"Why Pray?"
Peter Connolly

 

The subject of prayer, as it turns out, is a large one indeed, including, as it does, our personal beliefs and experiences as sell as the lessons I’ve learned from the recent exposure of prayer to the disciplines of science. So, today I’ll talk about the personal experience of prayer and I hope you will be here again on February 15 when I’ll speak about prayer’s effectiveness as revealed through the means and methods of science.

 When I was a child, I was taught to pray the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary and a prayer to my guardian angel. Later I was taught the Apostles’ Creed and a whi1e after that, the rosary which is a series of fifty-eight prayers, I think, which are said in a kind of chant; when they are said in a group, the responsorial form is used.

 My father had a significant bout of tuberculosis when I was a toddler and was away from the home for over a year. I don’t remember his return because I was so young and it did not last for long: the TB was not cured and he went back to the sanitarium in Rutland Heights for another couple of years before he had the successful surgery that removed a lung and returned him to us. What I do remember is that during that second time he was away, the rest of the family, which consisted of my mother, brother John, sister Mary and myself, knelt around my parents’ bed every night and said the rosary together. My mother would start us off and continue ,with the first decade, I would lead the second, John would lead the third, Mary, the fourth, and my mother would close with the fifth. We ended by dedicating the rosary to my father’s recovery and added prayers for my parents’ friends who were sick or who had passed on.

 It seems remarkable to me now that we were so dedicated in our practice. It left a mark on me of the importance of prayer in one’s spiritual life. But then my father came home and the strangeness of that fact and its effect on the family dynamics made me and my siblings question the value of what we had prayed for. We experienced a mixed blessing of salvation in his return and guilt at our response-- we traveled from limbo to Purgatory. It may be that I’ve been struggling since to make a connection between the practice of prayer and the mystery of deliverance.

 The guardian angel idea was perhaps the most comforting gift of the spirit that was bestowed upon us as kids. There was no down side. A special angel had been appointed in heaven for just each one of us; that angel was a constant presence, just as he is for Pasquale in the comics, available to hear our fears and offer comfort. It’s too bad that when we grew past the idea of the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny, there was no further teaching because as it was, the childishness of the idea, as we grew, encouraged us to leave it behind and to think of prayer in general as an aspect of childhood, something to grow out of. By high school I looked for ways to avoid church on Sundays and, though I could still be made to feel guilty for not praying, it was not enough to encourage me to resume the practice. Football, girls, studies and an after-school job were enough to fill the time.

For twenty years I had no church life at all, till I found the First Church in Jamaica Plain, Unitarian Universalist. There I met a number of folks who were to be significant in my spiritual growth; one of my chief influences was Emerson Stamps, an older man from a background in rural Arkansas, a black man in a predominantly white congregation; he was and is a friend and mentor for me, and a model for what it means to live a spiritually-centered life. Together we formed a meditation group for two-and-a-half-years, meeting twice a week for an hour with three other church members. Sometime during this time Emerson asked if I would like to start, with him, a First Church prayer group. I could only blurt out “But, Emerson, I don’t pray.” I could think of prayer then only as a kind of superstitious practice to a personal God that no longer existed for me. We left that idea alone for a while.

Then coalesced the number of events that led me to think of ministry as a vocation. As I began my first year at Andover Newton, I was approached by the chair of our RE committee who thought it might be a good idea to start a worship service for the children on Sunday mornings so that when they began to attend the adult service later, they’d have a context for understanding it.

“But what would you like me to do?”

“Well, a kind of care and concerns, lighting candles, that sort of thing. Maybe sing a few hymns; say a few prayers.” What was I to do? I had made a decision: I had chosen a path--and attendant with that I had decided to make it a practice to say “Yes” when asked to provide spiritual leadership. So I said “yes.”

 It was while leading Children’s Chapel, and leading the children in prayer, that I learned some of the basic benefits of the practice. “Dear Lord” was not going to work in a UU church as a mode of address to the Divine. And yet, how to speak to children about God without introducing the stereotype of an old and bearded wise man? I decided on a, dare I say it?-- Trinitarian formula of “God of grace, Mother of our spirits, source of our light,” figuring that masculine, feminine and even neutral models were covered.

 The kids loved the sound of the meditation bell that welcomed in the silence and they were remarkably respectful of it, intrigued by it. Each who wanted to, lit a candle and offered a concern or a joy; one of the parents wrote them down. At the end of the candle-lighting I read the list of the prayers, uniting the spirits of all to the prayer of each and at the end, the children added their voice in a (sometimes) resounding “Amen.”

 This is what I learned. The primary role of prayer is to join in a relationship with whatever we conceive to be the Divine Mystery that animates life.

 I learned that the very act of articulating a joy or a concern is, for a child, an accomplishment of bringing the unformed feelings of the heart to verbal articulation, giving those feelings shape and thus beginning a process of owning them.

I learned that articulating joys and concerns in a social group is a significant accomplishment in risk-taking, allowing a child’s peers to be aware of her insecurities and wishes--learning not to be ashamed of the neediness which, after all, is just an aspect of their humanity.

I learned that the process of articulating these needs and wishes within a group of peers forms the trusting bonds which are necessary for building a spiritual community. And we did indeed build a hardy and resilient little spiritual community together-- though not without its frictions. In a group whose ages ran from 2~ to ten, it’s inevitable that the prayers of some seem inappropriate to others. I’ll not soon forget the day a nine-year old approached a four year-old after the service to ask “Why did you make us pray for that stuffed animal?”

We rarely, if ever, used the term “sacred space,” but the children showed a good understanding of the concept by the way they behaved. I expected that by the time of the benediction, they would be scrambling to depart, so I was quite surprised that when I took out the candle snuffer and ritually snuffed the flames, they did not move, but turned their faces in wonder at what some of them thought was a miracle as the snuffer descended and the flame disappeared. It was not long after that that the children were given the task of taking turns to snuff the candles. It was only when they ran to the altar to dip their fingers in the melting candle wax that I was reminded that they were kids after all, and not angels.

My own prayer life has taken many forms as the years have passed. For probably a year, I adopted a psalm as my own and memorized it and said it daily on my front porch while watching the trees move in the morning breeze. During that time, I twice had occasion to say that psalm as a specific prayer for and with a friend at a time of crisis. My most frequent morning prayer is to look out the window at the natural world and list all the things I’m grateful for in my life. As Tricia said in her Thanksgiving sermon, the conscious practice of gratitude leads to health of body, mind and spirit-- one grows gratefully and “spiritfully” into the future instead of carrying forward the dread that can pull us down through the variety of ailments and obstacles that daily bedevil us. And I pray for the virtues I know I’ll need in the day-- patience, quite often; courage to speak the truth, especially to those in power, but discernment, too, to know which battles to fight. When I neglect my prayers because of the stresses to move on, those same stresses are my prime influences and mark my behaviors in ways that are not beneficial to me or others. I become a creature of them, rather than a creative being, and I am diminished by that.

 Prayer can be a useful and for some people an essential practice of the spirit, but it cannot stand alone and it cannot adequately take the place of the work of relationship in the world.

 In December, I saw a movie called “Jesus, You Know,” an Austrian movie presented as part of the New European Film Festival at the Harvard Film Archive. It is a documentary that simply films the prayers of six Christians as they stand or kneel at the front of their church and address their problems in great detail to Jesus, whom they view as their savior. It is remarkable that each of them prays for ways to make the central relationships of their lives work better. They show, for the most part, great insight into their problems, but very little insight into how to solve them.

 When the worshipers are presented, briefly, in scenarios with those they love, there is almost no movement toward relationship. A young woman plays a computer game while her boyfriend picks out a tune on his guitar; a Christian woman married to a Muslim man is able to touchingly articulate her desires to be closer to him when she prays, but she works on her sewing machine while he watches a mindless TV show when they are together. Prayer can give us insight into action, but it cannot replace the hard work of interaction that leads to transformation in relationship.

 There is a small shrine in my dining room where I sometimes stop to pray before leaving the house. There is a crucifix that was left behind at the time of my mother’s death. It’s fastened to the wall. At the top of a bookcase, just under it, and to the side, is a small statue of the Buddha contemplating an oil lamp. My prayers, then, are offered in a place where I am reminded that suffering provides a context for meaning in our lives and the peaceful contemplation of our difficulties can bring us the serenity we need to offer prayers adequate to our circumstances.