Prayer is one of the central aspects of all three Abrahamic religions. When I went to the Holy Land in 2014 I spent my first few days in Nazareth, where I was awakened before dawn every morning by the call to prayer that emanated from the minaret not far from the monastery where our group was staying. Prayer is not a casual, when you have time or when you go to the mosque sort of ritual for followers of Islam; Muslims are called to prayer five times a day. At those times they stop what they’re doing, take out their prayer rugs, kneel facing Mecca and say their prayers. That same sort of praying of the hours has taken place in Christian monastic communities for centuries, and there are certainly many devout people living outside such communities who pause, even in this busy world in which we live, at specific times during the day to pray. For me, prayer is an integral part of my life, but I don’t necessarily pray at certain times during the day or always on my knees or facing a specific direction. So to put it differently, we don’t all pray the same way, but for the most part individuals who believe in God consider prayer to be an important part of our religious practice. Ironically, as important as prayer is to people of faith, it’s the one aspect of religion most ridiculed by those who don’t share our beliefs. “How stupid can you be?” is their perpetual query. “Do you seriously think muttering some special incantation or some off the cuff remarks to an unseen entity seriously impact the wellbeing of other people or yourself?” My background as a science teacher notwithstanding, I would have to answer, “Yes, I do.” And yet at the same time I can understand where those who question the purpose and or power of prayer are coming from. Readings like today’s Gospel absolutely test the bounds of any rational person’s ability to believe in prayer, because in my experience prayer simply is not as straightforward as ask and it will be given you.
So, presuming that it does, how, exactly, does prayer fit into your life? Is it strictly a Sunday morning activity? Is it all the prayers at a celebration of the eucharist on Sunday morning plus a hastily said, memorized blessing before meals? Perhaps, if you were raised as I was, you learned to pray at bedtime. That first prayer that many of us learned back in my day, which I’ve seen mocked at times for being rather fatalistic, is actually pretty all encompassing: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. In other words, be with me God, now and always. The interesting aspect of that prayer is that it names the one facet of our faith most often overlooked by even the most faithful among us, and which is utterly beyond the understanding of unbelieving cynics: life on this earth isn’t all there is. So many of our prayers center strictly on this life. We beg God to keep our children safe, to heal our family and friends, to watch over those who are far from us, to guide us in our decision making. All of those are perfectly valid prayers. But when we limit what we pray for to the outcomes we perceive as the most desirable within the constraints of our earthly world view, we’re placing human limits on an omnipotent God.
Prayer, to harken back to my sermon last month, requires us to trust, to truly believe that God really does routinely give us more than we could ever ask for or imagine. So often we don’t realize God is taking care of us because we’re so focused on the outcome we’ve decided we want that we may not notice in the moment that the unexpected way things have turned out is actually better than what we had been hoping for. So, how should we pray?
First of all, we might want to broaden our perception of just what constitutes prayer. To quote Meister Eckhart, “ If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you’, that would suffice.” Prayer is so much more than asking for something. “The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy." These according to Frederick Buechner, are all prayers in their own way. They’re all ways, whether we realize it or not, that we connect to something outside ourselves, something that we acknowledge by our awe is greater than we are. Other times prayer can be pretty down and dirty. To give you a truly blasphemous example from my own life, back in the early 1980’s I helped with campus ministry at the U of O. One of my main responsibilities was producing a monthly newsletter which was sent to over 600 recipients. This was done in the days before desk top computers or easy photocopying. That meant I had to go down to Koinonia Center after office hours to use the secretary’s typewriter to type the columns, then physically cut and paste the columns, and headlines made with press-on letters, onto masters of a sort. The next day I had to take the masters to Central Lutheran where their secretary kindly made the plates for me to use on a perfectly hideous off-set press which Episcopal Campus Ministry had acquired from the Newman Center for I believe $25, which should give you some idea of its condition. More often than not I would end up at Koinonia well past midnight, alone, in a back room on the upper floor, trying to churn out 660 copies of this six to eight page newsletter. Mind you I was teaching in Cottage Grove in those days so I had to be up again at 6:00 to go to work. One night, well past midnight as I recall, the machine just stopped. I did everything I knew to do, and I could not get it to start up, and I had to have the copies ready for the students who would come the next day to process the newsletters. Absolutely at my wits’ end, and may I add I was training at tae kwon do in those days, I hauled off and hit that machine with the best back fist I have ever delivered while at the same time exclaiming God … God, make this work! Kachug, kachug, kachug, that pathetic excuse for a machine came back to life and I finished printing. Was it the prayer or the back fist? Don’t know, don’t care. I got the job done. I was told years later, by the way, after the diocese temporarily stopped funding campus ministry and the machine was being hauled in the back of a pickup to another location, it pitched out of the bed as the truck started up a hill and completely shattered in the street. I feel deeply cheated that I was not present to witness its demise.
Seriously, though, prayer is about much more than petition or intercession. It’s about praise - Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. It’s about giving thanks. It’s begging forgiveness for ourselves - forgive us our trespasses, and promising the same for others - as we forgive those who trespass against us. But most of all prayer is about acknowledging both the omnipotence and the omniscience of God - thy kingdom come, thy will be done, and not just here on earth, but also in heaven. Prayer is about remembering every minute of every day that God is with us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Which brings us to the heart of the entire matter. Praying is a way of being. It is a matter of being acutely aware that no matter where we are or what we’re doing, we're doing it in the presence of God. Prayer becomes a sense of gratitude, that once it permeates our being, simply never goes away. “Prayer doesn’t change God,” Kierkegaard said, “but changes the one who prays.”
So great, prayer is good for our souls. But does praying for someone else really make a difference to them, to their lives, to their souls? I believe it does. I’ve had people tell me time and again that as they were about to undergo surgery or were enduring treatment for cancer, or were caring for a loved one who was slipping away, they could feel people praying for them, and it made all the difference. Oh, pooh, the doubters say, they had better attitudes because they knew they weren’t alone so they had better outcomes. Well, how do you separate that out? My sister Trudy was delivered by emergency caesarian section in 1949. My mother nearly bled to death immediately prior and during Trudy’s birth. When the doctor emerged from the delivery room he told my father he was lucky to still have a wife, and he, the doctor, had no hope for the baby. A Roman Catholic himself and knowing my father was an Episcopal seminary student, the doctor told my father that he would strongly recommend that dad have Trudy baptized. So it was that Trudy was baptized in the hospital when she was four days old. Trudy celebrated her seventieth birthday in May. Was it her baptism or the loving care of the medical professionals who used the technology of the day to the limits of their ability that carried Trudy through those first critical weeks of her life? Does it really matter? Once again, can you really separate the two?
Fine, say the doubters, but what if you pray and pray and pray and the person still dies? I remember so well when Jean Ladehoff’s long battle with cancer ended and she died. People all over the diocese had been praying for her and some of them went to Bishop Ladehoff and asked him, “Why didn’t God heal her? So many people were praying for her.” “But God did,” was Bishop Ladehoff’s reply. “That was her healing.” “But she’s gone!” I’m sure those people wanted to respond, and in a very real sense she was. But those of us who loved her love her still. Clearly her spirit is very much alive. How could it not be? We are a resurrection people, who enthusiastically live our lives here on earth in the sure and certain hope of heaven. We unknowingly acknowledged that as little children. It’s still true. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.
