Reflections on Prayer, a sermon delivered at Community Christian Church by David Ketchum on May 7, 2017
One of the most common barbs thrown against religious folk is aimed at prayer. Prayer is a waste of time, prayer doesn’t do anything, prayer is superstitious, and prayer keeps us from doing things that actually make a difference. And it can be hard to argue with this, especially when we hear glib recommendations in the face of natural disaster or human tragedy. And it’s even worse when prayer is recommended as a way to make us more submissive to systems of oppression, when we’re asked to be patient, pray a little, and hope things will turn out okay. As an example, I have no patience or interest in notions, like those espoused by one minister, to pray that a god will grant Donald Trump wisdom out of the air, because “As Christians, we should pray ... that our elected officials will seek God and His will. … God alone can change the heart of the king if the people of God would seek His will and not their own.” Leaving off my objections to that statement, I especially object to this kind of thinking when it is part of a resignation to the way things are, such as when the pastor went on to write, that our current president “has been chosen, by the people and by the divine will of God. Now let us honor God by honoring [our current president] as we ‘render to God’ what He (God) sees fit to do in America.” (https://www.adn.com/opinions/2017/04/17/christians-should-honor-president-trump-2/ ) I do believe people, even a person like Donald Trump, can have a change of heart. I don’t believe it comes through wishful thinking, but through the hard work of social change, through communities organizing, resisting, and embodying a better, more whole and peaceful and just way of living with one another. When it comes to injustice, we need to say ‘No!’, not just say our prayers.
So I’m sympathetic with the criticisms. However, I am sometimes frustrated with them, too, because I think we miss an opportunity to understand why humans pray and what happens when we pray. Most of these attacks are really directed against supernaturalism in general, and not prayer itself. From a sociological perspective, even the frustrating requests become much more interesting, though also equally disturbing. Prayer says a lot about the people praying. It’s a very human thing, reflecting our deepest desires, insecurities, frustrations, fears, and aspirations. I suspect this is why many people are so slow to have a willingness to pray in public. We understand, at some level, that we are revealing more than we might be ready to share. I myself have had some strange lessons in the course of my religious journey, some laughable, some embarrassing, and some painful.
In my experience growing up in the Southern Baptist church, prayer was mainly sentimental. Prayer requests for healing and help were very common, but mainly used to elicit sympathy and support from one another. We were expected to say that we believed our prayers would be answered with divine actions like healing, but I don't remember anyone really having a sense that this would be the case, unless it involved collecting money. God's ways were inscrutable, beyond our understanding and even expectation. Prayer requests also provided a convenient and pious cover for one of our favorite pastimes, which was gossip.
All this changed when, as a teenager, I became increasingly involved in summer bible camps and local youth meetings that my elders somehow thought were good ideas. In particular, I became immersed in a local charismatic church that turned out to be spiritually abusive and dangerous, although this wasn't apparent at the beginning. We were taught, for example, that taking any medicines or seeing a doctor was blasphemous, and that god would reward our faith if we took risks to be faithful to him. Eventually, the limitations of the teachings became painfully apparent; first, one of the youth minister's children died during childbirth (due to refusal to get medical care). A year later, another child was barely rescued by the mother, who sought medical care for a life threatening condition. The mother was considered to be in sin and they were divorced. Eventually, the minister moved away to start again. Did I stress enough that teachings on prayer can be abusive and dangerous?
Gratefully, I came a little closer to a more stable and helpful understanding of prayer during my freshman year of college, especially regarding prayers for healing, that carried me through until I could form a more mature and rational approach. The crucible for that process of understanding was the final illness and death of my maternal grandmother. A couple of evenings a week and each weekend, I would return to my parents' house and spend hours sitting with and praying for my grandmother, who had moved into my old room when she required hospice care. Over several months, my prayers were markedly different, not focusing on changing some god's mind or giving instructions for what should be done and to whom, and not confronting illness as a demonic attack or death as an enemy. In my readings, I had picked up the teaching that “No prayer goes unanswered, if the one who prays is changed.” Praying for my grandmother opened my heart to the terrible pain and suffering in the world, even as it was filled with compassion, empathy, and love.
In sharp contrast to either sentiment or miracle, I began experiencing prayer as the embodiment of love. I found that the answers to my prayers were demonstrated in the expressions of care that we shared together - in planting flowers and installing a bird bath outside the window, in quietly sitting while finger-picking familiar hymns on the guitar, in hearing confessions and fears and questions of death in prayerful acceptance and love, in cooking whatever meal sounded best in the moment, whether it would be eaten or not, and in sharing stories and memories of life. My grandmother died, and our prayers couldn’t change that painful journey. But I began to learn how to pray, quite accidentally, through that sharing of love, life, and death together.
In hindsight, it was probably then that I began approaching my spiritual practice more like a Quaker, though I did not have the community or language at the time. But I can recognize, growing from that part of my life, the wisdom expressed by David Johnson: “A Quaker prayer life arises from a life of continuing daily attentiveness … . The difficulties we experience in inward prayer are preparation for our outward lives. Each time we return to the centre in prayer we are modelling how to live our lives.”
These days, I still set aside time to pray, usually a fair bit of time each morning and a briefer time before bed. It mainly looks like meditation. I sit on a cushion and bring my attention to my breath, situation or relationship, with kindness and curiosity. I come into a deeper awareness of how each moment is an unfolding of all the causes and conditions that came before it. I come into a deeper understanding of how all conditions arise and cease. I get a glimpse into how my reactivity arises out of years of social and psychological conditioning, buried and usually unnoticed. And, over time, insight, patience, goodwill, generosity, and even, at times, wisdom, begins to grow. Following the Quaker tradition, I make frequent use of advices and queries. Following the Franciscan tradition, I alsouse liturgical prayers from time to time. I sometimes light candles and incense, and you may even catch me chanting Christian, Buddhist, or humanist texts. But the heart of my prayer life is keeping silence.
It was in this silence that I discovered that prayer could be a way to honestly confront my attitudes, assumptions, and habits. Prayer could make a space to feel frustration, rage, grief, or confusion without having to be dragged around by those emotions. Through prayer and meditation, I could become familiar with how those emotions, and their often torturous thoughts, would come and go, what triggered them, what soothed them, what risks they raised and what wisdom they offered. Similarly, I could recognize and feel more at home with joy, kindness, wisdom, and gratitude. I could begin to influence my automatic reactions through a kind, persistent practice of attention, meditation, and prayer. And during the rest of the day, I began to notice that I had more empathy for myself and others, more patience, more flexibility and creativity. When I did have strong reactions to my experiences, I also had more space around those reactions, more ability to choose how to respond. To remember Johnson’s words, “The difficulties we experience in inward prayer are preparation for our outward lives. Each time we return to the centre in prayer we are modelling how to live our lives.”
The wisdom of this approach is also why I am not too upset when someone mocks and laughs at the idea of prayer. In fact, I think it has its place. It helps keep me honest, because I truly don’t want to substitute sentiments for actions; I don’t want to cover up suffering with piety or delusion. I want my prayer life to be a model for how I go through the day, with curiosity, openness, kindness, gratitude, and a passionate commitment to social justice and equality in community. And this is why I think it can be helpful if we look at what is actually happening when people pray, both psychologically and sociologically, both within us and between us. Instead of focusing on whether prayer brings about supernatural results, which is a pretty irrelevant question to me, we can ask: Can we uncover any of the functions prayer might play? Can we uncover any wisdom from the practice of prayer that can help to us work together for social change in the direction of social justice, either as a caution or as a model?
As it turns out, it is a pretty easy exercise to get a sense of the very human functions that prayer can play, for good or ill. Some of the common ones include:
- To say thank you
- To express deep emotions like outrage, grief, or joy
- To cope with powerlessness, fear, frustration, and uncertainty
- To identify our aspirations and needs
- To practice and rehearse relationship skills
- To demonstrate group belonging
- To influence our attitudes and perceptions
- To calm ourselves and even experience feelings of transcendence and bliss
One of the more interesting lines of inquiry in the last few years has taken a similar approach, with the conclusion that prayer does indeed change things. But what it changes might come as a surprise to those who tend to think about prayer mainly in supernatural terms. For example, in 2010, Florida State University psychologist Nathaniel Lambert and his colleagues tested the relationship between prayer and forgiveness. By having two groups, one with participants that prayed “one single prayer for their romantic partner's well being” and the other with participants that “simply described their partner,” they discovered that “those who had prayed for their partner harbored fewer vengeful thoughts and emotions: They were more ready to forgive and move on.”[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100127134607.htm ]
In other words, prayer changed the person who prayed (the study did not try to measure change in the one prayed for). Prayer changed their thinking, their feelings, and their actions, in turn creating conditions for changing theirrelationship with the other person. The researchers offered this hypothesis on why prayer worked this way -
“Most of the time, couples profess and believe in shared goals, but when they hit a rough patch, they often switch to adversarial goals like retribution and resentment. These adversarial goals shift cognitive focus to the self, and it can be tough to shake that self-focus. Prayer appears to shift attention from the self back to others, which allows the resentments to fade.” (ibid.)
Research has also been done on the impacts of Buddhist lovingkindness, or metta, meditation on the brain. Fredrickson's report in "Open Hearts Build Lives" (http://www.unc.edu/peplab/publications/Fredrickson%20et%20al%202008.pdf ) concludedthat the participants’ positive emotions tripled during the brief study.
“Rather than becoming bored with or jaded to the effects of meditation, our participants seemed to be building a dependable skill for self-generating positive emotions again and again. These findings are especially noteworthy given that most of our participants were novice meditators and our meditation workshop lasted only 7 weeks. … individuals began a mind-training practice that increased their positive emotions and, in turn, their personal resources and well-being. … when people open their hearts to positive emotions, they seed their own growth in ways that transform them for the better.”
Similarly, Hutcherson, Seppala, and Gross documented how "Loving-Kindness Meditation Increases Social Connectedness" (https://contextualscience.org/system/files/Hutcherson,2008.pdf ). They discovered “Even a brief (7-min) exercise in cultivating positive regard was sufficient to induce … small to moderate” changes - an especially important resource in a time of “rising societal isolation and distrust”.
This kind of meditation may be especially helpful for naturalists, agnostics, humanists, nontheists, post-theists, transtheists, atheists, and others who might not want to use language or rituals associated with theistic and supernatural forms of prayer, since metta is a quality to be cultivated and doesn’t require addressing any supernatural being. But metta is also appropriate for people in religious traditions. It is a very simple practice that many will recognize as compatible with their own prayer life, or that skeptics can practice without any religious convictions at all.
And, for me, it is a wonderful practice that helps bring prayer and meditation into my daily life, how I relate to myself, to others, to those who suffer injustice and those who inflict injustice, to the very earth itself. My prayers are deeply connected with how I live, how I embody those prayers. Being centered in love, after returning and resting in this attention, I can go back into the world with the equanimity and strength to pay attention to the deep suffering and deep needs around us. I can go back into the world with a heart overflowing with kindness, compassion, and joy. As Laurence Freeman, a Benedictine monk and director of the World Community for Christian Meditation, has taught: “Meditation, we soon come to realise, is a way of love because it is a way of attention.”
But there is a further consideration for me. How do we build a bridge from prayer and meditation as personal practices that bear the fruit of love, kindness, and wisdom, to communities of faith that bear the fruit of justice and peace? One of today’s lectionary readings contains an iconic verse about prayer. In this memory of the early church, Acts 2:42 notes that the community of faith “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Whatever we think about the prayers of those followers of Jesus described in the book of Acts, we cannot say that their prayers made them passive, apolitical, or ineffective. In fact, this was a community that “had all things in common.” This was a community that was so committed to social justice and equality that “they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” They had “glad and generous hearts.” And, it should be emphasized, they weren’t exceptions. These weren’t the unusual idealists who stood apart from the crowd. The Book of Acts goes out of its way to say that this was everybody, “All who believed.” This was the community that would insist, as the book of James has it, that “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (1:27) Practices, such as prayer, connected that community to what was best in their cultural memory, to have regard for the most vulnerable, to show respect and care for one another, and to do so on the basis of radical equality.
In this description, I am reminded again of James Cone's wisdom. In situations where we face systems of oppression, which is a fair description of most of the world for most of the last 10,000 years, we “have only two alternatives: (1) to accept the oppressor's value system and thus be contented with the place set for them by others, or (2) to find a completely new way of looking at reality that enables them to fight against oppression.” (God of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury Press, 1975; page 33) For me, prayer can be one of those paths toward “looking at reality” in a way that empowers us “to fight against oppression,” to continue in faithfulness even when we might otherwise succumb to discouragement and despair. By cultivating a relationship with our daily experiences that is oriented around grace, and oriented around honesty that is also wise and kind, we have an alternative to acquiescing to the way things are. In the place of prayer, there is a refuge for justice and mercy, a refuge where we can find healing, courage, and grace to sustain us. Prayer, meditation, sharing hospitality, sharing teachings, and other spiritual practices can be not only community experiences, but community expressions and a community’s embodiment of that fight against oppression. By participating in the community, we engage in practices that shape our perceptions, influence our emotional and interpretive reactions, and give us opportunities to act on our convictions. From a psychosocial point of view, this is what that description in Acts 2 was all about.
But there are challenges. As we can see both from the long history of humanity and the recent history of the religious right, prayer can be used to bring out the worst in us, to justify hatred and discrimination and oppression. For those who have been involved in coercive and abusive religious groups, shedding all of these religious and spiritual practices can be cathartic and healthy. For those who have never been involved, these practices often look, at best, unnecessary. For those who are oriented around a supernatural understanding of faith, these practices can easily degenerate into sentiment, demands for miracles, or similar pitfalls. And, as progressive faith communities emerge in this mix, we face the challenge of how to knit ourselves together, how to cultivate community that centers around praxis, around the changes we agree are necessary for humans to live together in a just, peaceful, whole way. If we are going to make use of spiritual practices in spiritual community, we need a sociology of prayer.
I’ve had a very modest goal this morning. I haven’t tried to define prayer, or whether one needs to pray to something or someone. I haven’t tried to categorize all the different ways we can pray, from liturgical to silent, from giving thanks to making requests. And I’ve only dipped into the research, without trying to argue that you should or shouldn’t pray. My modest goal is simply to encourage us to explore all the resources that are available to us.
This world is both beautiful and terrible. Humanity is both beautiful and terrible. The line between the two is very fine, between the sublime and the brutal, and the burden is sometimes overwhelming. Joy that cannot be contained, sorrow that cannot be contained. There is only room in my small heart if I make the room. So I make it my practice to make the room, to take the bounds of this small life of mine and make them boundless, my heart and mind wide open both to the suffering and to the exuberant joy of living. I read and sing and walk and plant wildflowers. Paying attention, I learn how to love.
I began this talk by noting that prayer says a lot about the people praying, and, despite all the baggage, a sociology of prayer invites us to reflect on what type of community we are, what kind of community we’d like to be, and how we’ll get there. Because, for me, prayer is an act of faith, in the best possible meaning of the word: that we do not have to resign ourselves to the injustice of oppression, or humanity to the vacuous pursuit of accumulating money, power, and pleasure; that we do not have to lose ourselves in the resistance to this injustice, but that we can preserve our own humanity in the face of it, by finding ways to care for the earth, for each other, and for our shared future. And that is the best prayer I can think of, or know.
