Rev. Molly Phinney Baskette ~ First Church Somerville
Sunday, October 5, 2008 ~ Twenty-First Sunday in Pentecost
Philippians 4:6-9
“Pray As You Can, Not As You Can’t”
There you are, 47 hours from now. It is 9 am on a Tuesday, and you are sitting on the tarmac at Logan waiting for your flight to take off. You look calm because you are good at faking it, but your palms are sweating, your breathing is shallow, and you are afraid. You are sure that this time your fear is so powerful it will actually cause the hydraulics to fail, or the pilot’s attention to waver for a moment, resulting in tragedy for everyone aboard this 737.
It is 9 am on a Tuesday, and you have just arrived at your desk. You postpone the days’ work and type the login to your retirement fund. You are deeply disturbed to see that the balance has dropped by 8% overnight. It doesn’t matter that you are not going to retire for 38.2 years. All that money, your money, has just slipped away into the ether and the panic of the economic crisis.
It is 9 am on a Tuesday, and you are putting your grad school applications in the mail. You are leaving your child crying at the day care center. You are checking your phone to see if the cutie you had a first date with last night texted you. You are driving by the panhandler on Fresh Pond Parkway. You are reaching for a cigarette. You are clutching your chest as your heart twinges again. You are thinking about climate change, or the price of gas, or Iran’s nukes.
You are doing these things, and you are worrying. You are doing these things, and it never once enters your mind to pray about them.
There are a lot of things that are complicated about Christianity, and we eggheady seeker types can generally be counted on to make them more complicated than perhaps they need to be. Trinitarian theology, for example, or the coffee hour schedule. But some things about Christianity are simple. Prayer is one of those things that may turn out to be quite simple, really. We can’t control the outcome if we do pray; we don’t know whether or how or when God will answer our prayers. But no one can deny us the right and privilege of prayer, no one can tell us how to do it, or not do it. There is nothing to stop us from praying, right here and right now, or at any moment of our lives.
It may be that you have a good reason for not praying. I’m trying to think of what it might be.
You are allergic to dogs, ragweed, and prayer? They have medicine for that now.
You believe your prayers are so powerful that they might actually bring about world peace, and then the military-industrial complex would go bust and throw millions of people out of work.
Or maybe it’s that it’s been a long time since you prayed, and you feel that God might be annoyed with you for suddenly showing up. A God so petty would not be worthy of our prayers, and if we really believed in that God, I doubt any of us would be here today.
There are a lot of reasons not to pray. But there are more, and better, reasons to pray. It could be that your prayer will be the fulcrum on which the lever of God’s justice or peace rests, and it will actually have tangible, verifiable results. But whether or not your praying changes the world, it will certainly change you. Joe’s going to talk more about that next week.
So my bulletproof logic has now demolished your resistance, and you are ready to pray, right? How do you do it?
We pray personally. Teresa of Avila said that prayer was nothing more than entering into terms of friendship with God. Even if the God you believe in is not a person, or a personality, but a great and numinous life-force, this is not a bad starting place. Prayer is, at heart, conversation with a most loving Someone or Something.
Which reminds me. It happens sometimes, pretty often, that I think I’ve prayed but I haven’t. All I have done is make a mental note, or had a good thought. There is no sense of conversation. I did this when I was flying through a thunderstorm from Atlanta last month. A couple of hours in, it was my palms that were sweating. “How is it that I’ve prayed, and I still feel so afraid?” I asked myself. Then I realized, I hadn’t prayed. I’d made a mental note, something like this: “I’m afraid of flying through this thunderstorm, and I bet God can take away my fear.” To really pray, I had to first name God,
“God?”
and enter into conversation,
“Please surround me with a sense of your strength, and take away my fear.”
At risk of sounding facile, my fear just melted away. Sometimes, it really is that simple.
We pray daily. Kathleen Norris says she has a hard time praying because her perfectionism gets in the way, and so does her general laziness. If she can’t pray well, she doesn’t want to do it at all. At times like this, she hums or sings bits and pieces of hymns. She says the Lord’s Prayer, or a fragment of one of the creeds. She makes prayer akin to household chores—it’s better to fold a bit of the laundry than to let it keep piling up.
Prayer is not just for Sundays, something to be enshrined and exalted; it is for everyday use. Like toothbrushing or dishes or any other regular maintenance, we shouldn’t get discouraged that it has to be done over and over again, that it seems like we’re always back where we started. Mothers and fathers know this. They wash the same bottoms and feed the same mouths over and over again, and never question the validity of this work. Well…
Daily prayer gives us a larger perspective, a sense of shared responsibility with God, a way out of no way. It provides a counterforce to the anxiety that threatens to leak in from every direction.
Did you know that that word Paul uses in Philippians, “the peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus,” that that word GUARD is a military term? It means, “to stand sentry.” Can you imagine UN peacekeeping troops stationed around your heart and you mind? Can you imagine what your outlook would be if you invested $700 billion a year in troops and equipment to defend your heart and mind against anxiety? The very same powers that resurrected Jesus are also at your service.
We pray, as we cook, with the ingredients at hand. Laura Ruth said last week that there are a lot of ways to pray, and not all of them involve words. One clue that you might be praying is if you are so deeply engaged in something—in making art or making food or making love—that you lose a sense of yourself and your own separateness from the rest of Creation.
But for those who would like a little more direction, a homework assignment, if you will, here you go. It’s called the Examen of Consciousness, and it’s been around for 5 centuries, since the founder of the Jesuit order, St. Ignatius of Loyola received it, in his words, as a gift from God. The examen doesn’t require any special training, a black belt in belief or hours logged in church. You don’t need to go shopping on the way home to get ready for it; you already have all the ingredients in your spiritual pantry.
Briefly, the examen has five steps. For the attention-impaired or those who are visual learners, there’s a handout you can pick up on the way out of church. It’s from an article by the Jesuit priest Dennis Hamm, called “Rummaging for God: Praying Backward through Your Day.” All you need to pray this prayer, is a day to pray over. It’s a prayer that can be prayed in the evening before you turn on the tube, or after you’ve gotten under your cozy blankets, so it has a deep appeal to the lazy among us, as well as the control freaks, who will find it hard to turn the day over to God until it’s almost over. Sometimes, the whole day slips away before we remember to give it back to God, and this is a prayer for people like us.
The first step is: pray for light. As we look back over the day, we’re not asking for memory, but “graced understanding.” The point is to see what the day looks like to God, not just to ourselves.
The second step is: give thanks for what was in the day. Hamm calls it “fondling the beautiful gifts of work, relationships, food, challenges.” Philippians advises us to make thanksgiving a part of every single prayer, and not limit ourselves to petition, asking. The act of thanking makes us more thankful, and likely to notice the blessings of life. And if we’re tired and we fall asleep at this point, before making it through steps three, four and five, well, we’ve had dessert first.
The third step is: review the feelings that surface in the replay of the day, paying close attention to where we get snagged. Feelings are neutral, neither morally good nor bad; it is what we choose to do with them that makes them so, so don’t censor your feelings in any way before God. Hamm says that strong feelings are clear signals of where the spiritual action was during the day.
The fourth step is: to choose just one of those feelings and pray from it. “The feeling is a sign that something important was going on.” Let a prayer rise up out of this feeling: a confession, a petition for understanding, a lament or praise. Let God work on this feeling with you, take you further. You’re not alone anymore.
The fifth and final step is: look toward tomorrow. We have been forgiven the things we did today that we regret, and we have let go of the things we left undone; we have, finally, given the day back to God. We don’t have to leave God out of the tomorrow until it is over, too. Take your appointment calendar under the covers with you, look ahead to the next day’s plans and demands, hopes and fears, and ask God to be with you in whatever you are facing.
Anne Lamott reminds us that: “Augustine said you have to start your relationship with God all over from the beginning, every day. Yesterday’s faith does not wait for you like a dog with your slippers and the morning paper in its mouth. You seek it, and in seeking it, you find it.”
It is 9 pm. Twelve hours have gone by. The sun set a while ago but your body is just catching up to the end of the day. You ease into your chair, you fall gratefully into bed, under your down comforter. You are not alone. You are never alone.
