pastor prayers

God of hope and glory and surprises, God who is with us, among us, and within us.  Let your presence be felt.

Dwell with the caregivers whose hearts break as the lives of those in their care are torn asunder.  Dwell with your big-hearted children who offer so much of themselves in their daily work and still find themselves haunted by demons of unworthiness at night.  Dwell with those who work hard to make the holidays memorable, bright, or just endurable for others and toil so long and hard at it they have nothing left for those near and dear to them.  Dwell in the hearts yearning to hear the voice that says “slow down,” but find all around urgent pleas for comfort, for help, for companionship.

Dwell with those experiencing violence, those without homes, without heat, without food.  Dwell with them in the form of some bodily comfort, a human kindness, a relief from the burdens of living as your precious children in a world that is willing to see so little of your grace.  Dwell within us, and help us end our captivity by dreaming and making a new world.  And help us not consume ourselves in the process.  Help us learn our limits, that we might know the infinite.

Please.

Just under a year ago, I started taking drum lessons.  Congas.  Not because I know anything about drumming, or because I have a particular knack for rhythm.  You can ask my teacher — he would find the kindest way possible to say it, but I don’t.  In fact I was attracted to learning drums because I’ve always loved them and they have seemed like something very unlike me.  I wanted a pursuit that would take me somewhere totally different than my usual word-centered world and teach me a new language.  (It was also no small thing that this was also a positive outlet for the urge to strike things with my hands.)

I strain to get my hands in the right place on the drum at the right time.  I squint and my brain does backbends to figure out where my part fits into the layered fabric of a song.  And I know that it shouldn’t be this hard, that I probably look tragically constipated as I try to play and that is definitely not a look anyone wants in the rhythm section of their salsa band.

I was snapping out the clave rhythm along with my songs as I walked to church this morning, and had a moment of realizing that I was doing it without counting, to a fast song that has been my nemesis.  It was an exultant moment.  So I thought surely when I sat down at the drums this afternoon, ready to play along with the song, it would all come together in a new way and I would have mastered this one at last.  Wrong.  I’m not used to being such a very slow study.  I’m so deep in the land of my own unknowing that I’m sure this is a place I have been led by God, both comically and pointedly.

Beating heart of creation, loving, laughing presence, thank you for guiding me into the land of these layered tones.  Of violins and timbales and bass and cowbell and saxophone and trumpet.  Teach me patience with my hands, with my mind, and with my ears as we learn this new way of being.  Open my heart to the many ways I may take your lessons into the rest of my world — to move with the moment, to offer the constancy of presence, to trust my gut.  Steady rhythm of creation, let me have faith in your movement through me and confidence that it will not fail.  Let me offer it to others, especially when words will not do.  Embrace us all with your texture, your transcendent joy, your unbridled passion.  Poco a poco, llene mi corazon.

My blog stats tell me that, surprise of all surprises, a lot of people find this blog when seeking a prayer for their pastor. In this week when at least we Unitarian Universalists (and at least those of us in New England) are gearing up for a return to the “regular church year” with a big homecoming/ingathering Sunday, I thought I might offer a prayer for us all, and for the congregations we serve and perhaps for those seeking for this blog to live up to its name.

All-embracing one, heartbeat at the center of all being, gracious and ever surprising god, be with your servants this week. Be with us as we fret over the words we will speak in public, doing the work of sloughing off what comes from ego and praying that what comes out will be from you, channeled through the beautiful and unique gifts you have given each of us. Be with us as we re-member our congregations, calling them together and greeting their precious bodies and spirits again, celebrating the glory and the quirks that walk through the front doors. Help us be ready to forgive old errors, continue to the work of healing wounds, and look toward a future in which we all can be redeemed. Be with us as we recall our failings, and vow to do better. Bolster our confidence in ourselves and in our people, that we might live into our greatest aspirations. Give us courage to speak to the needs of our times, to see the pain that rests in each person’s heart and its connection with the wounds of the world. Help us to continue to call ourselves and our communities to the work of justice in your name. Remind us that our work is as serious as the grave, and therefore demands laughter, and joy, and even some dancing. Let us feel the magic of a calling that regularly calls us to spend time with newborn babies and nonagenarians, that has us cleaning toilets and calculating employee benefits and a million other things our expensive seminaries never prepared us for. Remind us that we’d feel impoverished indeed if we had to live for too long without the commandment of the preacher’s life: to look at the world with god-seeking eyes. May we train those eyes on your holy will, and continually learn to be agents of a love that knows no bounds, and a justice that knows no end.

Amen.

There is a little collection of prayers by the Rev. Vivian Pomeroy, my predecessor at the church I currently serve.  It was published by Beacon Press in 1955.  The prayers are some of the best I’ve ever read, and I use them in my own prayer as well as for public prayer in worship.  Today, as I feel surrounded by conversations about how we welcome the stranger — both at Sunday worship and in national and international politics — I share with you one of Mr. Pomeroy’s gems.  Enjoy.

O God, we thank thee that so often we have been happily mistaken in our estimate of other people; that so many times we have been startled by a flash of beauty where we looked only for dullness, and a glow of fire where we expected to find nothing but ashes.  May we be delivered from the folly of demanding that others shall always be at their best, while we forget that we ourselves are not always at our best.  Save us from the false judgment of feeling that others are always as mean as they appeared to be in some perverse moment.  May we be ready to forgive people for what they are, as well as for what they do, since in thy great Being they have as much right to be as we have.  May we not feel too bad about the ways in which others have their good times.  If we put ourselves in the seat of the scornful, may we find it very uncomfortable.  May we never forget that every man is fighting a secret battle.  As for our own lives, may we grow more like what we seem to our best friends and less like what we seem to our worst enemies.  And may we not defraud ourselves by too little giving and forgiving.  Amen.

Amen, indeed.

As an homage to Robert Putnam, we went on a family bowling outing Friday night. A good way to spend a rainy summer Friday, and a good reminder of the limits of social sciences. Last Sunday the Boston Globe reported on Putnam’s latest study in which he finds that diverse urban communities have higher rates of anxiety and lower rates of civic participation than their more homogeneous counterparts. The Globe article details how agonizing it was for Putnam to present data that diverged from his own philosophical bias that diversity was a good thing. And that raises all kinds of important questions for academic integrity and ethics. It also lifts up what we know is the minefield of presenting carefully collected data in a scholarly article and then having only the skimmed “talking points” ever read by most people. I’ve ordered a copy of the journal with his study presented, but in the mean time, I’m grateful for once to work in the realm of faith rather than science.

My faith, based on my experience and my reason, tells me that living in diverse community is the most soul-growing, life-building, just plain right thing we can do. And it tells me that the challenge and the reward of it will not necessarily be visible in any quantifiable study, especially one that asks if life is easier or communication better or our financial success more guaranteed as a result. Without knowing the questions Putnam raised, I can say this much:  the challenges of being in diverse community are more than worth their cost.

In my community, which has been struggling in recent years with the anxiety that has been proven to be a corollary of increase racial and ethnic diversity, Putnam’s surface facts do bear out.  But there is also the very real fact that everyone is more anxious in general, more worried in the upper middle class (is there such a thing?  I think we need another study) about keeping the financial plates spinning long enough to finish the next remodel or get the youngest through college, and more anxious about any number of things: unpredictable illness and its costs; loss of a job because of moving into late mid-life; having the stock market tank and lose that retirement nest-egg.  People in the lower economic brackets are worried about the same things they ever were: getting the kids through school, keeping a roof over the family’s head, paying medical bills, and so on.  People are not engaged in civic life in general because there’s no space for it if you’re busy living the economic life that has become the be-all, end-all of American existence.  Why in the world would we go out and join clubs, much less vote, when there is nothing in either of those activities that can be proven to get us into the swimming-pool class, or even the small condo in a bad neighborhood class?

Conservatives are jumping on Putnam’s findings as proof that it’s a good idea for people to “keep with their own.”  My faith tells me that the god who made sure we were made with difference, and made a world in which the combination of different types bred offspring that were stronger, smarter, and better equipped for survival — I think that god wants us to get to know our neighbors, and to make ourselves neighbors with more and more people in this world.  The god who knit each of us together in our mothers’ wombs doesn’t want a bit of that precious effort to go unnoticed.  And the god who offers us the wonder of discovering who we are by knowing others more fully, that god too says look at this magnificent creation that is so much greater than the sum of its parts.  Know its parts.  Look at it in awe, look at it in praise.  Don’t do it because it will be easy, or it will make you sleep better.  Faith doesn’t really promise that, ever.  Do it because it will make your heart quicken and your blood pump and it will make you feel alive.  Do it because our fear is our greatest teacher: we need to move toward it.  Do it because your horizons shouldn’t be contained by arrogance, or fear, or greed, or hatred.  Every scripture says it’s so, human history says it’s so.  It doesn’t need to be proven by any study beyond the wisdom of religious tradition, our prayerful hearts, and our open minds.