The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Salem, Oregon

Publications

Five Prayers to OK

by the Reverend Richard R. Davis

UUCS March 4, 2007  

            I cannot tell you how often I have fallen into this particular trap, but I can assure you, the number is embarrassingly high.   I am speaking of the trap I call “when everything will be OK.”   It goes like this:  I will get a bit anxious or worried about something in my life, and I think to myself, “When this thing gets cleared up, when this matter is settled, when I get past this ordeal or clear this hurdle or save this amount of money do this or do that – when that is over and done with, then everything will be OK.”   

            It’s a seductive trap because it usually has a grain of truth in it.  Sometimes things actually do get better – you get that degree, that job, that mate, you safely make it to retirement with health and finances intact or you raise your children or you survive that frightening medical operation.  And it’s good to have positive anticipations, especially if life is dealing you a bad hand in the present.  If you’re in the midst of hard times, I hope things do get better for you – and they can. 

But it’s also true that everything in life is never going to be OK according to your personal needs and desires.  There will never come a time when you do not face some rather daunting prospects in life.  Even if you save lots of money, exercise and eat right, make friends with everybody and have no enemies, and you do everything you can to line up all your ducks in a row, there is no guarantee that some life crisis will not come along and knock them all down.  In fact, life comes with a guarantee that this will happen.  Sure, we’re better at protecting ourselves than any generation in history, and we’re healthier and live longer, thank goodness.  But still, you can’t completely move beyond human limitations and enter into some godlike realm where you have complete control and absolute certainty and security.   

            Living with the hope that things will someday be perfectly “OK” in your life is not a meaningful journey to a promised land; it is clawing through the sand after a mirage.  Things will never be OK, and hoping and waiting for the day when they will be OK means that you’re not living freely and fully today.   This doesn’t mean that you should live without any hope for a better time if times are really bad right now, it just means that denying the present, trying to wait it out, won’t vault you into a better world.  In fact, it may keep you trapped in a hard world because you’re not facing the root causes of the dis-ease you feel.

            Waiting and wishing for better times when everything will be OK is not a good life plan – because that time will never come.  After fifty six years on the planet I’m sort of beginning to figure that out.  So what to do?  Well, if you can’t change the world to be that place where everything is OK, then the only other option is to change or re-orient your perspective so that you are OK with things being as they are.   If you can’t change reality to suit your needs, then change yourself. 

            But how?   By walking a spiritual path.  Now as soon as I said that word “spiritual” I know that some of you didn’t blink an eye and others of you inwardly recoiled because you associate all sorts of mumbo jumbo metaphysical ideas with that word that strain your credulity.  I beg of you – let that go, and hear me out.   Pretend as though you’d never heard the word “spirituality” and are simply waiting for a simple, honest definition. 

            Here are two definitions which say the same thing in slightly different ways.  Feminist Margo Adair notes that spirituality is concerned with moving from a place of existential isolation toward communion with the greater whole.   Likewise, the Quaker social activist Parker Palmer says that “spirituality is engagement with something beyond our own ego.”   I think of spirituality as an unwrapping of oneself – taking off the superfluous coverings of fear and mistrust and removing the veils of ignorance and illusion – so that you can discover the gift of life.

            These definitions of spirituality don’t say anything about specific theological formulations.  They don’t say that you must have faith in God or accept some creed.   They simply say that spirituality is about connecting to the greater whole – or perhaps I should use the language of our Unitarian Universalist Principles and Purposes where we refer to the greater whole as “the interdependent web of all existence.”  

            OK, so say you decide that this notion of spirituality sounds appealing and you want to pursue this.  What’s next?   Well, that will be up to you.  But I will mention five ways of praying that have helped countless souls enter a better world.

            I don’t talk too much about prayer here, and for good reason: I value my life.  But seriously, recently one new member asked if we were allowed to mention prayer in our services since she had not heard the word or observed the practice.  In fact, in most services I offer a pastoral prayer (we name it as such in our Order of Service), but since I don’t use many traditional words associated with prayer it might not seem like a prayer, but it is. 

            Let’s clear away some misconceptions that might be barriers to a prayer life.  Praying does not necessarily mean that you are affirming a belief in a traditional image of God or a higher power.  It certainly can mean this, but it doesn’t have to.   I would even say that an atheist can pray in a foxhole and remain an atheist.  Prayer is about opening the windows of your being so that more life giving light can shine in on you, so that you can discover a connection to the greater whole that you had not known before. 

I can name five types of prayer that accomplish this spiritual function - five simple, basic types of prayer that anyone of us, regardless of our theological orientation, can turn to.

First, there is the “please” prayer. 

Say you are facing a hard situation – health crisis, loss of a job, death of a loved one, or some other heartbreak.   You are at your absolute wit’s end.  So you pray.  The precise words aren’t important – just the essential spirit of the prayer.   In this please prayer you simply take honest note of your vulnerability, your sense of helplessness and hopelessness.   You need to feel more strength, more hope, more love than you do at present.  So you pray:  “Please (choose one) God, Higher Power, Spirit of Life, Inner Self, Universe, Dear Friend, I need help.  I can’t handle this.”   The please prayer is a letting down of our rigid defenses so that healing, loving energies of life can flow through you.  If tears are shed as you acknowledge your vulnerability, that’s a good thing – they cleanse you out.   A subtle but important distinction needs to be made here:  A please prayer is not the same as a petitionary prayer in which a person pleads to a capricious deity for help.  A please prayer is not about manipulating God or the universe.  The please prayer is about changing yourself, opening the doors of your being to receive love, hope, joy, compassion from some source deeper within or without. 

Every one of us is dependent upon the many gifts and blessings of life and when we are aware of this, we feel grateful.   For such moments there is the “Thank You Prayer” – the prayer of gratitude.   Anytime you say “thank you” you are acknowledging your dependence upon someone, some gift of life – food, air, water, sunshine, beauty, art, love.  None of us is a self-contained entity.  Each of us is reliant upon others, upon the fruit of the earth and upon that which is beyond naming.   A simple “Thank You Prayer” makes us aware of our dependence and our connection to the greater whole in which “we live and move and have our being.”   Feeling genuine, perpetual gratitude is a path to wholeness and happiness.  Brother David Steindl Rast has said that “If the only prayer you ever say is “Thank You!” that is enough.”  

I like the poet e.e. cummings poem/prayer: 

               i thank You God for most this amazing  

               day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

               and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

               which is natural which is infinite which is yes.

Let me acknowledge my gratitude to my UU ministerial colleague The Reverend Heather K. Janules (of the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Silver Springs , Maryland ) for these insights about the please and thank you prayer.   Regarding this she notes “Those of you who believe that prayer does not relate to your life, I say that if you use the words “please” and “thank you” you already pray.  You pray because you acknowledge that there are things you need to survive and thrive that you cannot acquire on your own.  When you use the words “please” and “thank you,” you acknowledge that our lives are contingent on the mercy and generosity of other people, Mother Earth, fate.  Our very lives are dependent on all that is greater than ourselves.” 

The please and thank you prayer aim toward awareness of blessings that flow from without.  Yet it’s good to find time to look within as well.

This is where the “Taking Stock Prayer” comes in.  As with the other prayers, this one can be addressed to God, or if that theological word symbol doesn’t work for you, it can be a heart to heart conversation with your conscience.  A good time for this reflective prayer is in the evening, just before sleep - a time when you look back at your day, at your life, penetrate the clouds of self deception and confusion and ask honest questions:  How am I doing?  Am I as patient and kind as I might be?   Am I living according to the dictates of hope and courage or fear and mistrust?    Am I being generous, beneficent, forgiving or avaricious, small minded and vengeful?   Am I working too had, being too hard on myself or do I allow for moments of joy and love and grace?  You get the idea.   In a Taking Stock Prayer you don’t measure your life against impossible ideals, but lofty ones that call you to walk down a path of growth. 

As the 20^th Century Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies put it:  “Through such . . . prayer we cultivate our inner lives, and thereby raise the quality of our living, by giving definite times to such discipline.  And to the extent that we see the world more clearly and ourselves and our part in it more plainly, we gain wisdom and sureness of direction; and this in turn, relieves the tension that the world imposes on us – much of which is due to vacillation and uncertainty – and brings us closer to serenity.”

The prayer I most closely associate with serenity is the fourth one I’m mentioning today - “the acceptance prayer.”   Or call it meditation or silent contemplation, if you like.   You don’t try to change anything.  You just sit and accept life as it is, in the moment.  There are no words, or very few words in this prayer.  One good technique is to sit quietly, and focus your mind on your breathing and nothing else.   In most religious traditions, there are those who have discovered that focusing on the breath is a path to a higher consciousness – Orthodox Christian monks, Islamic Sufi mystics, Kabalistic Jews, Hindu yogis, Taoist sages, Buddhist practitioners.  Quite frankly – and this will come as no surprise to many of you who know me - this is my favorite prayer.  Every day I fold my legs into the stable full lotus position and strive to focus my mind on my breath - for about an hour a day.   It’s remarkable how scattered my mind is, yet how good and peaceful you can still feel when you simply sit and resolve to follow your breathe.   As any thoughts or feelings enter into your mind, you simply let them go, again and again and again.  Let go of fear, let go of anger, let go of confusion and doubt, let go of all that comes into your mind and enter ever more deeply into the silence of now, breathing ever more calmly. 

Many people have told me they just have no patience for this kind of prayer (or meditation) thinking that this gets them off the hook.  Not really.  Think about the implicit logic of this excuse.  It’s like saying you would exercise but you’re not in good enough shape, you would study but you don’t know enough.  You don’t begin such a practice (meditation/ the silent acceptance prayer) with the patience to do it, you cultivate such patience by virtue of doing this practice.  If you do decide to do this, it’s good to begin with just a few minutes and schedule a regular time. (If you’d like some instruction, we offer a meditation class on the first Wednesday of every month.)

Yet still, being still may not be everyone’s cup of tea and I know I do have to guard against becoming a fundamentalist meditator and insisting that everyone think and feel as I do.   So, for those who are more like perpetual motion machines there is “the Service Prayer.”   This is mentioned in our hymnal in an affirmation that says that “service is our prayer.”   This isn’t just about staying busy and “on task.”  It is about being actively in service for the benefit of others – our congregation, our community, our world.   The active service prayer is characterized by being other directed, done in a spirit of caring and compassion, and not being attached to results, for that can create too much tension and anxiety that troubles the spirit.  You just do what you know you are called to do:  You help out with our Interfaith Shelter Program, or the Soup Kitchen or you advocate for a more humane and just society, you drive someone to their chemotherapy or listen to someone in distress.  Attending to others in this way provides you with a key out of the prison of self pre-occupation.  You do what you can to make the world OK.

So pray.  Pray as you will, pray as you must. Let your heart and passion help you gravitate toward the kind of prayer that restores and renews your sense of connectedness with the greater whole, the sacred depths of life.  Pray in a spirit of need, of gratitude, of wisdom, of acceptance and of resolve.   

            William James once noted that if after any prayer you are a better person, then your prayer was answered.   May our prayers be answered.