A Cautious Unitarian Universalist Approach to Prayer
(c) 2009  Rev.  Ted Tollefson


I. INTRODUCTION:  UU's and Prayer

For many Unitarian Universalists prayer is problematic. Questions abound that have no easy answers: To whom are we speaking?  What counts as an "answer" to prayer?  Does prayer help or hinder the process of healing?  What happens when opposing armies are both praying to God for victory?  Does God take sides? favor both or neither?

Two  well-traveled UU joke highlights some of our difficulties with prayer.

Once there was a UU woman who was climbing in the Sierra Mountains of California.  She started to slip on loose shale was about to slide over a cliff when you spied a small cedar tree, reached out and caught hold of it.   She hung on, especially when she saw hundreds of feet of open air beneath her feet.   The path of ascent was unlikely.  She had some time to consider her options.   When all else failed, she decided to try prayer.  She looked up into the sky and said: "Is there anybody up there who could help me?"  Nothing happened.  Time passed.  With renewed vigor she cried out: "Merciful God in Heaven, can you help me?!!!!"

The clouds parted, a God-ray shone on her and she heard a voice like thunder rumbling: "YOU JUST HAVE TO HAVE FAITH........ AND LET GO!"

The woman looked below her again and the gaping chasm was still there.  She looked up toward the sky and in a loud voice cried out:  "Is there anybody else up there, I could talk to?"

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A second story concerns a very devout Baptist missionary working in Africa.  

One day he was walking through the savanah  and felt he was being followed.  He picked up the pace, but so did his stalker.  He looked over his shoulder and saw that a lion was following him.  After a brief run, it became clear that he couldn't outrun the lion.  So he flung himself down on his knees and began to pray: "Lord in heaven, if it is within your great power, may this lion be a good Christian too."

Immediately the clouds parted and a god-ray struck the lion.  The lion immediately stopped, got down on his knees and began to pray:  "Oh Lord who is powerful and merciful........................................ bless this food which I am about to eat!"

Even desperate Unitarian Universalists don't give up the habit of questioning.  Like the apostle Thomas, we want to hold  proclamations of faith accountable to our five senses.   We don't easily let go our grasp of the facts.   It is no easier for us than for Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin to understand how prayer might foster "miracles" in a seemingly lawful universe.   

Part of our problem is culturally induced.  Our culture validates a very narrow bandwidth of theologies and spiritual practices.  For many generations, the dominant theology of our culture has been a personal Theism:  we believe (or pretend to believe) that God is a old White Guy, a supernatural Santa Claus, who is sometimes benign and sometimes destructive.  Until quite recently, most forms of spiritual practice centered around prayer: often a petition addressed to God buttressed with flattery and wheedling.  My mission today is to turn the dial:  to open up more possible theological channels and more accompanying spiritual practices.  I assume that our pictures of God (our theology, the "to whom" of prayer) and our spiritual practices (the "how" of prayer) are mutually informing, deeply inter-dependent.

What is Prayer in a more generic sense?  A left-brained definition might be "communication between human beings or communities and whatever they consider Sacred".   Prayer is purposeful  communication.  It's purpose  is "to restore original unity, harmony or right relationship between human beings and the Sacred". * A right-brain picture might look like this:  human beings are like thermostats; their Higher Power is like the AC/Heating unit.  Prayer is all the communication between thermostat and Heating/Cool unit that aims at maintaining a good match between the set point on the thermostat and ambient room temperature.

II. Re-imagining the Sacred

Our theological mainstream flows toward personal Theism.  God is a very powerful Person.   God is utterly "transcendent": above and beyond this world.  God is "absolutely Other", different than we are.   What happens if we roll back the theological curtain, and survey some of the theological options often hidden from view?    What I imagined is at least three  binary pairs of possibilities.

                     1. Is God/the Sacred  personal or more-than-personal?  
                     2. Is God/the Sacred transcendent or immanent?
                     3. Is God/the Sacred "Other" (unlike our selves) "not Other" (like our selves) ?

A. God/the Sacred as Personal, Transcendent, Other: Prayer as Petition
If  God  is imagined as personal, absolutely transcendent and completely other than human, human prayer will tend to move from what we lack and want to what God is or has.   Prayer  become a plea for help, punctuated by bargaining and grateful praise.  Take for example the prayer attributed to Jesus who usually warns his followers against public prayer:

                      "Give us this day our daily bread"   (petition)
                              "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" (bargaining)
                               "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil" (petition)
                                                "For thine is the power, glory and honor...." (praise/flattery)

This three-fold rhythm----petition/bargaining/praise---is repeated in many Psalms and can be heard in countless congregations.    Whatever the content, its form reinforces a theology based on human lack or defect. God is an infinite pitcher; we are empty or broken cups.   God is all; we are nothing.   Through the mostly unconscious  repetition of this form, the course is set for a religion of dependency and a priestly economy of sin, penance, forgiveness and sin.   

There are, of course,  'minority reports' on the Biblical God.   Matthew Fox, a former Catholic and  now Episcopal priest, has championed a "creation-centered" spirituality  which affirms what the Unitarian William Ellery Channing did 150 years earlier:   human "likeness to God". *  A grace-centered theology moves in forms of prayer which do not require human degradation to 'lift up'  God.   For example, the Catholic theologian Thomas Keating has developed "Centering Prayer".*  Centering Prayer uses inward repetition of a sacred text to  quiet the heart and mind so that the Sacred can be more directly experienced.   Contemplative prayer tends to blend the transcendence  of God with divine immanence, the Otherness of God with  likeness of  Creator to Creation.   

But what would it be like to re-imagine the Sacred in new ways?   Are we ready to move beyond centuries of bent knees and bowed heads to experience new forms of prayer?

B. God/the Sacred as Trans-Personal: Prayer as Principled Action
What if "God" is more than personal?   
What if God is a personification of a  Sacred Principle?
What is "God" is Truth or Truth is God?  (Meister Eckhart, Gandhi).
If the Sacred is envisioned as Truth, then prayer is a call to act truth-fully:
whenever we sense a contradiction and name it out loud
when we notice what's left out
and speak up for an "inconvenient truth"
when we "test everything",
then we are helping the Spirit of Truth
to incarnate itself into this world.

As Gandhi said: we worship a God of Truth
by acts of truth-force (satya-graha).
When we publicly and nonviolently suffer
the cutting edge of  unjust laws
we can sometimes mobilize the compassion of the powerful
and the courage of the powerless.
A great power for good is released and sometimes,
when we pray in this embodied way,
change comes without violence.

After 83 years of artful dodging, my hometown of Duluth, Minnesota
has publicly apologized for the lynching of 3 black men on June 15, 1920
who were falsely accused of raping a white woman.
This tragedy is now marked by a public park and monument on Superior Street
that we might learn from our folly and never repeat it.
That monument and park is a prayer, by God,
crafted of copper, concrete and generations of shame.
Sometimes when we pray with our whole bodies
the arc of history can be bent
to the timeless forms of peace and justice.


C. God/the Sacred as Immanent: Prayer as Witnessing Presence
And what if we emphasize the horizontal dimension of the Sacred---
the immanent god, the gift  in-our-midst?
When we focus on God-between rather than God-beyond
we pray with open eyes and joined hands.

We may praise human nature rather than denigrate it
calling those present to testify!

"Thou art human" writes William Blake
"God is no more...
thine own humanity learn to adore".

The Sacred is present in our midst
whenever we open our hearts and minds
to the Common Good.

When we turn to another person
and see them as they are
and accept them as they are
not as a foot-solider in any cause of our own
but sufficient in themselves
inherently worthy, we might say,
not "useful" or even "capable"
but fully sufficient,
then we become members
in the larger body of love-incarnate.

"Virtue loves company" says Master Kung---
the Chinese character for humanity or human-kind (ren, jen)
represents two persons side by side
in dialogue:
human-kind at our best.

A prayer of this kind
might take the form of an open question,
a capacity to listen,
a willingness to let another being
human nor not
dis-close themselves to us and thru us:

Listen to this prayer from the Gospel of Mary Oliver entitled "The Swan"
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river

Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air--

An armful of white blossoms,

A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned

into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

Biting the air with its black beak?

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling

A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall

Knifing down the black ledges?

And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds,


A white cross

Streaming across the sky, its feet

Like black leaves, its wings

Like the stretching light of the river?

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?


D. God/the Sacred as like-Self: Prayer as Hidden Harmony
And what if we dare to envision the Sacred
like Thoreau and Emerson
Starhawk and Alan Watts
as the deepest layer,
the sustaining ground
of Nature and Human Nature?

Emerson, in his essay "The Over-Soul"
speaks eloquently about the God who-is-not-other:

"Let us learn the revelation of all nature and thought;
that the Highest dwells within us,
that the sources of nature are in our own minds.  
As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens,
so there is no bar or wall in the soul
where we, the effect, cease, and God, the cause, begins....  

There is deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us...  
Within us is the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty,
to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.  
When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius;
when it breathes through our will, it is virtue;
when it flows through our affections, it is love."*

Emerson reminds us that the boundaries between humanity and divinity,
are culturally sanctioned constructs
that conceal, as well as reveal, the face of what is.
Emerson's non-dualistic map, which emphasizes the confluence of divine and human
empowers his listeners to seek God within themselves.
Once one has contacted the Source within
through introspection, meditation or study,
why seek the pale copy God
entombed in sacraments and bibles?

In the twentieth century, Alan Watts has drawn a similar picture
of the Divine as the Depth of Nature and Human Nature
in his autobiography, In My Own Way:

"...if a flower had a God it would not be a transcendental flower but a field
– moreover a field as discussed in physics, an integrated pattern of energy,
a field which would not only be flowering,
but also earthing, raining, shining, birding, worming, and beeing.  
A sensitive flower would, through its roots and membranes,
feel out into this entire pattern
and so discover itself as a particular exultation of the whole field.”

Once we discover our deepest Self as a "wise silence",
"a particular exaltation of the whole field"
what becomes of prayer?

Sometimes prayer will take  familiar forms of Doing.
Every time we see beauty
and praise it
every time we see injustice
and struggle to set it right
then, by God,
we are praying
though some might call it a poem or monument
a food-shelf
or a secure shelter
for our neighbors
who are currently between homes....

But at its root, prayer to the Sacred as "the Ground of Being"
involves Being more than Doing:
whenever we come to rest more fully in the present moment
and find it to be "enough",
whether by happy accident or disciplined practice,
whenever we open our hearts, minds, senses and bodies
to the bounty of what-is
then we pray "without ceasing"
in the timeless, sometimes wordless, prayer of Being
harmoniously atuned with its Source.

Joseph Campbell, paraphrasing the forest-dwelling philosophers
of the Hindu Upanisads puts it this way:
"When before the beauty of a sunrise or sun-set,
we pause and say  "AHHHH"
in that "AHHHH"  
we participate in divinity."
(The Power of Myth)

Whether silent or spoken aloud,
inward or outward
this Prayer of Being is never solitary.
We pray in concert with a Field
that is happily
"earthing, raining, shining, birding, worming, and beeing."
Without that music
we would not be.

III.  Conclusion: 4 Gates to the City

With our theological horizons  expanded, there is no shortage of ways to communicate with the Sacred.

If we envision the Sacred as a Transcendent Person, we can choose the familiar form of petition, balanced with bargaining and grateful praise.  Our prayers are answered when our petition is granted or when are hearts and minds find peace. Or we can choose a contemplative form, like Centering Prayer, where repetition of a sacred text stills the heart and mind so that the
presence of the Divine can be experienced more directly.

If we envision the Sacred as a Trans-personal Principle (Truth, Justice, Beauty, Compassion) then our prayers may take the form of embodied action.  Our prayers are fulfilled when we put our bodies on the line to incarnate universal  values in this world.  We become the change we seek (Gandhi)

If we envision the Sacred as primarily Immanent, then we will pray with open eyes, open hearts, and open minds.   Like William Blake and Mary Oliver, we praise the presence of the Sacred in Human Nature and Nature.  Our prayers are fulfilled when poetry, music or other art-forms open our senses, hearts, bodies and minds to the universal indwelling presence of the Sacred.

If we envision the Sacred as the Depth of what is, then our prayer will be atunement with the Field in which we live and move and have our being.   We may find like Thoreau, Emerson, Starhawk and Annie Dillard that "heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads".  Our prayers and meditations are fulfilled when our actions flow directly from the deep well of our True Nature, the Ground of Being.*

Of course, there are other possibilities for prayer.   As the Sufi poet Rumi writes: "There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground".
 
But for many of us, these four gateways of prayer and their many variations, might fill a life-time or several life times.

I'd like to end with a story that Alan Watts loved to tell, to encourage new ways of thinking, feeling and acting about
the Great Mystery which some call "God":

"Once upon a time, a devout seeker came to the gates of Heaven and knocked.  No one answered.   He waited a very
long time then knocked again.   This time, there came the sound of a voice that sounded like wind saying: "Who's there?"  The Seeker responded,"It is I, your faithful servant ....".  The door remained closed.   Several centuries passed.
The Seeker knocked again.   Now a voice that seemed to come from within said: "Who's there?"  This time the Seeker
replied "only Thou".  The door trembled but did not open.   Eons passed.   The Seeker sat quietly and did not knock.
Finally a voice was heard like the Spirit itself whispering "Who's there?".   This time there was no reply....the Gates
of Heaven swung open....and then the Gate, the Seeker, the Voice and this story disappeared into the serene and
timeless Silence..."*

Blessed are the peace-makers