What's Your Take on Prayer?
Being a member of the clergy, you might assume I hold a strong belief and clear understanding regarding the nature of prayer. Not so. Rather I have bits and pieces that add up to a respect for prayer as a primal thing humans do for themselves and for one another.
Not long after being permitted by ordination to wear a clergy collar and self-conscious about what now could be expected of me, I made a pastoral visit to a man’s man who I knew to be skeptical of all things religious. I rehearsed a prayer for him en route to his hospital room, should it come to that. Our visit was brief. As I was turning to leave the room, leaving behind the awkwardness of whether to pray, he asked me for a prayer. So I composed myself, boldly took hold of his huge hand, invoked the Trinity, and asked for grace from above to abide with him now, and in the days to come. Amen. Then looked up to see one or two tears gently rolling down his face. Not for the last time, in my experience, has prayer had this effect on men who never cry, but who melt some when given more than they think they deserve.
Here is one of the best explanations for the gift we give others for whom we pray (which thankfully does not ask too much of God, nor that God be envisioned by us as more than the benevolent source of our well-being): On a bright, beautiful day, crowds of people gather three rows deep along both sides of the street to catch a glimpse of the Queen’s procession. As she approaches, a young daughter too small to see what is happening, asks her father to lift her up above the crowd. There, on her father’s shoulders, she basks in the fullness of her majesty’s glory. Prayer makes sense to me in this way. Rather than presuming we can bend God’s will to our own by praying, we use our prayers to bring others more intimately close to the source of all things, more fully exposed to the restorative properties of divine love, grace, and beauty.
Author Anne Lamott might well be the original source of this simple and helpful take on prayer. She believes all forms of prayer fall into one of three bins: “Help me! Help me! Help me!”, “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”, or “Oh my!”. Simple, yes, but wonderfully spot on. We all need serious outside help from time to time. We all need to let loose an unbroken stream of gratitude from time to time. and we all love being present to what transcends us in vastness of scale, thus granting the excellent sensation of being wee small, and one with all, in the very same sweet moment.
Alan Easton was in his 90s when I knew him. He was an author who wrote non-fiction accounts of his serving as naval captain of an escort battle ship in the North Atlantic during World War II. He was calm, articulate, bright as hell, smoked a pipe, and believed in the power of prayer. We’d meet once a month in his living room, a prayer group of four to six, to review our prayer list. Who had been healed; whose family difficulties were better; who was now newly employed after a job loss? Having such respect for Alan, how was it, I wondered, that he believed in intercessory prayer? Double blind, scientific studies prove it does. You can look it up. But whether it works or not, anytime we consider who might need prayer, we do ourselves the favor of looking up and looking around. We expand our horizon and our circle of compassion. We are becoming better people by taking the time to think about others.
Final take on prayer: “...When you pray, go into your room and shut the door, prayer to your Father in secret, and your Father who sees you in secret, will reward you.” Love these words from the Gospel of Matthew. If prayer is anything, it is our means for being in direct touch with that which is both in the world, but not of the world. We think we need an audience to make what we do count for something. Not true. What really counts is what we can taste completely apart from the world, in the place where the door is closed behind us. There is where prayer can take us, if we dare experience what is like to be untethered and lost in God’s embrace.