Roger Ray, D.Min.
"Prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays." Soren Kierkegaard
"Substance over symbolism," is one of my regular mantras. I am convinced that religious symbolism is often used, not as a teaching tool, but to take the place of substance. What is, after all, lighting a candle in honor of abused children compared with volunteering to become a foster parent? Religious people have been trained through practice to make symbolic actions and to then tell themselves that they have done something. This is nowhere more true than when it comes to the way that we speak about prayer.
I had said to my congregation, in a sermon about prayer, that telling someone that you would pray for them was the same thing as saying, "I have no intentions of actually doing anything to help you." What is, after all, praying for someone to get well compared with bringing them a steaming pot of chicken soup?
Just a couple of days later my father died in his home 500 miles from here. My congregants couldn't attend the funeral nor could they directly express their sympathy in the language of the church, which is usually a covered dish. I speak "covered dish" and gladly accept that homemade food is the physical equivalent of love. The normal church response would have been to have called or e-mailed to say, "You are in my prayers," or the modern tacitly more secular version of, "You are in my thoughts and prayers." I suppose adding "thoughts" is a way that we can hedge our bets against the supernatural theism implied in intercessory prayer but, because of what I had said, my friends were nervous, even about that.
We no longer say intercessory prayers in our public services because we do not believe that God works like a giant Santa Claus in the clouds. But that is not to say that progressives have eschewed the practice of prayer. As Kierkegaard said so succinctly: Prayer does not change the one to whom we pray but it does change us. We pray, not to give God information that God might not have known nor do we assume that God is an ogre who must be pestered into charitable action.
In Alcoholics Anonymous literature, people who are in recovery are encouraged to increase their conscious contact with God as they each understand God to be. Even the ancient mystics of Christian spirituality spoke with disdain about prayer that was either supplication or intercession or even prayer that used words. Let me briefly describe three types of prayer:
There are discursive prayers, verbal prayers such as what we say in public or perhaps at our dinner tables. Then there is meditation and contemplation. There is not general agreement in the distinctions that I am making but for my own purposes, when I say that I am meditating that means that I am thinking about something. If I attempt contemplation, I am specifically and intentionally silent and am I am trying not to think about anything at all.
Discursive prayer is where everyone starts- whether they are repeating a rote prayer, reading one written in a liturgy or composing their own feelings and thoughts in words. The act of praying is an acknowledgement of our spiritual world view, of our connection to one another, to God and to the universe. Discursive prayers can be prayers of praise, confession, thanksgiving but mostly they are intercessions.
The four noble truths of Buddhism teach:
That life is full of suffering and that suffering comes from our desires, our attachments. The end of suffering comes from learning to let go of our attachments, to learn how not to desire or love things. The fourth noble truth is the invitation to follow the way of the Buddha in prayerful contemplation.
Though I intellectually discourage praying "for" something, I don't want to be dishonest, like most people, whenever I am scared or worried, I still do.
I don't actually believe that my silent prayers work in the way that we were taught to believe when we were kids. Regardless of my intellectual beliefs, my anxieties about my loved ones or fear for myself manage to get composed into earnest prayer as naturally as the way our body will produce adrenaline when we see a barking dog charging us. I think that is normal but we should not let it recapture our minds in the prison of magical thinking.
When we speak of prayer, I hope that we will concentrate on the kind of prayer that really can change the one who prays.
Meditation is a form of prayer similar to what I believe that Buddhists mean when they speak of mindfulness. In fact, we have examples of parallels between Buddhist "mindful walking" and the Christian practice of praying the "stations of the cross" or a labyrinth. Trappist monks today will typically have a small crucifix on the wall of their cell and a simple icon, either of which can be the focus of hours of meditation. A person in meditation is striving to think deeply, prayerfully, about one thing.
Many people will take a single verse of scripture and reflect on it during a long meditative walk. During my graduate school years when scripture was too closely associated with my academic work for me to peacefully and calmly meditate on a verse from the Bible, it was my habit to read through the sayings of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) until I could find a single sentence that was meaningful to me and I would spend hours walking through the grounds of the monastery where I went on retreat, just thinking about that sentence.
During most of our waking hours we are either thinking about the past or anticipating the future. Meditation is a way of becoming centered again in the present moment. In recent years I have discovered much of the calming and centering effect of my former monastic prayer retreats in my weekly practice of yoga.
I don't know if everyone else in my class has to concentrate anything like as hard as I do to achieve some of those yoga positions but I have found yoga to be an excellent means towards meditation and I do not hesitate to call it "prayer." Again, some people may simply be exercising just as someone might just be taking a walk but either done intentionally, mindfully, as meditative prayer can make the experience something that strengthens our spiritual awareness.
For the sake of brevity I will not say more about this but I do want to point you in the direction of Matthew Fox who has written and spoken on this topic brilliantly.
Many of you have heard a few clips of his on the Living the Questions series but you can find several of his talks on YouTube and his books are very worthwhile.
Finally, there is what we call contemplation. Contemplative prayer might be the most unlikely and yet the most needed in our modern society. Many of us can scarcely so much as go to the bathroom without the company of our smart phone or tablet. My generation has gone from three channels on a black and white TV set in the living room to having media in endless varieties in every room and even in our pockets. Silence is nearly intolerable. We have to have something to distract us, entertain us, to make certain that we are never simply alone and still.
We have 24 hour news channels though none of them have more than 30 minutes of hard news in a day.... It is mostly fluff, distraction. We hear more about Miley Cyrus' twerking butt than we know about why there is a civil war raging in Syria. We have the world's knowledge at our finger tips on the internet but the majority of traffic on line is still just pornography. For the most part, our distractions fill our time, our minds, our souls, our character with junk.... Maybe even poison.
There is an old story about a young novitiate pestering the abbot of his monastery asking, "Father, how can I draw near to God?" and the abbot would reply, "Shut up and go to your cell." Having received this reply several times and feeling entirely brushed off, finally the monk complained, "Father, why will you not help me?"
And the old man said, "I have told you, you will draw near to God if you will be silent and still, alone in your room and in the silence your cell will teach you everything you need to know."
Again, this is very similar to the Buddhist notion of emptying. There is a Buddhist story about a seeker coming to one of the old masters and asking him to teach him the spiritual path.
The master invited the young man to sit down to have tea with him. The master began pouring tea in the student's cup but continued pouring after it was filled until tea was running all over the table and onto the floor.
The student asked, "Master, what are you doing?" And the wise one replied, "You come asking to be filled when you are already full of many things. How can you find the way until you can be empty?"
If we have become spiritually dull, insensitive and unaware, I suspect that this is not a failure on God's part. If we fill up our lives with entertainment, work, distractions and even with good things, how will we ever find meaning?
We pray, not because we want to ask for favors from a magical Deity in the clouds but because we want to heighten our conscious contact with God and with one another.... We pray as an alternative to becoming a product of what comes at us through all of the screens we stare into night and day.
In the last first century, Christians chose to follow Jesus because the Jesus message offered an alternative to the empire.... An alternative to warfare, slavery, service to the aristocracy. Today, to choose what most people are rejecting..... to choose a spiritual life and not one of those embarrassingly self-serving magical incantations to keep you out of hell or get you into religion, but to choose a rational, intelligent, progressive spirituality is to choose as our first century predecessors did, we are choosing not to become the product of advertisements, pornography, the culture of Hollywood and entertainment.....we are rejecting the dominance of the 21st century empire that is a marriage of corporations and governments.
Capitalism is not our religion. Military power is not our security. We have chosen another way. If we are good enough at it then we will be able to show the world that there is an alternative. They have the money, the media, the military and the majority but we are not defeated.
