2015.04.26 WHY PRAY?

A granddaughter asked me not long ago, “Grammy, why do you pray?” Her tone was not child-innocent, it was edgy-young-teen-of-fifteen.

Momentarily flummoxed, I had no idea why I prayed. But this was a near-emergency—my aging religious faith vs. her budding religious skepticism—so I  blurted out, “I pray because I love.” She snorted but didn’t retort, then grabbed a couple of french fries from my plate. After she’d swallowed them whole she grinned and said “Okay to have a couple of your fries, Grammy?”  Sassy!  And I love her.

So that IS why I pray. I love. I also pray about her, which is to say that she is on my heart daily, along with all my children and grandchildren and several million other concerns from world peace to the barely audible wheeze I’d heard in my lungs this morning.

I remember some priest asked the Presiding Bishop some years ago when she spoke to the diocesan clergy of Massachusetts at our conference: “What do you think about prayer?” (I do think it was a rather saucy adolescent question.) The PB threw up her hands and just said, “Do it!” Later she added that she prayed when she ran.

Public prayer is powerful and recitative. However, personal prayer is a sluicy thing. The assumption behind prayer is that there is a greater power than the human looking out for the universe in kindly, not kingly or silly, ways. When we pray we access and release that greater energy. We call this Mystery by many names (God, Allah, Wisdom, Christ, Adonai, YHWH, and more) and when we evoke it in prayer it is a matter of connection and hope, not control. 

No one really understands prayer but many of us do it. There is no one who can’t pray, and probably no one who has never prayed or called out in some way. My own praying makes an art form of wordiness. Yet when I am on a retreat of silence and solitude, after my yammering, I fall into contemplative prayer, which is much the same as breathing meditation: after a while your heart becomes one with the sacred heart. Thump, thump, thump. 

In other words, God is Goodness and Love and, in a deeply spiritual way, massages the fabric of earthly life enabling replication of this goodness and love—imperfectly but surely. 

Thank god I did not rattle on in such abstract ways to a fifteen year old. But here is what I hope she got:
    We pray because we love, because we care.
    We pray because people and things matter to us.
    We pray because we seek faith and because we have faith.
    We pray with certainty and we pray because we don’t know.
    We pray because we seek God as God seeks us. Prayer is more mutual than we think.    
    And as Christians, we pray because Jesus prayed.

The psalmist in Psalm 119:9 (Pamela Greenberg translation) declares:

“With all my heart-muscle I have sought you.”

Seek with all your heart muscle and you will find.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Prayer is muscular. According to Benedictine monastic, David Steindl-Rast, OSB, the antidote for exhaustion is not rest but whole-heartedness. Whatever you do, including pray, do it with all your heart-muscle. Thump. Thump. Thump
   

The Church: Wholehearted for Godde's Sake

The Church is one of the most reactive institutions I know.

Something comes up in the culture, a trend, a fad or a deep movement toward secularization ( currently in vogue) and the Church leaps in to organize programs that are relevant, hang new signs that are attractive and LARGE, create kicky ads and slogans, beef up its church school, etc.

These strategic quick fixes may bear some short term fruit but usually they are hasty and don’t take root or ripen because these efforts are anxiety-driven. This is abusive all round.

Anxiety kills Spirit.

Clergy get exhausted and churchgoers and seekers are absent, apathetic or overworked. Over-reactivity for short term gain is sinful according to one Kabbalist (ancient Jewish mystical tradition) definition of sin as superficiality.

The worst abuse however is self-abuse, self-forgetting. The Church forgets to love the God who calls it into being and instead serves the almighty market to sell itself.

The only healing for this compulsive pattern is whole-heartedness. Know who you are, what you have to give and what you can do. What the Church does that is unique to its vocation is teach about Holy Scriptures, create liturgies that give meaning and ritual shape to people’s lives, build a welcoming community of prayer and sacrament, and provide pastoral care and compassion in times of need.

I do not include social justice because this is the work of all decent citizens and because there are many agencies involved with this work. It is not the Church’s job or her gift to be one more such organization. It is the Church’s job to encourage its members to devote a portion of their time to such work outside the Church.

To be wholehearted isn’t always obvious or easy. Poet David Whyte tells a story on himself. He was working in a social service agency, racing from thing to thing, task to task, desperately engaged in the work of helping others. One day he raced into a conference room in which he thought there might be a meeting he was supposed to attend and said to those assembled, “Has anyone seen David?” After laughter they sent the exhausted David himself home for the rest of the day.

Once home Whyte spent the evening with his friend and monastic brother David Steindl-Rast who listened to Whyte’s tale of overwork, reactivity and fatigue. Steindl-Rast told Whyte that the antidote to exhaustion was not rest. Astonished, Whyte looked at his friend and said, “What is it then?” Brother David said, “Wholeheartedness.”

Their talk led Whyte to consult his heart, find there his true gift and passion for poetry and to risk quitting his job and becoming a poet. Since then he has written many beautiful volumes of fine poetry and also used his poetry to help people in both church and corporate settings find their own hearts.

David Whyte wrote in his poem "Sweet Darkness": Sometimes it takes darkness/and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn/that anything or anyone that does not/bring you alive is too small for you.

Perhaps the Church could in this, its time of darkness and dangerous reactivity, re-enlist its own tired heart, not to self-serve but to dare to be wholehearted—for Godde's sake.