Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
Then, as was also the custom in that time and that place, we appended a long list of "God blesses" to the basic prayer -- God bless Mother and Daddy, and Grandfather, and friends and playmates, and baby-sitters and, as we grew older, teachers and classmates and finally even the family dog. I remember occasions when I was not quite ready for the day to end and so I made the list as long and comprehensive as possible. I remember other occasions when kneeling on the linoleum-covered floor was cold and uncomfortable, and I abbreviated the list as much as propriety would allow and hurried through it as quickly as possible.
In subsequent years, I have heard people question the psychological soundness of a prayer which sends children to bed thinking of death rather than of life. I don't know whether those four little lines caused others psychic distress, but I confess that I gave precious little thought to the words, or to the theology they reflected, or to the intelligence toward which they were directed. The prayer with which my day ended was not intended to convey a message to some other place or to some other mind. Rather that routine prayer was a way of punctuating my life, a celebration of consummation. In the course of living a day, many things unexpected and unintended happened -- even in the life of a very young child. One never knew what a day might bring, but whatever it brought, it could be tamed, domesticated, made acceptable by closing the day in the same way -- by repeating the syllables of a prayer which, despite the words, said, "It's all right; no matter what happened this day, the family is intact, your world is as it should be, and you can safely sleep through this night."
The significance of the moment was in the ritual act, not in the words spoken. The truth of that assessment may be found in the fact that for me the prayer began to lose its power as I grew older, as I emerged into a world in which words had power to rival and define acts. Then it was that I stopped kneeling by the side of the bed, but slipped quickly under the covers and raced silently through the prayer in my own mind, until the time came when the prayer was more frequently forgotten than repeated and then was completely abandoned.
Prayer was also a ritual part of mealtime in our household as I was growing up. Somewhere, in some corner of my mind, I can still hear my Uncle Jim's voice as, every evening, he tucked his head and quickly muttered over the food:
Dear Lord,
Bless this food to our bodies
And thus to your service.
In your name we pray.
Amen.
The prayer was uttered with such speed and with so little inflection that it required some years and some growing sophistication before I was able to decipher the meaning of the words which constituted the suppertime incantation. But here, too, the words were not the source of power. That prayer was effective because it was a ritual act which signified the reconstitution of the family. We did not offer grace at other people's houses. We did not offer grace at breakfast or lunch or when any of us ate alone. We did not offer grace at picnics or on those rare occasions when we ate at a restaurant. Grace was a thing we did together, at supper, at home when all the family was gathered. The message, independent of the words spoken, was always the same: "No matter where the day has taken us, no matter where responsibility might lead us, the center of life is here, around this table, with the family."
As I was growing up, there were other things which were called prayer, but which I knew instinctively were not prayers in the same sense. There was that long, complex sermonette, called a pastoral prayer, which the preacher intoned every Sunday morning and every Sunday evening as a warm-up for the sermon. I early learned not to take this tour de force seriously, for I often overheard the adults critiquing the prayer, joking about its length and how the preacher had "prayed himself all the way around the world and back again."
Nor was the "Lord's Prayer," which we recited in church school and to start the day in public school, really a prayer. If it had been, we would never have stumbled over whether we should ask forgiveness for our debts or for our trespasses. Prayers were the simple, repeated, familiar rituals by which we marked life together as a family, not a disputed formula which underlined differences and disagreements.
It is not surprising, I suppose, that I was never much worried about whether prayers were answered. By their very nature, family prayers were always answered, and at the very moment of their utterance. They were expressions of gratitude for present reality -- for home, and food, and love; for a day which had been full and which had come to completion in a warm and safe and familiar place. I never doubted my prayers were heard, for they were addressed to my condition, not to some distant ear. In the very saying they were heard; by the circumstances which prompted them, they were answered. Such prayers were, perhaps, the only thing in the universe that moved faster than the speed of light, often answered before they were formulated or voiced.
Nor is it surprising, I suppose, that there came a time when prayer ceased to be important in my life. In those years when I was growing away from the family, in those years when my driving need was to establish my own identity, my own independence, the rituals by which my life had been knitted into the family became an impediment, became objectionable, came to appear childish and foolish. I needed a simple, straightforward, logical, rational world -- one in which intellect defined relationship, one in which reason shaped value and consequence justified action, one in which the meaning of words was critical to integrity, one in which principled agnosticism replaced unexamined faith. The family and its rituals seemed too dark, too mysterious, too pre-rational, too tied to blood and to soil and to unexamined emotion.
And so, there came a time when I stopped saying prayers. I ate my meals without a thought; I went to sleep without reflection. In the name of making life more consistent, more thoughtful, more rational, I gave up introspection and abandoned conscious reflection. The world became for me little more than it appeared to be on the surface of things -- a succession of one thing after another, with little internal rhyme, little obvious reason, little inherent relationship. I was busily engaged in building necessary independence, and the price I paid was my rootedness, my sense of interdependence. It was not a sudden choice; it was a gradual abandonment as I orphaned myself in an indifferent universe.
This was not a unique path I followed. As Carol Gilligan and others have pointed out, in our culture, many young men walk this path -- a path defined by the horizontal dimensions of life -- avoiding the depths, treading concentric circles of ambition and education and career and goals. Even though I was preparing for the ministry, even though the idea of religion was at the heart of my dreams and ambitions, the time for introspection, for evaluation, for deep-rootedness had not come.
As my theological position evolved, I found it more and more difficult to discover any intellectual justification for prayer. If, indeed, there were a God, why would any reasonable person spend time telling God things which any God deserving the title already knew? And clearly, requesting special attention, special exemptions from God was out of the question, for it represented a violation of everything I understood to be true about the operation of the world under natural law. Engaged in the need to exercise mastery over my world, my environment, my vocation, I plunged into life and wrestled with external realities. Prayer, which seemed to me best defined as pouring empty words into the drumless ear of space, was simply not part of my life.
Ironically, as I entered upon my profession, my duties further obscured the meaning and significance of my early experience of prayer and diminished its value as a spiritual act. I found myself frequently called upon to pray in all kinds of public situations -- at banquets and public meetings, at the beginning of civil rights rallies and anti-war rallies. (While many people had severe doubts about the soundness of my theology, they knew I could be counted on to deliver an invocation, addressed "To Whom It May Concern," which would include rather than exclude the diverse groups which comprised so many public coalitions in those days.) But while it was called prayer, I never felt the act was a prayer. It was little more than a starting bell -- a signal that the program was about to begin. Real prayer, the ritual punctuation of daily life, the wordless affirmation of kinship and rootedness, of thankfulness for a grace-filled world, was absent from my life.
I confess to you that I felt no great vacuum in my life, no vast emptiness, no deep need which might have been the consequence of an inadequate spiritual life. The regular and habitual need to prepare a sermon, the necessity of reflecting upon the meaning of the events of the day which my vocation imposed seemed to be spiritual discipline enough for me. The remainder of my time was split between my responsibilities as a husband and parent, and the urgent demands of various social action programs which were intended to put into concrete action the religious imperatives of my faith. There seemed no need for and little time to devote to the discipline of prayer.
How long I continued in this manner, I am not sure. But though I cannot name the date, I remember quite clearly the occasion when prayer, in a new form, found me and became part of my life again. It was a beautiful, warm summer day. The sky was as blue as I have ever seen it, with no hint of the greasy stain along the horizon which often, like ring around the collar, betrays pollution in the atmosphere. Walking along a path which led past an old brick wall and past a variety of flowering shrubs and trees, I was vaguely aware that somewhere off to my left a cardinal was singing his usual song. My mind, for once, was in neutral, thinking of no special problem, no pressing business, no worrisome difficulty. As I strolled the path, a wind began to stir the upper branches of the trees, creating a sound which suggested the possibility that the locusts and the pines and the maples were engaged in a friendly conversation which I might understand if I could only concentrate my mind sufficiently.
Suddenly, walking quietly along that path, I was invaded and overwhelmed by a sense of the incredible beauty of this world in which I found myself. Everywhere I looked, the world was alive and vibrant and profoundly interconnected. I remember stopping in my tracks, drinking in the fullness of that instant. As I stood there, a sudden, unexpected shiver ran up my spine. And suddenly I understood -- in a manner which goes beyond any intellectual knowledge -- that I was no longer an objective observer, I was an intimate part of the scene through which I was walking, that in some sense, the bird was in fact singing for me; that the whispered message in the treetops was intended for my ears; that the blue of the sky existed only because the slant of the sun's rays through microscopic dust motes created that color in my eyes. For the first time in many years, I knew -- at a level deeper than any intellectual knowing -- that I belonged in this world, that it was my home, that I was its child, and that in some curious way, it would be incomplete without me.
In an instant, through my mind flowed unbidden words: "Great Earth, beautiful Earth, how wonderful you are. When I consider the marvel that is this planet, what am I that I should be graced to be part of such wondrous creation."
How long I stood there, I do not know. But for a long time I remained motionless, feelings of gratitude and belonging too profound for words filling my soul. Then I turned, reluctantly, and slowly walked back the way I had come. And I remember thinking to myself, "That is the first time I have really prayed in a very long time." The words -- a vague paraphrase of a psalm I had learned as a child -- were only an attempt to give form to what had been essentially a wordless prayer. But it was a prayer nevertheless -- just like the prayers I had repeated as a child. It was addressed to no one in particular; it asked for nothing; it confirmed my at-homeness in the world; it flowed out of a profound sense of gratitude; it was answered before it was formed or uttered.
From that moment on, prayer has been a significant, if somewhat erratic and unpredictable, part of this agnostic's life. It has not always been the result of ecstatic and oceanic experiences. There are moments in my life, as in most people's lives, when the sun disappears from my inner skies, times when there is darkness and sorrow and disappointment and despair wherever I look -- occasions when what I feel is a profound separation and isolation from all that sustains and nourishes me. And sometimes, in those moments of abandonment and desolation, when private pain drives all joy from my world, I am aware of a presence, as of a voice whispering in my inner ear: "Even now, even in this, you are a child of great Earth and the strength of the Earth flows in you and through you." And I know in that moment that while there is no power in the world which will remove my pain and distress, there is power in the world which will permit me to endure, to live through the grief and sorrow. And I know that in some curious way, accepting the dark realities of life and living through them is also a prayer -- not intended to change the world, but to connect me to sources of inner strength which make endurance possible.
There are other times when I find myself ensorcelled in the mystic embrace of a human community which extends through time and across all the divisions which bedevil the human race. I see a young parent or a grandparent engaged in an intense and loving interaction with a child, and though I do not even know their names, I know in my heart what they are feeling -- for I have felt it too, and so did my parents and their parents and all the generations of human beings who have ever walked this planet. Or I witness the grief of those for whom love has ended, as love always does, in death, and I know what they are feeling, for I have felt it too, and so have my parents and their parents and all the generations back to those ancient proto-humans who colored the bodies of their dead with red ocher and spread flowers to cushion and to cover them, tens of thousands of years ago. And I know in the depths of my soul that we are all one, all offspring of the same great love, all destined to the same end, one humanity incarnated again and again in this perishable, fragile form, destined to love and to lose and to love again. And I find myself overwhelmed by an inexpressible compassion for this humanity we all incarnate. And that is a wordless prayer for all our sisters and brothers, living and dead and yet to be born, for their welfare on this beautiful blue- green planet.
I would not have you believe that I live my life always in this state of enhanced awareness. The truth is that most of the time my life is filled with a thousand petty concerns and annoyances which distract me and distort my vision and try my patience and challenge my good humor. Most of the time I am consumed by the mundane problems which come and go and come again and define our quotidian existence. But there are moments when something else breaks through into my consciousness, and reminds me that while life is experienced in fragments, moment by moment, it is lived in a larger context, an oceanic timelessness, and that our well-being, our wholeness depends upon the ability to be open to that other dimension, which, for want of a better word, we have called the holy or the sacred or the blessed, that the larger meaning of life is to be found in those occasions when we are lifted out of our little local universes and graced with a vision of the larger reality in which we are rooted, in which we are truly at home. And those are the times when I know what prayer is for this self-orphaned agnostic, living in a post-modern world.
Whatever it may have been at other times in my life -- a ritual act affirming my at-homeness in the world or a tiresome professional duty -- I now acknowledge that prayer is not something I do or can do. Rather it is something that happens -- something unbidden, and unexpected -- a moment when, out of the bourne of time and space, I am grabbed and shaken out of the ordinary and reminded of the greater context in which we live and move and have our being. It does not happen because I want it to happen or even because I need it to happen. Like all that is truly sacred in this world, it moves in response to its own hidden imperatives. Sometimes, strolling along a garden path, or struggling with the dark moments of the soul, or smiling into the face of a child, or sharing the ancient grief of unbridgeable loss, or in a hundred other small and unexpected moments, we may catch a glimpse of a larger reality, may see ourselves deeply rooted in the Earth, connected across time and space; we may find ourselves empowered and enriched in ways we could not have hoped or asked for. These moments may not, in someone else's definition, constitute prayer, but they are as close to prayer as this aging, stubborn agnostic is ever likely to come.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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