The Power of Prayer

February 6, 2000

To quote Psalm 19, or possibly Toots and Maytells, depending on your frame of reference, "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight."

In a 1959 letter to George Lyttelton, Rupert Hart-Davis wrote, "Did you hear of the parson who began his sermon: "As God said -- and rightly-- ..."

To parallel that in a very non Unitarian Universalist way, I would say -- as Jesus instructed in the reading this morning -- and rightly, "Do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do…" Gentiles has been variously translated over the years as barbarians, pagans, and the like. I take the admonition to be a warning against thoughtless repetition in prayer. And having made the admonition, Jesus, or the writer of Matthew, proceeds to lay out a prayer that became so well known that it has ever after been thoughtlessly repeated.

I should admit, frankly and openly, that the title of the sermon should have been something like "The Lessons of Prayer," but I couldn't resist the title "The Power of Prayer." It is such a splendid non-UU title.

Like many of you, I have spent a good deal of my life in traffic jams, and sometimes have listened, to pass the time, to evangelists, both southern and northern, black and white, frantic and calm, elevating and deflating, from Brother Shaumbach to Sister Grace. And it seems to me that the power of prayer is a perfect name for an evangelist's sermon, but it usually wouldn't be called the power of prayer -- flat like that, in small letters. Rather it would be called The POWa of PRAYa. Now having been lured by the siren call of that title, I will have to try to perform against it.

Let me start with two biographical bits.

Biographical Bit 1…

… an image of my 85-year-old father, who had suffered a stroke, lying as I saw him right after the stroke, in a rehab hospital in Salem, NH. The room was darkened, he was turned with his face to the wall, there was no sound, no movement. I thought, oh, this is awful, he's all alone, lonely, he's had it--the worst fear, to be locked up inside with no movement outside. But as I rounded the bed to the wall side, to see him, I saw his lips moving, heard a whispery voice, saying,

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet heav'n knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.

And he continued right on through Shakespeare's Sonnet #17, to the end, then noticed me, gave a quick look of recognition, and started in on another sonnet. He was not alone at all.

In admiration of my father's gifts of memorization, for he had many of the sonnets, as well as whole pages of Marlowe and Milton, I took up memorization for several years, finally owned, as my dad would have put it, thirty or so poems, as well as, of course, innumerable rock and roll lyrics and advertising jingles which have permanently bent my mind. In learning the poems, I found that they needed to have some depth for them to bear the many repetitions required. The same is true of prayers.

 Biographical Bit 2, which could be called "How I Failed Meditation 101."

About 15 years ago, my wife Florence and I thought it might be useful and fun to study meditation and did so with a friend as a teacher. It involved the usual relaxation exercises, the gaining of control over breathing, and the letting of words drop through the mind, memorized words. Our teacher gave me a mantra to work with, but the words were so shallow that I soon gave them up and secretly replaced them with the Prayer of Jesus, which I had first memorized, lo, those many years before in the Sunday School here. In practicing meditation, I let the words, one by one, completely separate from each other, thus almost void of meaning, drop slowly through my mind as into water, and I watched them fall to the depths below.

The meditation never really took hold, but the dropping of the words of that prayer through my head remained as a habit. All too often, I am sorry to report, this exercise—or perhaps it could inflated into being called a habit of prayer—all too often was performed in the midst of insomnia. Prayer became an attempt at a soporific, something to put me to sleep, the words printed in Matthew became portly little sheep which never cleared the fence.

Even more important, I was never really able to blind myself to the meaning of the words as they went through my mind. I was unable to get them to flow at the repetitive incantatory level required by eastern meditation, was unable to turn them into some sort of inner prayer wheel.

In fact, one evening, I was struck by an awkward inner silence as I cruised through the prayer. I would get to that most New Testament part of it "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," and then a silence would begin. My inner tape had developed a curious gap.

Frequently when running memorized words slowly through the brain, I get lost, since part of what makes words memorable is their meaning, and if one is nearing success at repetitive incantation, the words lose meaning completely. But this silence was different. It was always at the same place, and I could say the prayer aloud and find the words, but they wouldn't come silently.

After several weeks of wondering about this, I thought about the quality of the silence at the missing words. It was not a complete silence; it had a spatial and sonic shape, it was the silence, or nonsilence, of this very building, and the hearer was I as a boy, and the silence was in my father's. When I was a kid in this church, the Prayer of Jesus was a never-omitted feature of the service, and now much later I was recalling that my father would never say the words "lead us not into temptation." He simply let that part pass silently, as others around us went on. "Why?" I finally asked him. His response was thrillingly Universalist: "A loving God would never lead you into temptation, so that part of the prayer just doesn't apply." I was left to wonder on my own whether this was a problem of text or translation, as I was assured so many Biblical problems were, or was it a theological error on the part of the Bethlehem native.

Given Harold Babcock's sermons over the past month or so, which have often stressed a current theological hypothesis--that evil is not a separate force from us, that temptation is not outside of ourselves--I find my father very advanced in his reluctance to associate temptation with God's management of human affairs.

The Prayer of Jesus is a good model for what most prayers do: it addresses the deity (our father), it acknowledges that the deity is divine (who art in Heaven), it praises the deity (hallowed be the thy name), then it commences to beseech (thy kingdom come thy will be done, give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil), then it moves back to praise of the deity (for thine is kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever).

The only missing element is the thank-you section, though all the praising seems an adequate stand-in. The prayer is in second person, what with all the thou's, as any beseeching prose would be. Now, in English language instruction, the second person is a well-known way to avoid the linguistic artifacts of our sexist history, and we would perhaps have gotten a couple of more decades use out of the Prayer of Jesus did it not begin with "Our father," a vocative, words of direct address, aimed at the deity. It could have easily begun with another vocative "Oh, thou, who art in Heaven" or the always useful Unitarian alternatives, "Oh, maker of all things" and the like. If you examine the prayer in your mind, you will find that only the word "Father" carries the masculine assumption. But then, if you were to examine the prayer in your mind, you too would be failing Meditation 101.

After several years of occasionally running the New Testament prayer through my head, I switched over to the most usual Old Testament offering, the 23^rd Psalm. It was even better for these purposes. The images in it seemed almost designed for meditation. The Psalm, as you probably remember, goes like this:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

It's those still waters that first attracted attention: "he leadeth me beside the still waters," and as I said the words inwardly, each word fell separately into those still waters to such a degree that I could hardly get past that point in the prayer. And this pastoral prayer seemed to have more mystery, more unanswerable questions than the other: after all, what does it really mean by "my cup runneth over." That had been a mystery to me as a child, especially since part of the same sentence included the anointing of the head with oil. I always had that cup full of oil, not of the blessings of the Lord. And in these words, the sexism cannot be rectified: this is clearly the prayer of far-off time and a foreign culture. We have so few shepherds here in Essex County.

I have reconciled myself over the years to the foreignness and the apparent small mysteries within this prayer because I stand in awe of the greater mystery at its center; the sort of mystery that only an English teacher could love.

One way to get at it is to ask why the sexism is so pronounced--it's because the psalm is declarative, not beseeching. But let me show it another way by saying that the Psalm could be read as a chest-thumping brag of the kind that Mark Twain claimed were common along among the Mississippi riverboat operators, for example, "I'm a wild he-wolf from bitter creek and tonight's my night to howl" or "Contemplate me through leather, boys, I'm too brilliant for the naked eye." So, the psalmist's brag would go this way--

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .

But at this point the arrogance is no longer supportable because the he, who is the counterpart to the I, turns into a you, a thou; the Psalm shifts from third-person reference to the deity to second-person reference.

…for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me…: thou anointest my head with oil

Somehow, the relationship of first-person to second-person makes impossible any bragging, brings earnest emotion into the relationship.

So you might say that the 23^rd Psalm for the most part is no prayer at all. It is instead a description of a relationship from the outside, but within the description the speaker becomes so agitated and awed by the relationship being described that he or she changes the relationship from I-he to I-you…sound familiar? We have teetered here to the edge of modern theology, the I-thou, posited by Martin Buber.

In general, Buber felt that a believer should avoid any kind of I-it relationship toward God, since the I-it turned the deity into an object of dogmas or a legislator of fixed rules, or confined the deity to a specific place: a church, synagogue, or mosque.

The I-you is the relationship between intimates, the way we love, whereas the I-it is the way we tell a story. The I-you is the relationship of real community, which is created not by stories, by gossip, but by actual concern and care, the hello and good wishes of an I to a you, the movement beyond the proddings of conscience or acts of charity, which are done I to they, into real acts of love, between an I and a you. The I-you is the relationship of real and active love, not of a story told about love.

So the 23^rd Psalm starts at a distance from the deity and moves into intimate relationship, then at the end moves back to the distance with: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever."

If a piece of prose is supposed to show motion of some sort, this Psalm does it in spades, in showing the speaker moving into unexpected relationship with the object spoken of and then retreating in wonder from the relationship. But, of course, it is not really a prayer at all: there is no directed praise, no supplication, no thanks to the deity, or if a prayer, it is of the most subtle type in showing perhaps that the writer believes relationship with the deity is inevitable and irresistible.

Many have touted the magic of prayer--"You prayers WILL be answered" -- as if the deity were some sort of rich grand uncle to whom we take our requests. Others have touted prayer as an aid to meditation, a repetitive form, a string of words, in which one can lose oneself to uncover a deeper consciousness. But such a use of prayer may prove incompatible to those priding themselves on the rationality of their religion. I see yet another sort of power in prayer, not in efficacy or in going beyond consciousness. To start with, as my father discovered, material worth memorizing makes good company, whether you're in traffic or rehab, or both. But more important, these old prayers, with all their ambiguity and their antique imagery and attitude, continue to remind me that temptation is within myself, not outside, and that the work of religion, by which I mean the work of a life, is to come into right relationship with oneself, one's fellow humans, and one's God. The Power of Prayer is, thus, a power of transforming vision. So be it.

John Mercer