pastor prayers

This is my favorite so far of the search engine terms that have brought people to this blog. It makes me smile every time I look at it. That may seem cruel, since I’m sure that one wouldn’t put that statement into a search engine without some serious angst. So forgive me if you’re reading this because you put exactly that combination of words in a blank box and hoped for an internet miracle.

Because that, I don’t have.

What I do have is this simple truth about prayer: the words don’t matter.

I say this as a lover of words, and a lover of putting them together and then spending hours deciding if they’re too trite or too convoluted or too long-winded or just too too. I spend much of my days doing it and then marveling at how little I am paid for my long hours of toil. But it’s true: the words don’t matter. I say this in many more words than it should take, and none of them matter, either.

What matters is that there’s this thing deep in you that needs to come out and it needs to connect, or to make itself known. It needs a quiet place to really find itself. And then it needs to come out however it will, and as much as it can, just to say the thing that only can be said at that moment, by you, to the God who had some part in making you, and making you someone who would pray just like that.

And whatever comes should be good enough for any pastor, and any public made up of God’s people.

So I hope your pastor makes you pray in public. And I hope you bring it on by singing, dancing, speaking, clapping, shouting, crying whatever that place in you is yearning to let out. God will be listening in the form of every other one of us who needs to do the same.

A few weeks ago, I was picking my son up from camp and uncharacteristically arrived a few minutes early. It was the last day of camp for the week, and as part of their closing ritual they were giving out awards to each kid based on the most positive spin on their character. The formula was to describe all the characteristics, then pause dramatically before saying the name of the child.

The first child to get an award was lauded as “the most calm, collected, and thoughtful helper of all, who was always there with a considerate word for fellow campers and for the counselors.” When they said the name, up popped this skinny little five year-old girl, whose shoes looked like they could swallow her toothpick legs, and whose glasses were teetering heavily on her delicate face. She was adorable in the way that made me want to be able to follow her around through her childhood just to make sure no one is mean to her.

As soon as she heard her name, she exclaimed “Me? Really?” in the most sincere and genuine way, and turned bright red with what looked like a mixture of pride, embarrassment and shock. She marched up to get her construction-paper award, and on the way back, shaking her head, exclaimed with complete sincerity: “I had no idea I was that special!”

And then my eyes began to leak.

Eternal spirit, creator of all,

help us to nurture in each person the deep and unshakable understanding of the blessing of their being. Let none ever doubt that they are that special, that loved, that magnificent. Let the truth of it be known at our core, far past our culture’s thin veneer of meaningless affirmations. Help us to know the real thing by its failure to be drawn in to pettiness or self-aggrandizement, by its constant reminder that the God that makes one of us beloved makes us all beloved. May the power of that be-loved-ness be a source of great strength, so that we might meet its demand that we work for justice. May it fuel our courage to live and work for and with others. May we find the path to peace by making our home in the landscape of compassion.

Amen.

Delivered at the opening of the UU Musicians’ Network Conference in Boston, August 5, 2008.

Spirit of life, visit us with your power.

Come to those who are still reeling from the trauma of violence in Knoxville, come to those who are feeling desperate and fearful, come to those of us who are newly aware of the fragility of life and the vulnerability of our beings.

We lift up in our midst the names of our brother and sister whose lives were lost to violence born of anger and alienation:  Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger.  May their memories be a blessing to all who knew them, and may their nearest and dearest family and friends be held in the wide open embrace of love as they encounter the depths of their loss.

We send prayers of comfort and healing to those recovering physically from injuries sustained in the attack: Jack Barnhart, Linda Chavez, Tammy Sommers, Joe Barnhart, John Worth, Linda Barnhart and Allison Lee.  May their loved ones and caregivers be held in care and sustained by the power of hope.

Spirit of life, spirit of creative possibility, spirit of unending love,
come to those who are living in fear and uncertainty, who have been directly shaken by the desperate acts of a man possessed by anger and despair.  Let them feel the power of our love surrounding them, the strength of their own community upholding them, and the power of the living god moving in and among them.  Lift them up, embrace them, infuse them with the breath of life that heals and endures.

Let our hands, connected in this room, our arms aching to hold and comfort our family of faith in Knoxville, feel the source of life moving through them.

As we feel our own vulnerability, let us feel strengthened in community.  May these roots indeed hold us close to the source of all, so that we might feel nourished by the compassion and the passion for life and for justice that are the source of our growth.

Let our wings set us free to soar and see the ways this tragedy among our own family of faith connects us with those around the world experiencing the violence born of desperation, a world where too many are forgotten.  As we pray for our beloved kin in Knoxville, and let us also send our prayers to all those who feel lost or abandoned, whose lives have turned them toward violence as the only solution.   Let Jim Adkisson be held in the midst of his pain, and on the path toward justice let there be healing.   May love free us from the bonds of fear and help us honor the sacred spirit in each and all.

Let that great love that lifts us up, moves us forward, and gives us courage help us to find strength and solace in one another.

Amen.

Youth group anchored me in my teen years. In the midst of the daily discovery of how cruel the world could be (also known as high school), my church youth group was a singular place of earnest engagement. We cared deeply about true inclusion, explored what it meant to do the right thing, and developed the skills to work cooperatively to build community. Also, many of us had mad crushes on each other. The latter kept us attending when we were failing miserably at our loftier goals, and all in all the balance served us well.

I’m completely impressed with the youth in our church and their journey through our coming of age program this year. They are thoughtful, articulate, brave and kind and have forged a tight community across many differences in background, ability, personality and theology. Witnessing their developing selves — I’ve known most of them for the last four years, so from about age 10 to 14 — I am struck by just how precarious and how precious this journey of personhood is. From the distance of age, it’s incredible to see the different ways qualities like resilience can shine from a person. One offers a joke at every turn, eager to put others at ease and move things forward. Another is sure to align herself with the most powerful of the girls in the room for cover from the real or imagined possibility of exclusion. Yet another wraps himself in a shroud of mystery and intellect, seemingly impervious to the petty judgments of adolescents. We send them all forth with every wish that they will continue to grow into the selves they are meant to be, and for some reason I feel much more protective of these almost-adults than I do of the smaller children in our midst.

For children, disappointments usually center around learning the basics of how the world works: Lick too hard at the ice cream cone from one side, and it will pop off the other; you won’t necessarily get another. Scrapes and bruises hurt at the time and heal before you know it. People say unkind things, and sometimes you might too. The lessons aren’t always easy, but the exposure to them is character-building and forms perspective that will serve them well.

In adolescence, though, there is a greater vulnerability. The stakes are higher now, and their heartbreaks and disappointments from here on out have a different kind of consequence, will carry a different weight when it comes to shaping who they will be. Parents of adolescents sense that vulnerability and know it’s there beneath the too-common surliness, snottiness, or dismissiveness that helps their children develop their own identities and stirs in the parents a whole new layer of vulnerability of their own.

We gather in worship to celebrate the faith statements and the journey of exploration the youth have begun in coming of age. We all get a window into the powerful stuff that is moving in and through them, and for a moment, we all know the beauty of vulnerability. We find our strength in that fragile place, where the God of mystery and hope plants her seed.

In a growing congregation full to the gills with young families, it’s a challenge to convey the sacred thread of tradition and history that connects us in a small New England town. We’re surrounded by city, and our lives are wrapped up in a cosmopolitan and economically anxious pace that keeps us moving from activity to activity without any real time for reflection. My people land at church on Sunday morning and want that moment to rest, to connect, and then to get back “on track” with the list that will continue the day. I am no different.

Last week, a beloved member of our congregation died. She lived a long life, and it was her time. But what goes with her is more than just the single, remarkable life she led. She connected us with a lineage that went back over a century, and in the stories she told and the people she encountered she covered the major events of the 20th century. There is nothing that feels like enough to mark such a passage, nothing that can convey the loss, or the memory, or the importance of that link. We offered a lovely funeral for her. The choir was spectacular. People shared stories, eloquently told on the spot. We enjoyed an elegant luncheon befitting our dear departed’s own generosity as a hostess. Now, it is for us to continue to tell the stories, to live the legacy she passed along to us in a million ways. And hope we were paying attention.

Gentle god, god who spans time and space and memory, touch our hearts with the significance of each life we encounter. Grant us the curiosity to ask the stories of those near to us and dear, and to sit humbly at their feet, be they old or young, and learn the wisdom of their lives. Bless us with the time to enjoy the gifts we offer one another in our simple presence. Help us remember again and again the stories of those who have gone before, who have made us who we are, and who gave us this rich heritage. Equip us with an ever growing understanding of yesterday, so that we might build tomorrow with compassion, with dignity, and with humility. In your holy names, o god, we pray. Amen.

William Sloan Coffin once wrote: “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

Issues of diversity in my quiet suburban town have once again reached the forefront of our local news, with a racially and ethnically diverse school at the center of turmoil over redistricting and now over a case of alleged harassment of the child of a lesbian mother. We’re in difficult territory here, in a community where recent comers arrived for a sense of peace and security and decent schools. And where some longtime residents long for the simpler times before the pressures to educate so many children pushed property taxes sky-high.

It’s easy to dwell on the dangerous and small, to feel a bit surrounded by them, and to lose touch with the demands of truth and love. Notions of truth and love have themselves been co-opted by the sense of danger and smallness in the world, and we’re stuck with pressures to consider truth in terms of what danger it poses, and love in terms that ask no risk.

God of infinite understanding, god of justice and of love, god for whose existence I hope against hope for a sign…

We are here, regular folk who want all that is best for our children. We are here, hard workers who are anxious about keeping all of our financial commitments. We are here, kind people who want to be good, and be seen for our goodness. We are here, with many different skin tones and ethnic backgrounds and life experiences. We are here, tired from daily life and prone to recline into the comfort of old stereotypes. We are here, needing to see your presence in our neighbors. We are here, praying for wisdom and open hearts and sharp minds. We wish to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Please help us know which is which, and how to move with the spirit of life that makes all people free and encourages all people toward the good. The struggle is long, and some of us are praying for rest. Deliver us by helping us to see one another more fully, to offer forgiveness as well as challenge, and hope as well as commiseration. In your mercy, help us be truthful and loving.

Yesterday I made a visit to a member of the church who turns 94 today. As I said goodbye we held hands as we always do and I spoke a prayer for her. Sitting there, I was overcome by the realization that the hands I held in mine, knotty and losing their strength, had touched and been touched by people and things all over the world (she was very well-traveled) for nearly a century now. And I left with a little tingle in my hands and a sense that god herself had touched them and offered me a blessing even as I spoke words for dear Mrs. S. This is my prayer to the god present in those hands.

Let me feel you close, embodied One, as you rest in these hands that have felt the fine silk of China, filled white gloves for formal balls, gracefully offered themselves for kisses from gentlemen offering their respect. In the impossible thinness of this skin, help me to be mindful of the tenderness of each soul I encounter. I am washed with awe at the air that has touched this skin, the sun and wind and rain that have danced on it and offered it pleasure and pain. In the countours of veins, the knobs of joints, the arthritic curve of fingers, let me know the grace of living through pain with dignity. In the softness of warm palms train me in humility; help me to yield my certainty so I might greet new insight. In the trembling of arms (moved by sobs or by nerves — it’s hard to know which, and may be none of my business), burst open my heart so that it might embrace the suffering of the world, and feel the warm light of love seep through the cracks in this aged skin. Teach me the wisdom of tradition, the lineage of those in my care, that I may know my own. In the name of life abundant and full and the beauty of age, amen.

Creator, protector, lover of all life. I come to you today more aware than usual of a peculiar kind of vulnerability, and a remarkable sense of connection that comes with and from it. A terrible accident has struck a family I care about. Another tragedy has befallen a family I don’t know.

A father is struck by a storm grate while driving along his morning commute, and a family is sent reeling with questions about his health and their own future. A mother is found with stab wounds and her two children stabbed to death not long after she lost her job and reported wanting to end her own life. These are the dramatic ledes that bring to surface the tenderness of all our lives, the delicate dance we do to keep them going, to keep ourselves together in the midst of circumstances within and more often beyond our control. When there are people we’ve brought into the world whose care is our greatest vocation, we do well most days not to dwell too much on how great a responsibility it is. We couldn’t really get through the days if we let ourselves take in its depth each moment. But it is there, in the shadows of our awareness, palpable if usually unspoken.

Help us to hold our own places in this fragile web, and to keep faith in your care for us and to feel your presence with us even when the twists of fate make it seem comically absurd to believe it. Let us feel your presence in the community of human care. Let us be attentive to our everyday movements of grace, that we might come to our times of crisis with ample touchstones of sacred presence. We need those memories in our bodies and souls when when our lives seem as precarious as dandelion tufts balanced on the razor-thin edge between divine and doomed. Let ours be the breath that, when we fall, blows our lives toward the divine.

Amen.

The town I live in was just listed as number seven on Money Magazine’s list of the Ten Best Places to Live in the U.S. The magazine offers all kinds of facts and figures which together form the basis for their decision. There are strictly financial factors listed, like median home price and household income levels, property tax rates and such like. Other typical “quality of life” measures are also listed: proximity to green space, a large city, institutions of higher education, and so on. They even have a whole section addressing the health of people in the community: average BMI (body mass index), and rates for things like diabetes and hypertension. The whole thing is the talk of the town this week, of course. Some are amazed, some feel it’s an overdue realization, most are at least a little proud.

I like this town very much, but the whole notion of living in one of the “10 Best Places” to live has me thinking about what, beyond reportable data, makes for a good place to live. I have lived in 23 different dwellings thus far in my life, in 11 different cities and towns, and spent most of my childhood and early adulthood moving. I loved most of the places I lived, for different reasons, and aside from a particularly traumatic move when I was 13, I rather enjoyed the changes.

When I was in seminary I was talking with an acquaintance who began to complain with some drama about how she hated Boston and couldn’t wait to leave. I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to whether I particularly liked the place or not: it was the place I was living, and that made it home, and it was fine with me. In my mind she hardly qualified as having “lived in Boston” since she was a grad student in Cambridge who rarely ventured further than neighboring Somerville, and had made it a point to prove herself too good for Boston for as long as I had known her. Nothing was spared: the people were rude, the buses were late, the weather was terrible, and there was no redeeming culture or nightlife. I was overcome by an almost overwhelming desire to slap her.

I surprised myself by feeling a loyalty to the place I was living, which I hadn’t realized had become my home. My acquaintance was asserting her own rejection of the place and in so doing was also stating clearly that she intended only to be a passer-through, while I had been busy establishing my life there. I didn’t think it would be permanent, but what did I know of permanent anyway? Wherever I was living was home, and I then realized was worth defending and protecting from someone who wanted to take a crap all over it just because they were unhappy with how things were turning out for them.

Not every place is for everybody, and some people are genuinely unhappy in, say, large cities or remote rural areas, or have to be near the mountains or the ocean. But there is so much more than statistical data that make for a “best place to live.” Things like meaningful work, and proximity to family, caring community, and true diversity. In our seventh-best town, there are people who are struggling to pay the $3 weekly trash barrel fee; people who are overcome with grief; people who are spiraling in addictions; people fighting terminal illnesses. Just like there are in the town whose jumble of statistics puts it at #7 from the bottom.

Since the news of our high rating, I keep getting a vision of the great spirit looking upon this human endeavor and chuckling kindly and wisely at our struggles to understand ourselves. Shaking her head a little and saying: “Silly bunnies, all of creation is paradise if you tend it carefully. If you stop taking yourselves and your imagination of control so seriously and learn to live in rhythm with the earth and with each other and with the beating of your own hearts, you’ll see. There’s no competition, my sweets. The suffering that is part of being human will find you wherever you are, and so will the joy. Find out who your neighbors are, and how your home got to be as it is in human terms. Live as if where you are matters, and soon you’ll find that it does.”