pastor prayers

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jemez Mountains

From librarianmer’s photo stream, because our rule is that the camera goes with the kid, and this trip didn’t include the kid.

Ever since I attended New Mexico Girl’s State, and especially since I moved away from New Mexico 12 years ago, when I return and take in the landscape I start to sing the state song in my head. Which is a problem for many reasons, including a natural aversion to state or national songs of any kind as well as an inability to remember more than the first three lines of this particular one. And of course the chorus. Always, the chorus.
There I was last weekend, riding through the desert (my horse with no name an Avis rental car, apologies to Mr. Young) to arrive in the only landscape that has ever captivated me and made me certain there is a meaning and purpose to this existence that is magical, eternal, and unknowable to mere mortals. New Mexico is where I go to be home, not just in the sense that I know people there and have a personal history there, but where I go to be reminded of my place in the order of things — or the disorder of things, as the case may be.

There is nothing that can match the sense of being surrounded by the mountains and mesas, the sky that stretches forever and carries every expression in the weather it brings, the tenacious animals that make their homes amid the mesquite and sagebrush. I sat on a rock early one morning deep in the Jemez Mountains and stared down into the valley, felt the crisp sun on my face and arms and the pink glow that rose from the light landing on the orange earth dotted with bushes, and, further up, Ponderosa Pine. I was overcome with an urge to throw myself into the valley, to be enveloped by its beauty, washed clean by the daily thunderstorms, healed by the effusive hot springs, consumed by the very life of the place. I imagined being held by the earth, swallowed by her and held on her tongue for a time before being spit out (too bitter to be kept for long), renewed. I wanted the land to want me as much as I wanted it: passionately, irrationally, adoringly.

But truly the thing that has always been most calming about this landscape to me is its indifference. The magnitude of its existence, the sense of time before time and long after my time makes it a trustworthy place to leave the struggles and the celebrations of my own life. Death can be held here, and finds company with people who have mourned it in many cultures, through wars and droughts and blizzards and floods, with many gods and One True God. Life, too, is precious and always worthy of note. The people are gentle with each other, strangers, because everyone has a sense of being a stranger here. There is no mistaking that there is something much larger than yourself that determines the fate of your existence; the illusion of personal invincibility is not one that can last in this landscape.

I’m so grateful for my brief reunion with the god of open skies and hard rains, of eternal mountains and cool streams of living water. My heart is welling with thanks and praise to the people who have been my sustenance in that landscape, who I have carried in my heart just as I have saved the earth from Santuario de Chimayo on my prayer altar during these many years away.

O fair New Mexico, I love I love you so.

Originally uploaded by ParsaSilva

A couple of weeks ago, we joined the Universalist Church of Essex on their annual sunset cruise around Cape Ann. It’s the best church fundraiser I’ve ever attended.

I’ve been reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower this summer, so as we soaked in the beauty of the landscape — the craggy inlets, the green, green marshes, the twists and turns as the land and sea do their intimate dance — I couldn’t help but think about the folks who arrived on these shores by sea and the wonder and terror and disorientation of it all. Whatever history’s judgment of them, they were folks looking for a way to be faithful, a way to live their lives fully and abundantly, and they were willing to risk their lives for it. Riding the choppy waters, listening to tunes played by the resident church D.J. on the upper deck, I was grateful to have this relaxing, fun tour through a place that for so many people was fraught with peril. Our religious forbearers, we owe them a lot.

And I wondered at what risks I am willing to take to live this faith, ill-defined as it is theologically, oddball as it is in our cultural landscape. I’m not talking live on a stinky ship with a hundred other people, no water for months, and no guarantee of help on the other side kind of risky. Thank god some faithful, brave or desperate (or all three) folks already did that. I beseech the ancestors for the wisdom to discern how to live this faith in the face of that which might crush it, to believe that there is a purpose and a meaning that is worth danger of reprisal, or being outcast, or just plain seeming weird. I pray that I can find a ways to listen so that the call of that great spirit, the spirit of the sea and the earth and the sky that meet and mingle on this coast might be more audible than the rush of the clock and the list of things to do and the pressure to be all, know all, do all, that conspire to do the work of stifling the soul and keeping life too small, justice too far, forgiveness too empty and love too saccharine to be compelling. May the beacon of the eternal light be in all our sights as we navigate the waters of faith. And may it offer us the challenge of honesty, a balm of healing, and the promise of love eternal and enveloping.

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.

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?