Sermon: Contemplative and Mystical Prayer

 

I served as a hospital chaplain in California back in 1998. I was, of course, a Unitarian Universalist, and as such, when a patient who identified herself as UU arrived at the hospital, I would be notified and was expected to pay a visit. I also had other areas of the hospital which were my responsibility to serve; I had the prenatal ward, and the pediatric ward, and neo-natal intensive care, and I also worked a cancer care floor and the emergency department.

 

My experience in these different areas of the hospital were eye-opening to me as a Unitarian highlighted for the first time one Universalist Minister, and of the most significant challenges I’ve had in ministry, then or now.

 

When I went into the emergency waiting room, I would take a look around at the people there. Fortunately, this hospital was extremely well-run, and despite being a Level I trauma care hospital – which means that we were able to handle the most severe medical crises – the emergency room was extremely well-run, and patients were not left waiting in the waiting room. I was there to look after the family and friends of the patient. I would take a look, and see who my intuition said might be most in need of some personal attention.

 

Whenever I sat down with someone and told them I was a hospital chaplain, asked them why they were there, and how they were doing, I was always so amazed and filled with grace at the way people opened up to me. And in those situations, with folks in emergency or at their bedside in the prenatal ward, where women often were hospitalized for months at a time, trying to prolong their pregnancies so as to get closer to their due date…in those situations, I never for a moment felt awkward to look at them and ask, “Would you like me to pray with you?” I cannot remember a single time when I was turned down.

 

Then to the bedside of a UU. I would enter, introduce myself, and there would almost always be a moment of appreciation and even palpable relief when the patient learned that I was a UU, just like them. We would talk, and almost everything I would do – as I was learning to do – would be the same as when I talked to people of different or no or unknown faiths. But when it was time to go, I faltered. To look and them and ask, “Would you like me to pray with you?” Never once did that fall gracefully from my tongue. I believe once or twice I did awkwardly stumble through an attempt to ask; I seem to recall a time when I was specifically turned down. But the awkwardness hovered there like a miasma; what was prayer to us? Even though I know, because I have practiced prayer with UUs and others, there is language that can be used that comforts without alienating, in the personal and private moments even with you here in this room, it does not come easily. I do not think I have ever looked at any of you and asked simply, “Would you like me to pray with you?”

 

So many of us arrive at Unitarian Universalist bruised or even bloodied by a tradition that could not support our hearts. Others of us, educated, knowledgeable about world religions, perhaps are fine with notion of prayer; I suspect many of us have private prayer practices or practices that fall into the larger understandings of prayer. But to look at one another and ask: may we pray together? This is a challenge, one I have fallen short of.

 

Matthew Fox was once a Catholic priest in the Dominican Order. When he developed a theology he calls “Creation Spirituality,” which says that rather than being born with “original sin,” we are born with “original blessing,” the very presence and indwelling of God, the radical notion that humans are indeed created in God’s image -- he was formally censured by the Vatican, and defrocked. He is now an Episcopal priest, and founding President of the University of Creation Spirituality. Matthew Fox is deeply interested in prayer. Of it, he says:

 

“The adult question to put to prayer is: Who is asking what of whom? …[I]t is not we who ask God’s action in prayer but it is [God] who waits for us to become what we already are; to act with a new spirit and a new vision…a humanist spirituality, one that accepts [humankind] as God’s image in the universe, joins chorus with science’s respect for the unlimited capacity of [humans] to know and affect the universe…prayer, from the personal or psychological point of view, is before all else the process of responding to life (emphasis mine)…prayer is a process of rerooting oneself, or better, ourselves. From a personal point of view, the essence of prayer, even of a mystical experience, is the way we are altered to see everything in its life-filled dimension, to feel the mysteries of life as they are present within and around us. The process implies change. “Let your behavior change, modeled by your new mind.” (all quotations drawn from Prayer: A Radical Response to Life by Matthew Fox, 1972, Paulist Press, various pages)

I believe that even as UUs, with our widely differing understandings of religious matters such as God or prayer or even meaning or ethics, there is a way to stand on common ground and talk about practices of faith that open us to life, or as Fox describes, a way in which we may be “altered to see everything in its life-filled dimension.”

 

For time immemorial, there have been people who exhort us to see God or the Divine in every person, every situation – those who urge us to see past differences and even hostility and pain, to that place where we share something significant in common. It is the essential meaning of the Hindu greeting “Namaste,” which means and is enacted by “the Divine in me greets (or bows) to the Divine in you.” Perhaps you know someone who is uniquely good at seeing the good in others, whose heart seems expansive and whose patience is legendary. One of the reasons I became a Minister was because I wanted more training in how to be that kind of person. Alas, in this I was sorely disappointed. I learned many, many wonderful things in seminary, and in no small part how to minister with others, but seminary does not in itself open the heart wider and its education is much more scholarly than spiritually awakening. Just the same, it does push push push for you to find that path, the one that allows you to see with kinder eyes and reach out with a more open heart.

 

Prayer, on the other hand, does offer just this. There are many ways to pray, but one that I think resonates particularly well with UUs is contemplative or mystical prayer. Mystical prayer, by the way, generally refers to a direct and immediate experience of the sacred, or the wisdom or insight gained from such an experience. In this it shares some relationship with our own UU history of the Transcendalist movement, which also sought that direct relationship with the sacred, and specifically eschewed the need for priests or intermediaries. In any event, the mystical and contemplative practices have as their intention the opening of the heart or soul or spirit; they seek communion, revel in the moments of connection that can appear in any moment of our lives. Consider the opening invocation this morning, written by Teresa of Avila, who found God emanating from bricks and speaking in song. Often, those most identified with the Christian mystical movement were overcome by experiences of joy and ecstasy, but they shared a perspective that the moments of ecstasy were not the point…Fox declares “To build a theology of prayer on [ecstatic] mystical experience would be like building a science of baseball on a no-hitter or a grand slam home run, with the same consequences of discouraging players to approach the game.” And please note that now I have successfully incorporated two sports metaphors into sermons during my several years with you!

 

The point is that the point of prayer is not to achieve some extraordinary state, but rather to be much more in the moments of life as they are, bringing forward a perspective of gratitude, joy, confidence of a larger wholeness, of seeing the best or the divine in others, despite the transitory circumstances of each moment. A way of developing a centeredness, a grounding in life which we are not so easily swayed by the situational factors of our lives. What might that be like, to look and see our partner, spouse, children, friends, co-workers with an eye toward the goodness that is in them, even when their behavior is not to our preferences? Contemplative prayer is a well-trod path toward that goal. It’s interesting to note that when one of us does something unkind – for example, snaps at a colleague or is impatient with a child, when we are asked for our subjective perspective on the situation, we explain our actions: “I was hungry and tired, and had had a bad day at work, and just snapped.” We express a basic goodness that was overcome by the situation. If we observe someone else doing the same thing and are asked why they did that, we are much more likely to say, “She’s just an impatient and controlling person,” or “They always have a bad attitude.” We believe that actions tell us something about the person’s character, rather than about a situational behavior.  Developing a practice of centering prayer allows us to ground ourselves in something larger, and it often enables us to extend the compassionate understandings we have for loved ones to the larger world.

 

So how does one practice contemplative prayer? As you might imagine, it begins with finding a way to center yourself. Most people choose to sit in a place where they will not be distracted. It can be with others or in silence, alone. Traditionally, the next step involves choosing a word, picture, or even focusing on the breath as the symbol of your intent to consent to opening to the sacred. Words that are often chosen are the name of a prophet or saint, or words which hold great meaning for the one praying, such as love, peace, hope, IS, mercy, stillness, faith, trust… In most traditions, the eyes are closed and the mind is invited to stay with a repetition of the chosen word, or a visualization of the symbol. The word or symbol or breath serves as a way to gently let go of thoughts that enter the mind to distract, and to bring us back. However, rigidness is not helpful. The goal is simply to find a center and have a way to come back to it, so in the quiet and time of simple being, greater awareness, greater openness, can come. You can see that in most ways it is almost identical to what is in many traditions called “meditation,” and for the most part, often serves the same purpose. The distinction lies most of all in the beliefs of the one centering. Some prefer to enter into contemplative prayer to draw closer to their understanding of God, to listen or experience or simply come to know God’s will. Others think on it not so much as about God as about a quiet opening of self to Greater Self, or to Life. The practice is worthy, whatever particular flavor we bring to it. It is one that cannot be useful to us practiced once or twice a year, though any time we center ourselves, we do much good at least for that moment. It is a practice which must be cultivated, practiced regularly if it is to help us truly expand. And we might remember that prayer is not meant to be thought of as an activity that one is sometimes doing, and sometimes not, be rather is meant to be a way of experiencing life in as many moments as we can manage, a way of transforming our relationship to one another, God, life itself. Prayer is, most of all in the mystical tradition, a higher union with life and with the sacred, a way of being in the world so that everything reveals its sacredness to us in every moment.

 

Let me close with a story closer to home, told by a man who, at least this one day, found himself living a prayer. Notice not just the unique aspect of the day, but how in almost all of the other moments, he discovered new levels of joy. It’s called “A Two-Rainbow Day,” by Pat Jobe.

 

I hope that you will seriously consider the role of prayer in your own life, and if one day I ask you, “would you like to pray together?” you might take a chance with me, we two UUs, finding a new place of centeredness together.