Learning How To Pray

A Poem and Reflection for 7th Sunday after Pentecost         St. Mary's Episcopal, Gatesville, NC

Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant                                       July 24, 2022

Hosea 1:2-10         Psalm 85       Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19)        Luke 11:1-13

Learning How To Pray

From the reading from the Gospel of Luke for today, the disciples want to learn how to pray. Which brings up a question of where did Jesus himself learn how to pray? Where did you learn how to pray?

 Jesus taught them a prayer, which we turned into ritual, often reciting without thinking. But lets look closer. The word “Hallowed” means that the “name” of God is sacred. In the Jewish tradition, and Jesus was a Jew, one of the most important of the Ten Commandments was about taking the “Name of God in vain.” The Hebrew in the Hebrew Testaments was written without consonants. Hebrew Scripture, like all of the Great Sagas throughout the ages, was never meant to read alone but meant to be memorized and spoken out loud in a community of worship.

But there was one word that was never spoken out loud, and that was the “Name of God”, with the consonants YHWH, yodh, hey, waw, and hey. Think of breathing in and out; when you breathe in, your lungs expand, filled with air you cannot produce, there is a sound like “Yah”. Then when you speak with air coming out of your lungs the sound is like “Wey”. In the creation story God breathed the breath of life into the Human being. So the sounds the lungs make reminds them of God's presence, since the name is so sacred, that is not a “name” to be ever said out loud. Whenever the tetragram was to be said out loud, the speaker would substitute something like “The Name”. YHWH was the word favored by the writers connected to the Temple in Jerusalem. It implies that you cannot approach God directly but must have an intercessor, like a Temple Priest or functionary, to speak to and with God, and follow certain prescribed rites and rituals. If your God is the King of the Heavens and Earth who cannot be approached directly, but through intercessors then the purpose of Prayer is to placate God so that you may live in peace and prosperity. Voltaire once said: “ In a word, we only pray to God because we have made him in our image. We treat him like a Pasha, like a Sultan whom one may provoke or appease”

There were at least 6 other Hebrew sacred names for God that Jews considered holy, not names per se, but derivations from earlier Canaanite functional descriptions about their own Gods, Their chief God and the Father of whole series of Canaanite related religious variants was “El”. Some writers of Hebrew scripture used the word “Elohim”, the plural form of EL, meaning that Elohim is the Supreme God, over all other lesser Gods. “Adonai” was from the word for Lord. Shaddai was the word for almighty. Sabaoth means Hosts like armies. Ehyeh is I am, Ehyeh asher ehyeh is I am who I am or will be. These names, descriptive terms of attributes, were used especially by the prophets outside the Temple structures. In Hebrew culture, when someone knew your name, they knew something about you; they had some understanding. However, with God, God the deep mystery, is beyond understanding. Only God understands God. The name of God is sacred, hallowed, because it is beyond our understanding. Even today, when many Rabbis write the name “God”, they will usually write it as “G_d” to avoid writing a name so holy it cannot be erased. They believe to erase God's name is to take God's name in vain

The prophets focus in on a metaphor for a relationship with God; of God as the parent, who created all life and whose spirit walked with the people of Israel. Their metaphor about the mystery which can be used, is “Father”. We see this in the passages from Hosea for today where people are being identified as the “Children of God”. The prophets suggest that one can have a relationship with God if you see yourself as a “child of God”.

Jesus, a prophet, tells his followers that they can use the metaphor of God as parent, the Sacred Father, and have the courage to speak to God, because God is speaking to them all the time, in every part of creation. God is speaking through the Lilies of the Field, the Birds of the air, the love exchanged in mercy to strangers. Jesus is living proof that the living Spirit of God does not stay up in heaven, but lives in the lives of people here and now. The kind of prayers that Jesus gives begins with the acknowledgement that God may have a better understanding of us than we do. As Anne Lamott reminds us, “The difference between you and God is that God never thinks he is you.”

When I was growing up, I respected my own father tremendously. My Father idolized his Father, who us Grandchildren would call “Daddy Wilson”. Daddy Wilson was an amazing force of nature, adventurer, worked all over the world and legend in the family; we were in awe of him. The model my father gave us of the relationship between father and son was of awe and respect. I would tell my Father of things that I had done right while he was at work. I would NOT tell him about the things that I had done wrong, for I did not want to disappoint him. It was the same pattern I used in my prayers with God; reminding God of what I did right and overlooking the things I had done wrong. Part of this behavior was based on the fact that I had 2 brothers and one sister and, in my mind, they were competitors for what I mistakenly thought was limited approval and love. It was only when I went off to college that I started to risk disapproval by disagreeing. My father died while I was still in college and I was devastated. I had no spiritual life, the only prayers I knew were memorized ritual without thought. There is a scene in Shakespeare's Hamlet where Hamlet has an occasion to get revenge on his step-father, but he sees him, kneeling in an act of prayer. Hamlet, afraid that Claudius is in a state of Grace while praying, leaves and postpones killing him. Later, Claudius gets up from his knees and sighs saying, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below, words without thought cannot to heaven go.”

After I graduated, I got married and then worked five days a week, eight hours a day, at a job as a counselor with young people who had made some pretty bad choices in their lives. When I found out that my child was to be born, I was scared. Knowing my own failures well, I thought that I could never be a good father. When the nurses wheeled out my daughter out of the delivery room, I was dumbfounded. How could I ever be a father to a girl? I barely understood boys, but girls were a deep mystery.

A college friend had come into town that morning and while we waited for my wife and child to be cleaned up and rested, we had breakfast and I shared my fears with him. Saying them out loud was helpful. One of the things I said, to my shame, was “What would it be if she grows to be the town slut?” To which Jim, who was homosexual said, “Probably, the same as having your son as the town queer.” Jim knew that his father and mother loved him, no matter what.

When the nurses cleaned her up, they let me hold my daughter for the first time, and I saw her through the eyes, not of my fears, but the eyes of my love. I knew that I would be able to love her no matter what she did or did not do? It occurred to me that my own father, had also loved me in a way that was not tied up with approval.

It was the beginning of my understanding of God. No longer was God “the old man above the sky” to be placated and flattered so as to avoid my just punishment. But God is the river of life flowing through me and all of creation, who knew me and loved me, no matter how far I was from being perfect. I was forgiven long, long before I begged for it; which gave me the courage to forgive as I was forgiven. I had always been amused by Heinrich Heine, 19^th Century Romantic Poem. who was asked on his deathbed if he wanted to pray for God's forgiveness: “God will forgive me; that's his job.” It was then I, made in the image of God, started to realize that forgiving is my job as well.

When I started to understand that I was forgiven, that started to change my life. Before then I carried wheelbarrows full of grudges and I did not want to forgive myself or others; I wanted revenge like Voltaire used to boast: “I have only made one prayer to God. A very short one, Here it is, “ O Lord: make our enemies quite ridiculous!” God granted it”. There is a song, which I did not hear until fifty years later, by Country Music Singer, Iris DeMent, which pretty much summed up my philosophy at that time about forgiveness. The chorus goes:

'cause God may forgive you, but I won't
Yes, Jesus loves you, but I don't
They don't have to live with you and neither do I
You say that you're born again, well so am I
God may forgive you, but I won't
and I won't even try

My baby is now 52 years old, and while there have been a few times over this last half century when we had occasion to disagree, there has never been a moment that I did not love her or cease praying for her in thanksgiving and intercession. The point of prayer is to find a way to live a life like Jesus, faithfully and humbly following the Divine Parent; as C. S. Lewis suggests, that we pray not to change God, but to change ourselves.

I have been learning how to pray for more than three quarters of a century and when I looked back, my memories led me into a poem:

Learning How To Pray

Lights lowered, the blankets pulled tight,

the story read, the day's memories shared,

the final songs sung, few regrets are bared.

Now for the recitation, trying to get it right;

“Our Father” replacing old “Now I lay me … ”,

later by “Don't know if anyone's out there … ”,

then trying out, “Give me strength to bear … ”,

arriving today, “My friend, help me to see … ”.

During the day, with our eyes open wider,

we find reminders of those who need aid,

from us and beyond for whom we prayed,

giving thanks to the strengthening provider.

Prayer is breathing in the air of sacred space,

and the breathing out to live the Holy place.