioned the chain email as a form of prayer, I am
not suggesting that you all leave here today and compose a series of chain
prayers to send out to your closest friends and family. Though
that would be a unique contribution to our faith tradition.
And,
writing out a prayer may be meaningful to you, whether a private prayer or one
to be shared with others. Your
prayer might be spoken aloud. Saying thank you before a meal. Or,
naming the people in your life that you are concerned about. Or,
acknowledging the awesome beauty of a
November sunset.
Some prayers are not meant to be spoken aloud at all. In many eastern countries, prayer flags are put up to share blessings and to spread good will and compassion into the world.
Prayer for you might be engaging in an activity that opens your heart to others – serving meals at a soup kitchen, tutoring at a local school, or walking a labyrinth.
There
are many ways to pray especially if we begin with an openness to our heart’s
call.
Some
of you participate in our small group ministry program and in that setting have
been exploring prayer and may even be trying it out on your own. I
encourage us all to do this. To give it a try.
As Unitarian
Universalist minister Erik Walker Wikstrom writes: “Notice those
places in your life where you have felt yourself in the presence of the Holy,
remember those experiences in which you have heard your connectedness; seek in
your own life—your own feelings, your own moments—those places where you have
encountered, or are encountering, the Sacred. In other words, simply pray.”
Simply pray.
You
may be wondering whether it really is that simple and asking yourself: What
should I be praying for? Who am
I addressing these prayers to?
As we
engage in this exploration, Wikstrom has a second recommendation for us: to pray
without any preconceived notion of what you’re doing or why.
I’ll
admit that this little piece of advice provides a great deal of challenge for
me. My
quest to use my analytical mind is probably in part what led me to Unitarian
Universalism…and, indeed, we are a religious community that prides itself on
the strength of our intellect and critical thinking capabilities.
So,
how might we set aside all those questions and simply notice where we are
encountering the sacred and see what happens?
Two
summers ago, I served as a chaplain in a hospital just outside Chicago. The
thing that brought me the most anxiety as a chaplain was praying with patients
and their families. My mind would race with the questions of how to begin and
what words to use…Throughout
the summer, we were each assigned five or six overnight on-call shifts. For
most of the summer, my shifts were fairly tame. No
major crises. I even got a bit of sleep. This
was not the case, however, for my final overnight shift.
In the
children’s wing of the Emergency Department, an infant, just a few months old,
had been admitted. I
learned that her body was covered in bruises and one of her arms was broken. She
had arrived with her mother, a young woman not more than 20 years old. And her
mother later joined us. The young
woman had picked up the child from the baby’s father who had been taking care
of her at his home the last couple of days. The
infant had been wailing when her mother picked her up and so the young woman had
brought her to the hospital sensing that something was terribly wrong.
I had
often felt like I was walking on holy ground as I offered my presence to
patients and their families. But
this night, the sacred tragedy of the situation was all too apparent. There
lay this little child, helpless,
vulnerable, impossibly
small in the hospital crib under the fluorescent lights, surrounded
by the nurses and doctors whose hearts were breaking, witnessing
her brokenness. I
spent most of the night with the baby’s mother and grandmother listening
to them tell and tell again the story of what had happened, sharing
their anger and shock, wondering
aloud what to do next. As the
early hours of morning arrived, there was nothing left to say or to do. Yet,
the intentions of our hearts were too strong to ignore. And so
we prayed.
Without any preconceived notion of what we were doing or why. The questions about prayer that had previously tormented me no longer mattered. I don’t remember the words we spoke. What words would have been adequate? I know we joined hands. I know we cried.
That
night I encountered the sacred in its frailty and in its fierce love. Witnessing
the brokenness of an infant. Witnessing
the rage of the medical staff. Witnessing
the despair of a mother.
I breathed in.
I breathed
out.
And I
continued to simply pray.
Through
prayer, we touch what is holy.
The
holiness that is painful and tragic.
The
holiness that is joyful and awe-inspiring.
The
holiness that is beautifully ordinary.
My
prayer, the
intention I hold in my heart for all of us, is that
we might keep our hearts open to all that is sacred, that
we might live into the truth of our connectedness. that
we might simply pray.
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Benediction:
The sacred is all around us
May we open ourselves to its wonder and to its beauty
In all the parts of our lives
Let us go in peace and return again in love
(Listen to a podcast of this sermon.)
