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.

Thank you, Jesus

One of my favorite art purchases ever is this ex voto from Guatemala. I found it at my favorite gallery about 9 years ago. It’s a thank you note to God (or in this case Christ the King of the Mountain) for having survived a school bus accident, hand stitched by the person giving thanks. As soon as I saw it, I was touched by it. At the time it was because it made me think about how often when we make it through something scary we move straight through the “thank goodness I’m alive” and on to: “whose fault was this?” and “How can I make sure I’m never so scared again?” or, in many cases, “Where can I get some financial recompense for being so threatened?” Taking the time and trouble to mark the sheer fact of survival when things could have turned out otherwise, to actually make a beautiful tribute to the fact of being saved… well, it just hadn’t ever occurred to me.

When I bought it, I had just graduated with my M.Div., been through a divorce, and had a brush with death in the form of a pulmonary embolism. I had plenty of reason to be thankful just to be walking around somewhat intact. And so I carried it home on the plane as a reminder of the constant need to offer thanks and praise. I don’t usually think of prayer as having magical powers or as something one does to stave off bad events in life. I certainly don’t tend to attribute miraculous survival to the person of Jesus. But whatever the direction of prayer, I am ever more convinced that it is important as an acknowledgement of the struggle and the joy of our lives. We sanctify them by offering them up, just as they are, to some great and ultimately unnamable force. And when we say them out loud, make them into art, preserve the significant moments of our lives, we come to understand them in a new way, to offer them a bigger context and sometimes a greater purpose.

As I have held onto this particular prayer from the journal of Zenaida, I’ve also come to realize the power of holding and honoring anothers’ prayer — one that belongs to someone I may never meet, with a life I probably can’t imagine. Most of us are familiar with prayer chains and different ways of sharing prayer as a way to magnify its efficacy or just to feel held in community. From Catholic altars and shrines to puja offered at Hindu shrines and temples, there seems to be a universal human need to offer prayers publicly, to share them and believe they can be heard — if not by the gods or goddesses, then by our fellow humans. Who knows, they could be one in the same.

One of my favorite parts of the liturgy we do at my church is the Morning Prayer. Before worship begins, anyone in the congregation is invited to write down a prayer and light a candle on a table at the front of the sanctuary. They can indicate whether they wish for it to remain private or want it to be shared, and then as I speak the rest of the prayer I read the words of prayer of the folks in the congregation. On the days when I think about its meaning too deeply, I end up choking back tears. There is something astoundingly powerful to me about having the honor of speaking the prayers of others. I consider it the centerpiece and most religiously important part of our worship.

I don’t know how many people are reading this blog (my stats just say how many hits there were, but I don’t know about duplicates or from where), but I’d like to offer this as a place where folks might also offer prayers to be shared. Not in a creepy chain-letter way, but as a way to offer up genuine thanks, or concern, or sorrow, and let it be held by a larger community that will offer some tender care. I can hear many of my beloved rationalist atheist UU’s rolling their eyes at how cheeseball it may seem. But I’d be willing to bet that even you folks have some deep yearnings that you’d love to get off your chests and have a little bit of help holding.

Give it up, dear readers. Do you have a thank you note to God? A lament? A tirade? A full-on angst directed at the universe? Let’s hear ‘em.

PS: Later update — I will have intermittent email access at best for the next week, so if you don’t see a comment right away, know that it will be posted as soon as I can get to it.

When I have a little more time than usual to devote to prayer (which is always just a little, but as they say every little bit counts), I’m often struck by the fact that after a few days of regular prayer that lasts more than 10-15 minutes, up come truths that are really hard to face, that make me want to go shopping or eat something or watch an E! True Hollywood Story rather than return to prayer and be vulnerable and stay with it.

This week it has been the return of a keen awareness of the distance between the god I preach and teach about and the internal god whose voice judges (or blesses, but really mostly judges, and not happily) my daily actions. So I sit in quiet and attempting to meditate and am met with a litany of things I probably didn’t do right, things I could have said better, people I should have called or if I did call them I should have called sooner or said something more smoothly, times I should have been more playful with my son and less in a hurry. Because my meditation time has been on the fly for months, there’s a backlog of errors and grievances against myself and others and even the planet (why can’t I ever remember to put the re-usable grocery bags in the car when I go to the store?) that have to be spit out before I can even imagine listening for the spirit. And all I can do is sit there and hope that the great loving heart I tell people creates the pulse of the universe can help to mop it up, and maybe tell me that I’m forgiven and always was, and how to live from that awareness and genuinely spread that love a little more in the day to come.

I rise from prayer with no great previously un-heard nugget of wisdom, no gospel passage illumined with brilliant new meaning, just an awareness of my need to rest in a loving embrace I don’t have to earn (and couldn’t if I tried). And then I’m called back to my need to learn to live that truth in a world that wants me to want to be more thin and wealthy, less content with what I have and who I am, and certainly less apt to ask about the meaning of it all.

So, what do you think is going to happen next with Lindsay Lohan?