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What to You mean "prayer?"
 was
tempted, when thinking about this question, to turn to one of the
Unitarian Universalist holy books, the dictionary, and proceed to
deconstruct the definition of prayer that I found there. Instead, in the
interest of time, also in Unitarian Universalist style, I am going to
make up a definition that works for me, and go with it, and I
wholeheartedly invite you to do the same.
I have spent many years in a hazy, gray religious borderland between
Christianity and Buddhism. The more I learned about Buddhism, the more I
encountered the spiritual depths of Christianity, and met or heard of
some real Christian spiritual superheroes, and slowly came to the
realization that there are many different Christianities. So what if
most schools of Buddhism are atheistic, and Christianity is by
definition theistic? If we’re going to quibble over details like the
existence or nonexistence of God, we’ll never get anywhere!
When we discuss prayer, UU’s often get hung up early on just who we are
we praying to, because much of the prayer they’ve encountered before is
what is called “intercessory” prayer, the well-known example of this
type of prayer being a child kneeling by their bed listing friends and
family members for whom they wish God’s blessing. (Although it seems to
manifest for me when the computer is doing something wonky or I can’t
find my keys or phone.) I have learned that there are actually many
forms of Christian prayer, including deeper, more contemplative forms,
that eventually lead to union with God. And then when the contrasting
idea comes up, of meditating or praying more from the place of
uncertainty I described earlier, it seems a little random or chaotic. In
the Zen tradition, they talk specifically about starting meditation
practice from what they call the “don’t know” mind, which is just what
it says it is. If you think you know the “don’t know” mind, guess what?
So there’s some bookends on the spectrum of who we are praying to, from
addressing a personal God at one end of the spectrum, to the other end
of the spectrum where we start from not knowing just who’s on the other
end of the line, or if there’s anyone there at all. I myself am so
convinced of the universal benefits of prayer and/or meditation,
regardless of where we find ourselves on this spectrum, or even if
you’re not on the spectrum at all, that I was happy to take up Rev.
Wellemeyer’s invitation to offer a weekly Adult Religious Education
class on meditation in the New Year. From the shameless plug department,
the class will be starting January 11th, and will be offered seven
Wednesday nights in conjunction with our existing meditation group, it
is called “Meditation: Buddhist, Christian and Secular Approaches.”
So to get back to that promise of my own definition of prayer. I view
the terms prayer, meditation, and contemplation to be largely
synonymous, and I would define them all as a deliberate, conscious turn
in our day towards the sacred, in whatever way we view the sacred. And
to give a little preview of the class, I am biased in my view of the
sacred that this activity of prayer is by definition physically quiet
and solitary, even if done in a group. This being said, meditation for
me is not necessarily motionless, we will address silent walking
meditation in the class. And I am not saying that we cannot feel
prayerful in many different ways not characterized by solitude or quiet
(I’d be lost as a musician if I believed that), nor am I saying that
praying out loud, as we are in this service, is not prayer. I am saying
that I personally incline towards an understanding of contemplative
prayer that for me is a flower that blooms when given the light and
water of an exterior silence, which supports and eventually gives rise
to an interior silence, free of the discursive chatter that constitutes
my ordinary mind state. I believe that this interior silence is the
necessary mental state to be able to hear what some Christians have
called “the still, small voice” of God, or to attain what some Buddhists
call “insight”, or to achieve what some physicians call “stress
reduction.” If some of you decide to begin a practice of meditation, you
may find, as I and many others have, that the inner quietude I seek is
easier described than attained, but that every clumsy step on that long
path of cultivating mindfulness is valuable.
What do you mean "all people?"
 efore
I begin, I’d just like to let you all know that I’m part of a movement
to conserve syllables, so when I say UU during my reflections today,
that is shorthand for Unitarian Universalist. OK. So when new people
visit a UU church sometimes they are surprised that, depending on the UU
church, that there can be subgroups of UUs who consider themselves
Christian, subgroups who consider themselves Buddhist, subgroups who
consider themselves pagan, and subgroups who consider themselves
atheist, and other subgroups I’m not yet aware of, or that we have yet
to come up with. Then there are UU churches which are ardently
Christian, and UU churches which are passionately humanist. There are UU
churches that call themselves Unitarian; there are UU churches that call
themselves Universalist. The UU church I attended in Salt Lake City as a
kid was called First Unitarian. Now my parents have been ardent
supporters of First Universalist at Hampden and Colorado for years. And
I wish I could tell a new person that that means that the people at
First Unitarian had such and such, easily definable outlook, and the
people at First Universalist have such and such easily definable
outlook, but it ain’t that simple. How can all these different people
coexist inside the same building, how can all these different UU
churches comfortably share our larger organization, the UUA, the
Unitarian Universalist Association?
Most churches and temples are unified by some kind of shared creed, in
which they say, this is what we believe, and you must share these
beliefs if you are going to worship here. I have attended some mainline
Protestant churches in my day, and they often use what is called the
Nicene creed, which starts, “We believe in one God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” A
creed like this makes things very clear for people, it gives them a
clear benchmark for what it means to belong in that community. But this
clarity has a price as well.
If you haven’t seen a movie made by Bill Maher, called Religulous, I
highly recommend it. It’s a documentary about his exploration of the
religious world using a modern, critical mind, and a well-honed sense of
humor. At one point, there’s a scene where he’s riding in a car, talking
about how difficult it is to openly criticize religion, and he says,
“The other guys are selling certainty. I’m on the corner with doubt.” In
Bill Maher’s opinion, a lot of the harm caused by religion comes from a
certitude that is not actually warranted, a certainty that we know for
sure exactly who God is and what He wants, that we know exactly for sure
what happens when we die and the implications that has for how we live.
Unitarian Universalism is a different approach to religious life, an
approach more about questions than answers. One of my favorite UU jokes
is the one about the guy who upset some UU’s, so they got back at him by
burning a question mark on his lawn. UUs ask this question: What if we
wanted to enjoy the communal benefits of being in a church, that instead
of organizing around the certitudes expressed in a creed, was organized
around an ongoing, open-ended, open-hearted spiritual search? Are we
required somehow to base a church on certainty? Why not uncertainty, if
that makes more sense to us, as we spin on this granite we like to call
a planet? A church that believes it is possible to love both ourselves
and others without some kind of cosmological finality, that our most
sincere prayer can come in the form of an inner relationship to what we
understand to be the Divine, that it is possible to lead a moral life
without being motivated by fear of judgment and punishment. (OK,
speaking of punishment, one more UU joke:
Q: Why did the Unitarian-Universalist cross the
road?
A: To support the chicken in its search for its
own path)
How do all these Buddhists, Christians, atheists, humanists, pagans,
engineers and artists all share a building and grow from being with each
other? In my humble opinion, this small building is a microcosm of our
globalized world now, which is just a much larger, crowded room full of
people who think and act differently than you. We come here to love each
other as best we can and thereby practice embracing our larger reality
on Earth now. We pray that through striving to remain open and loving in
our hearts and minds, we can make life better for ourselves and our
neighbors here and now, and be content to have this path of love be our
preparation for whatever is to come.
Please do not copy or quote without permission of the
author.
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