UU Society of Cleveland

May 18,2008

Approaching Prayer

by Rev. Colin Bossen

This service is about prayer, what it is and how to approach it as an atheist, an agnostic or a believer in the divine. My definition of prayer is an isolated being reaching out for connection with someone or something other than itself. Using this definition an atheist can pray simply by extending his or her hands to his or her neighbor. If religion is about what binds us together, from the Latin religio which means to bind, prayer is about what connects us, both to other human beings and to the world around us.

Several months ago a member of this congregation approached me wanting to talk about prayer. She is a recovering alcoholic and participates in Alcoholics Anonymous. She told me that as part of the practice of AA she is supposed to pray. Our friend identifies herself as an atheist and her mentor in AA had told her that she should talk with me about prayer. Since I am her minister it was supposed that I might have something useful to say on the subject. Then the holidays hit and somehow months managed to pass before we sat down to talk.

When we did we met over at Phoenix Coffee for some tea and conversation. Now, when I talk to people who self-identify as atheists I usually ask them to tell me about the God that they do not believe in. I find that people tend to reject belief in a specific God--a God from their childhood or the idea of a higher power, for example--rather than the idea that God is a helpful metaphor. God, to me, is a word, an idea, that symbolizes the sum of the universe and all of its mysteries, some of which we do not currently and perhaps never may understand.

God is not essential to prayer. I told our friend that whether or not she believed in God or could find a definition of God that she felt comfortable with she could still pray. I asked her what it felt like when she struggled with her addiction. She shared a little of her story. We talked about feelings of isolation and how alcohol and other drugs can either numb one or make one feel more connected to others. I told her about my friend Neil McLean who, influenced by the psychologist R.D. Laing, taught me about mental illness and addiction

Neil never refers to people as mentally ill. Instead he says that they are isolated in their own reality. We know from the study of neuroscience that our brains construct what we experience to be real based upon a combination of sensory perceptions, our brain's physiology and the chemicals moving through our body and our grey matter. As a result what we understand to be real and how we perceive the world is a little different for each of us.

We humans have the gift of language. The way we try to come to agreement about the nature of the world is by telling each other stories. We use these stories to construct the common reality in which we participate. When we are battling addiction or mental illness the story we are telling about our own life does not closely match the story other people are telling about their lives and, probably, ours. We become isolated in our own stories. This is perhaps the most extreme form of isolation. We can break out of such isolation through connection. Prayer is a way of seeking that connection. Prayer is an effort to end isolation.

Prayer can alter our brain chemistry. It is often a physical act involving speech, hand gestures, changing body postures or breathing. As any student of the human body will tell you changing a person's physical state is sure to change their mental state. If you doubt this try changing your breathing. Breath slowly and you should feel calmer and more relaxed. Breath faster and you should feel more energized, on edge and alert.

By changing our brain chemistry prayer changes the way we perceive the world. It can make us feel more relaxed and in tune, connected, with our surroundings and our neighbors.

I find the German Jewish theologian Martin Buber useful when thinking about prayer. In his book "I and Thou" Buber developed an ontological typology in which he divides human experiences into two categories. Ontology, by the way, is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being. It describes how we humans are in the world and how we construct reality. Buber's two ontological categories are the I-You and the I-It. The I-You is “the world of relation” while I-It establishes “the world as experience.” A person can only live in one world at a time but needs both to be fully human.

The I-You word pair is necessary for a human being to “become,” to gain self-knowledge. “I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You,” Buber wrote. This becoming can only occur in “the actual and fulfilled present” when an individual human being is fully, exclusively, engaged with one of the three “sphere[s]...[of] the world of relation.” These, according to Buber are nature, other people and art. The I-You relation requires complete presence and attention. It stands outside of the ordinary world of “space and time” and requires the “power of exclusiveness.” That is, no I can have more than one You at a time.

We gain affirmation from our experiences in the I-You world. Our sense of self is affirmed and we affirm the importance of the other, the You, we are engaged with. Without this affirmation people will whither, they will fail to become. Buber understood that humans are social beings and that “the longing for relation is primary” and begins at birth.

The world of I-It is also necessary for a human being to live. It is “the world in which one has to live” of physicality, food, shelter, “activities and knowledge.” The I-It is the world of things and it includes other human beings when they are treated as objects.

When we pray we are trying to make a shift from the world of I-It to the world of I-You. We are reaching out for affirmation and a genuine encounter. Whether or not we receive something from the reaching out is not wholly up to us. It depends upon what or who we encounter and how earnestly we stretch ourselves. We cannot always find connection when we pray but we can always reach for it.

At the close of our conversation I asked our friend if she found my explanation of prayer helpful. She reported that she did. Later, she reaffirmed this when I asked her for permission to share this story with you.

Since that conversation I have done some more research and thinking about prayer. The type of prayer that AA was asking our friend to learn is what is known as an intercessionary prayer, a prayer for someone or something to intercede and change the course of events. Intercessionary prayers are just one kind of prayer. Prayers come in an almost infinite variety. There are prayers of thanksgiving, devotion, ecstasy and contemplation. There are prayers for birth and for death. In some traditions there are prayers for each action that one might take. Among orthodox Jews, for example, one can find prayers for putting on new clothing, for a thunderstorm, for hearing good news and for hearing bad news.

Prayers also vary by medium and action. There are prayers said while standing, while sitting, while dancing, while making love and while cooking. For every movement a person can make and an action that can be taken someone, some culture, has created a prayer. Prayer can also be found in throughout the arts. There are paintings, poems, photographs, sculptures, pieces of music and pieces of theater that serve as prayers. Whatever the medium is I can assure you that someone has created a piece of art that serves as a prayer in it.

We can experience the art someone else created as prayer. Art is one of Buber's three spheres of the I-You for good reason. A piece of art can draw us in with rapt attention. Encountered fully it can change us and connect us with both the artist--no matter whether living or dead--and ourselves. This act of paying total attention to something can be an act of prayer. Any time we have fixed our attention on something we might find ourselves in prayer.

I invite you to consider the instance of artistic interbeing that is Pablo Picasso's painting "The Old Guitarist" and Wallace Stevens poem "The Man with the Blue Guitar." Interbeing is a phrased coined by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han to describe how everything and everyone is dependent on something else for its existence. In his description of interbeing Han explains how a piece of paper is reliant on the paper mill, the logger, the tree and the Earth and the sun for its existence. Without any of these things, and the things that they draw sustenance from, even the simplest piece of paper would not be.

Stevens poem finds its genesis in Picasso's painting. Without Picasso's work Stevens piece would not be. The painting is one of Picasso's earliest masterpieces. It is from his blue period and it depicts, on a muted pallette, an elderly man absorbed in his own guitar playing. His head, capped by white hair, is bowed at almost a ninety degree angle. He sits cross legged, dressed in simple clothes becoming rags, plucking the strings of his guitar. Look at the picture and you see a man at prayer, submerged in his music and communing with and connecting to something other than just himself.

In his poem Stevens imagines the tune of the man. He writes:

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Ourselves in tune as if in space,
Yet nothing changed, except the place

Of things as they are and only the place
As you play them on the blue guitar,

Placed, so, beyond the compass of change,
Perceived in a final atmosphere;

For a moment final, in the way
The thinking of art seems final when

The thinking of god is smoky dew.
The tune is space. The blue guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,
A composing of senses of the guitar.

This is prayer. It is a reaching out for and a receiving from something other than ourselves. It is a "tune beyond us as we are." And yet the poem is the result of an exchange, through their art, of two master artists--the poet and the painter. Picasso's poem evokes in Stevens something that he would not have found otherwise. Stevens reaches beyond himself to encounter and be changed by the painting. In contemplating the painting he found connection.

This reaching out requires attention. In composing the poem and in painting the picture Stevens and Picasso almost certainly leant their full attention to their art. The French philosopher Simone Weil defines prayer as "absolutely unmixed attention..." This expands prayer far beyond my simple definition of seeking connection into a realm where any action given sufficient attention can become prayer. It suggests that there is no discernible difference between meditation and prayer. For, as I understand and experience it, meditation is about paying absolute attention to the present.

In an interview on the radio show Speaking of Faith, the author Stephen Mitchell comments on Weil's definition of prayer:

In that sense, prayer has nothing religious about it. A mathematician working at a problem or a little kid trying to pick out scales on the piano is a person at prayer...The attention itself is the quality that... [Weil] wants to call prayer. So whatever context you're putting it in, whether it's inside a church or...inside a toy box, that's the quality that is the sacred one, where there's nothing else in the world but that little girl's attempt to draw a red circle or that physicist's attempt to make sense out of apparently messy facts.

And yet who would doubt that each of these people is not somehow deeply connected to the object of their attention. Whether animate or inanimate the object of their devotion is changing them as they change it.

If the first two aspects of prayer are reaching out and giving our attention, the final aspect of prayer is setting intention. This part of prayer requires the least explication. When we set our intention we are determining the object of our prayer. We are deciding what we are trying to connect to. For some of us this may be God For others it might be the soft still voice within, the strength to fight an addiction, our neighbor, the good earth, our ancestors, the motive force of love, peace or almost anything else in a long list of human ideals and images.

The intentions of our prayers matter because it matters what we pray to and for. If our prayers change us then the intentions of our prayers suggest how we would be changed. Consider Reinhold Neibuhr's "Serenity Prayer":

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

It seems to be a simple prayer with a simple intention, a desire for serenity, courage and wisdom. Yet each of the things it asks for is almost unattainable. How is it possible to know what can and cannot be changed in our world? Some things that should be so easy to alter prove impossible to shift while challenges that seem insurmountable at first blush are, in fact, easy to tackle.

Learning to discern between what can and cannot be changed is a skill that likely only comes with great patience, powerful talents for observation and a willingness to engage in ongoing self-reflection. Uttering this prayer is an invitation into a lifelong quest for discipline.

It is in the realm of intention that prayer can become dangerous. Whatever our intentions are we never know exactly how our prayers might change us. If we use someone else's prayer we cannot be entirely certain what their intentions were.

This is why prayer becomes an object for fierce debate. A prayer offered with good intentions by one person can be viewed as an attempt to oppress other religions by another, legitimate only certain conceptions of the divine by a third and genderize God by a fourth. Any prayer that addresses God might offend the atheist while the theist might be offended by any prayer that does not. The intentions of all parties involved might be benign but each party might interpret the intentions of the other as at least slightly malevolent or exclusionary.

Ultimately we each understand what we reach for and the intentions of our prayers a little differently. We each experience the world through our particular filters and so each prayer we offer, even if the words are the same as someone else's, is slightly different.

Despite this the basic elements of prayer remain the same. Connection, attention and intention, taken in turn they tell us how to pray. We begin by reaching, we pay attention and we set our intentions. In doing so we may seek help, solace, express gratitude or despair, offer cries of ecstasy or center ourselves.

Let us join together in a prayer for prayer:

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