Sermon #64 (16th October 2022 at Essex Church / Kensington Unitarians)
Prayer is a subject we come round to periodically at church – and that’s as it should be – prayer is a core part of what we do together as a religious community and, as such, it’s important to reflect on what it is we’re doing (or not doing), and the hows and whys of it too. Also, prayer is such a big topic, and such a varied practice, that it’s good to come back and approach it from different angles from time to time. So, with the help of a few distinguished poets, I’m just going to add a few thoughts to the ongoing exploration of prayer this morning.
I found a short quote on poetry and prayer which might be a helpful place to start. An abridged version of these words is on the front of the order of service, for those in the church building, and as always the full text is on the website for those joining in from home. The quote is by Melannie Svoboda, a writer, retreat leader, and nun, who says: ‘Poetry is a lot like prayer. Prayer is a lot like poetry. First, they both arise from a deep attentiveness to life — whether to a rose, a grain of sand, a baby’s laugh, a particular hurt, an interior joy or dread. Both poetry and prayer tend to displace the logical and rational in favour of metaphor and feeling. They both have the uncanny ability to put us into the presence of the universal and eternal, thus connecting us with others, with nature, and with the entire world.’
Let’s keep those words in mind. But before we get to the poets and what they can teach us, I want to recap just a few basic premises about prayer, some things we’ve looked at before. What is that we think we’re doing when we pray? The purpose of prayer might be understood in various ways. For some of us here, and perhaps for most of those people who pray and have ever prayed around the world, it might be simply put as ‘speaking and listening to God’. To pray is to cultivate some kind of relationship with God, however we understand ‘God’, and as is the case with many relationships in our lives, perhaps, communication comes before understanding, and we grasp towards understanding through communication. We set out in prayer, out of instinct and need, before we have any sort of organised theology (indeed we might never come to any definitive theological conclusions about who is ‘on the other end’ of our prayers – but we pray anyway). If the God-language doesn’t work for you there are other ways of understanding prayer. I’m very fond of the what the UU minister Vanessa Rush Southern says: prayer is about ‘putting our hearts in the right place’. Now what you understand by ‘in the right place’ is another thing but perhaps it’s something like ‘getting back in touch with our highest values and recalling a sense of perspective about our place in the grand scheme of things’. Something like that.
That’s one way of looking at why we pray – the purpose of prayer – but it’s the slightly sanitised and theoretical version, in a way. We pray – actually, let me speak for myself, rather than make too many assumptions about anyone else – I pray, more often than not, because I am in need, and I am crying out to something beyond myself, in sorrow and overwhelm at life’s struggles, or in rage at the world’s injustice and my apparent inability to bring change, or (just sometimes…) because I’m bubbling with joy at some beauty or goodness or righting-of-wrongs I’ve witnessed. For me, the prayers come before the theory, and when life is hard (as it is for so many right now) we might find ourselves saying a spontaneous prayer as we wake each day that’s really simple and direct, just to help us get out of bed, like ‘God, help me face the coming day and all it brings’. Or before a tricky meeting or challenging task we might pray ‘God, help me to be clear and kind’, or ‘God, help me to be my best self, and use the gifts I’ve been given for the greater good of all.’
There are various ways we can pray – collectively and individually – in a regular, disciplined, practice or spontaneously (out or our need, our pain, or our joy) as we go about our days – we can pray with words or in silence – with movement or meditative ritual – there are so many ways to go about it.
Recently I’ve been attending a refresher course on prayer with the London Jesuit Centre and last week the course leaders reminded us of one particular model of the major strands of prayer. This model more-or-less follows a pattern I’ve heard mainstream Christians talk about before – it’s based on the acrostic ACTS – A, C, T, S – where (A) is Adoration; (C) is Confession; (T) is Thanksgiving; and (S) is Supplication. In brief, and slightly translated for Unitarian sensibilities: Adoration involves praising God, naming God and God’s attributes, or in some way orientating ourselves as we pray to that which is of greatest worth to us, our ultimate concern. Confession involves looking honestly at our lives, and getting perspective on our own actions, in the light of conscience perhaps, and our sense of what it is we think God wants us to be doing in life. Thanksgiving is the easiest to translate as it’s simply prayers of gratitude for all that is good. And finally in this framework we have Supplication, sometimes also known as Petition, which involves asking God for what we want, for ourselves, and for all those we know to be suffering.
Anyone who’s been around this congregation for long will know we can’t have a service on prayer without bringing in Erik Walker Wikstrom. He’s a UU minister who took another angle on this and presented ‘Naming, Knowing, Listening, and Loving’ to us in his book ‘Simply Pray’. And this informs the way we pray together here at church – very overtly in our ‘Heart and Soul’ contemplative spiritual gatherings where we intentionally take time for each of these sorts of prayer in turn – but this model shapes our Sunday prayers too. Wikstrom’s framework arose from a study of comparative religion where he tried to draw out common principles from the prayer practices of different faith traditions around the world and, as such, it’s not surprising that there are parallels with the traditional ‘ACTS’ approach I just mentioned. His ‘Naming’ prayer smushes together the Christian ‘adoration’ and ‘thanksgiving’; in ‘Naming’ we name both who or what we are praying to as we set out in prayer with the gathering words. Here we often say something like ‘Spirit of Life, God of All Love, in whom we live and move and have our being…’ These are words that help bring us into a prayerful space and which hopefully help to reconnect and align us with who and what we each think we’re praying to. In ‘Naming’ prayer we also practice simple thanksgiving by naming those things we are grateful for. Wikstrom’s ‘Knowing’ prayer is equivalent to ‘confession’; it is a time to reflect on our own lives and take stock of our own action (and inaction) and how well it aligns with our highest values and aspirations and (perhaps) how well it aligns with God’s dream for us and for the world. ‘Loving’ prayer is very roughly equivalent to ‘supplication’ or ‘petition’ in that is a time for bringing compassion and loving-kindness to ourselves, our loved ones, and our world – expressing our hopes and desires for healing and justice and peace – and, yes, asking for what we want and need as we try to muddle through each day. Wikstrom also has ‘Listening’ prayers which don’t exactly have an equivalent in the ’ACTS’ framework but they’re prayers of meditation and contemplation – the spaces we make, often in silence and stillness, to hear the still small voice – and (finally) this brings us around to today’s theme, ‘Praying with Poets’.
Today, I don’t especially want to focus on collective prayers. Today, I want us to think about the praying we do (or might do) when we’re on our own. And particularly, given the challenges I know that many of us are facing in life right now, I’m thinking about the part prayer might play in helping us each to get through the day. Some of you already have a regular prayer practice. Some of you might have a decidedly irregular prayer practice (mine might fall into that category). Some of you might not have a prayer practice at all (you might not see the point of having one).
Of all the poets in the world I’ve only brought two to our service this morning – Ann Lewin and Mary Oliver – of course there are so many poets who have reflected wonderfully on prayer and I bet some of you listening are thinking of your own favourite poems on the theme (please do get in touch if there are some you’d like to share and perhaps we can have a follow-up service). But it seems to me that both Ann Lewin and Mary Oliver call our attention to what I’d call ‘Listening’ prayer – that space of contemplation and meditation – where we go quiet and wait for… what?
In Ann Lewin’s ‘Disclosure’ (and her own commentary in ‘Watching for the Kingfisher’), which Chloë read for us earlier, she makes a metaphorical connection between prayer and birdwatching. To pray, as to watch kingfishers, you have to show up faithfully, be prepared, and wait. And wait. And, as she says, ‘often, nothing much happens’. But we put ourselves into the right space – into the right state of body and mind, wherever we may be – on the metaphorical riverbank with our anorak and thermos – and we pay attention. We focus on what matters. As Lewin says, ‘there is space, silence, and expectancy’. And sometimes there doesn’t seem to be much to show for it, ‘but sometimes, when you’ve almost stopped expecting it, a flash of brightness gives encouragement.’
Mary Oliver points to something similar in her poem on ‘Praying’ we meditated with today: ‘just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.’ All our prayerful words, our praise and thanksgiving, our crying out in search of help, are only one half of the communication, half of the prayer. Without listening it is incomplete. With our presence and intention – which can take many forms – we make a clearing in our busy lives in which (sometimes) we might be able to discern a response to all our asking. For most of us the response to prayer won’t come as a thunderbolt or a burning bush. It’ll be an inkling, an intuition, an inner nudge, perhaps a pattern of meaningful signs over time. A ‘blue iris’. A ‘few small stones’. A ‘flash of brightness’ which ‘gives encouragement’. And if we’re going to notice something so very subtle we need to stop talking and pay attention.
So – if we are to ‘Pray with the Poets’ – I encourage you to make time and space for listening prayer in your daily life. For many of us these contemplative moments don’t arise naturally. Life is demanding: we are pulled this way and that by work, study, or caring responsibilities. These days many of us get sucked in to rage-watching TV news, talk radio, or social media too, a grimly compulsive fixation, which can easily expand to fill all our waking hours. More than ever we need to set aside moments in our days where we can get a bit of perspective and tune in to something beyond the endless cycle of demands on our attention and energy. I encourage you to make a regular date with God – or a date with what matters most in life, if you prefer – even if it’s just five minutes in bed when you first wake up, or in an armchair at the end of the day, or on a daily walk round the block – make a modest but regular slot in the pattern of your days, away from distractions, where you show up prayerfully and pay attention. Easier said than done, for most of us, I know. But let’s see what we can manage. And keep at it.
I want to close with just a few brief words from Sophia Lyon Fahs, a legendary Unitarian educator of the last century, as a reminder of what it is we do when we set out to pray. May we be inspired by her words as we nurture our own prayer lives and make a little space for daily contemplation. She wrote: ‘Many of the past generation and many of today have found three abiding values in prayer: the quiet meditation on life, the reaching out toward the universal and the infinite, and the courageous facing of one’s profoundest wishes.’
May we do likewise, continuing the line of faithful souls, for the greater good of all. Amen.
Sermon by Jane Blackall
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