Learning How To Pray
Reverend Roberta Finkelstein
Sunday, May 21 2006

Although I was raised and religiously educated in the Unitarian Universalist faith, my first lessons on prayer came not from the Sunday School of the Community Church of New York, but from Mimi, my very traditional Pennsylvania Lutheran grandmother. Mimi was a genteel woman, but she couldn’t hide her ongoing distress with the religious education I was receiving. In fact, I don’t think Mimi ever got over the fact that her daughter had married a Jewish man. I remember once she took me aside for a ‘secret’ talk. “You don’t need to tell your mother and father about this,” she told me. She asked me whether I had learned anything in school yet about evolution. When I answered in the affirmative, she gave me the Genesis version of how the earth was created. Then she advised me, when taking tests in school, to write just what the teacher said so I would get a good grade. But I should know in my heart the way it had really happened!

So Mimi also taught me how to pray. Her method, which I later rejected as stilted and meaningless, was actually appealing to a small child seeking spiritual solace, and getting precious little guidance in that department from her own Sunday School. (Unfortunately for me, the religious education philosophy of the 1950’s and 60’s in our faith had fallen so far under the spell of science and reason that all sense of mystery or awe was missing, at least in my memory.)

Mimi's formula had four steps. First you tell God about all the things you are grateful for. Then you tell Him (yes, for Mimi God was definitely masculine) all the things you have done that you are sorry for, and ask forgiveness. Then you ask God to bless all the people you love and care about, and anybody who needs help. Finally, you can ask God for things you really, really want. My relationship with Mimi's God, and Mimi's form of prayer, finally broke down around that last item. I would faithfully say my prayers: gratitude, confession, and invocation of blessing. And I would always end my prayer with the same respectful request. Since that request was never granted, after a while it became clear to me - a rational, intelligent Unitarian Universalist child well schooled in the scientific method - that God was not listening. "Who needs that," I thought, and washed my hands of the whole God/prayer business.

In his spiritual autobiography Markings, Dag Hammarskjold tells us, "God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason." As Unitarian Universalists we may sometimes feel the absence of that sense of wonder. We are religious people who place the use of reason squarely in the center of our faith. Can we also claim an experience that is beyond all reason? I think so. There is a difference between that which is unreasonable - which makes no sense, abrogates the laws of nature, betrays our minds and hearts - and that which is beyond reason. Beyond reason – where wonder dwells - in the realm of the spiritual, a realm that Unitarian Universalists increasingly seem to want to explore.

In our statement of Principles and Purposes, we claim as the first source of our living tradition, "Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life." That statement reflects the legacy of both the Radical Reformation – which insisted on the primacy of personal experience and the transcendentalists - those 19th century spiritual forebears who reminded their very rational Unitarian friends that people needed to experience the holy directly – not just to talk or think about the holy but experience transcendence. For the transcendentalists, encounters with the holy could happen in nature, in solitary contemplation, in music, even in human conversation. They were concerned with the cultivation of the soul – William Ellery Channing’s term - through whatever practice brought the individual into awareness of the experience of transcendence.

Mary Oliver's poem about the deer in the woods is a perfect example of encountering the divine in nature. But that kind of spiritual encounter will only happen if you are open to it. In Franco Ferrucci's autobiography of God (entitled A History of God as Told By Himself) Himself talks about his frustration over the years with trying to make himself known to people who were supposed to be religious: he includes an audience with the Pope in which the Pope is persistently unaware of his presence, conversations with Christian mystics in which they consistently misunderstand his communications, and even an extended visit with Herman Melville during the writing of Moby Dick. Ferrucci’s tongue in cheek description of God's frustration at making Himself known to the professionally religious only serves to remind us that while it is true that we are occasionally surprised by grace, blessed in spite of ourselves, our spiritual depths are more likely to be plumbed when we are deliberately open to our own personal encounter with the holy. We have to pay attention!

Openness is the essential attribute that allows us to experience the transcendent. Robert Raines uses the term "falling into mystery" to describe it. Falling into mystery will mean different things to different people, but the result will always be a direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder.

So what does this have to do with prayer? Prayer is one way we can fall into mystery. I pray, but I don't do what many people think of when they use the word prayer - just as I believe in God, but not the God many people mean when they use that word. My prayer is not a letter dictated to God, with a list of demands and concessions. Once in seminary a fellow student, confused as to what UUism really was, asked me if we pray. "Some of us do, " I answered. "Well, whom do you pray to?" was her response. The kind of prayer I am talking about renders the question irrelevant.

Prayer is not a speech by one person addressed to a bigger and better and more powerful Person. Prayer is a process - a process of opening oneself to the possibility of falling into mystery. It is a process of reaching deep inside of oneself to the pools of pain and joy that defy rational description. In those pools I have found the strength to cope with losses that had initially felt unsurvivable, and the fortitude to live through days of doubt and confusion that at first seemed unbearable. In those pools I have found, to my surprise and delight, the capacity to love beyond all expectation, and the energy to pursue possibilities that I would have laughed off had reason been given the only vote. And perhaps most importantly, in those pools I have found the courage to surrender aspects of life, which I had despaired of ever controlling, and yet whose loss felt unacceptable.

But prayer is more than just a reaching inside. It is also making a connection between those interior depths to that which is outside of us - beyond us - unfathomably other. Not just swimming inward, in Mary Oliver's words, but flowing outward. Falling into mystery and trusting that something - whether you call it God or life or the good - will catch you in your free-fall, and bring you gently back to earth, standing on your feet once again.

Prayer is, in A. Powell Davies' words, the language of the heart. The language of the heart is not always the most articulate, or the most well thought out. Munch's famous picture, The Scream, is a prayer. Sometimes the only prayer you can say is "help." Prayer is not an address to a particular being; it is not a finely constructed set of words with a beginning, middle, and an end. It is not a set of instructions, or a wish list, or an accounting of sins and virtues. It is not a magical incantation. Prayer is your heart and soul expressing your deepest longings, your most profound fears, your most unspeakable joys and desires. Prayer is a communication between the heart and the very heart of mystery that is life. It is a process of allowing oneself to be open - open to illumination by that radiance, that wonder, that is beyond all reason.

Some years ago, I was living through a very difficult period in my personal and professional life. I was leaving the church I had served for seven years – and the leaving was sad and complicated. I had come to care deeply for the congregation and the individuals in it, and I was finding it hard to let them go. A good friend of mine, who had been fighting cancer for several years, was dying. And then my cat disappeared. All of this forced me to pay more attention than usual to my own spiritual practices -–and to the meaning of prayer in my own life. After the Board meeting that week, I was talking about all the things that were distracting me from the business of the evening. Interestingly, I had the exact same conversation with a UU board member that I had with my Methodist seminary classmate years ago. "When you have a week like this, do you pray?" he asked. "Yes," I answered. "And who do you pray to?"

Although these questions came from somebody whose faith stance was diametrically opposed to that of my seminary friend, my answer was the same. Yes, I pray. But what I mean by prayer renders the "who to" question irrelevant. I did pray a lot that week. I didn't ask God to send Deana home - Deana after all, is a cat – by definition her behavior falls outside of God's providence. (By the way, Deana reappeared a week later. And she is still alive and kicking at the ripe old age of 19!) I didn't ask God to stop the cancer from eating my friend’s body. I did pray for the strength to get through the day and the resources to continue to attend to those things that needed my attention while my heart was with my dying friend. I prayed for her family, hoping that eventually they would find the resources to integrate their grief and loss into their lives, and to continue to live.

So, yes, I pray. Ironically, today the form of my prayer very often resembles the formula Mimi taught me all those years ago, but with a different understanding of the meaning of some of those words. I try to think of the things I am grateful for. Especially when I am in a funk, full of anger and sorrow and confusion, it is most helpful to try to cultivate gratitude. Step one - be grateful.

I also think about all the things I am sorry for. I know that the word confession is extremely loaded for many of you - and I use it both with that awareness and also with the awareness that there is wisdom in every religious tradition that calls us to regular self-awareness. I try to review my day - in 12 Step language I do a moral inventory - and I acknowledge the places where I have fallen short of myself, and I make note of the places where amends need to be made. Step Two - Confession.

Then I think about the people I love, the people I serve, the people in the world in need. The Quaker prayer tradition is to hold the person you are praying for in the light - not forming words that will fix them, or putting in a repair order, just holding them in loving consciousness. Step Three – Invoke Blessing.

Then, finally, I ask for what I want. I don't have a magic wish list that I deliver to the Magician. But I do have faith that I can find, either within myself, or in my connections to the world around me, the fortitude to live through what must be lived through. Sometimes my prayer is simply for the forbearance to carry myself with grace through the next day, or the next hour. And it is clear to me, a rational, Unitarian Universalist adult, that when I am spiritually open, that prayer is always answered.

In that spirit of possibility, I close with these words by poet Denise Levertov. Allow them to take you into a time of silent reflection, meditation, prayer as it is meaningful to you.

“As swimmers dare to lie face to sky and water bears them,
As hawks rest upon air and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain free fall, and float into Creator Spirit's deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns that all-surrounding grace.”

Amen.