prayer

Book Openers: I Still Haven’t Figured Out How to Pray — But I’m in Good Company

July 20, 2009 By Barbara 2 Comments

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

“I am a failure at prayer,” author Barbara Brown Taylor confesses in her new book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. And, ”to say I love God but I do not pray much is like saying I love life but I do not breathe much.”

Now there’s a woman after my own heart.

I belong to a group that meets twice a month on Mondays. Some people might describe it a prayer group. But I don’t – because I, for one, am not that good at praying. Our group is good at talking, and we’re really good at listening to each other. And, somehow or other, God seems to be there when we meet on our Mondays for a simple meal and reflection. But prayer — how to do it, why do it — has been the topic of much conversation in recent months.

Like me, Taylor expresses consternation at trying to formulate a clear theology and practice of prayer. The author of the acclaimed Leaving Church, she waits until the second to last chapter of An Altar in the World to finally bring up the subject of prayer. When she does, it is with trepidation. “I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life,” she writes.

“I have shelves full of prayer books and books on prayer,” Taylor says. “I have file drawers full of notes from courses I have taught and taken on prayer. I have meditation benches I have used twice, prayer mantras I have intoned for as long as a week, notebooks with column after column of the names of people in need of prayer (is writing them down enough?) I have a bowed psaltery–a biblical string instrument mentioned in the book of Psalms–that dates from the year I thought I might be able to sing prayers easier than I could say them. I have invested a small fortune in icons, candles, monastic incense, coals, and incense burners.”

Every once in a while, prayer overtakes Taylor and she is flooded with the Presence of Holy. But most of the time, she finds a more immediate sense of God in what she calls “enlarged awareness” – in paying attention — as she bites into a homegrown tomato, or sets the table for guests with her best dishes and silverware, or pauses to notice the moon, round and full “like the wide iris of God’s own eye.”

An Altar in the World limns a spirituality of the everyday, of finding Holy in the feeding of the cats and the dogs, the family and the friends. It suggests that, instead of waiting for God to answer our prayers, we wake up to the fact that our lives are the very answer to the question we ask. The Sacred is right there in plain sight and always has been.

Maybe that’s what happens to me when my Monday night group meets to eat, talk and be present for God. I listen to the others speak. I offer up my own private stories — and I feel them coming back to me, intensified, enlarged and sanctified.

An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, by Barbara Brown Taylor, HarperOne, 2009, $24.99 hardcover.

My Monday Night Group has been the inspiration for a number of blog posts on prayer, including one on meditation.

I’ve also passed along some thoughts on prayer from noted religion writer Karen Armstrong. Also from a Benedictine monk who talks about “prayer without words,” and a Native American who says if you’re looking for God, “Go look at a rock.”

Filed Under: Book Openers, My Rocky Spiritual Journey Tagged With: an altar in the world, barbara brown taylor, book review, karen armstrong, leaving church, paying attention as prayer, prayer

GodsBigBlog: Why Pray? — Some Thoughts from Karen Armstrong

June 5, 2009 By Barbara 1 Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Why pray?

Apparently, I’m not the only person asking that question. No less a light than author and student of religion Karen Armstrong took up the question in an essay first published in 1998 and reprinted in the April issue of The Sun magazine.

Don Fausto Perez prays to the Virgin of Guadalupe. c 2009 B.F. Newhall

If God is the all-knowing, all-good and all-caring Almighty of traditional Judaism, Christianity and Islam, then surely God knows what we want and need before we ask, so what’s the point in asking?

And if the Ultimate Reality is not so much the Person of the Abrahamic religions, if it is more an all-pervasive Creative Force than an Other with whom one could have a relationship, then maybe there’s no point in striking up a conversation with It.

Yet every religion worth its salt recommends the discipline of prayer, Armstrong notes. Why? What good is prayer? And what good can it do those of us who are skeptics, who can’t really say we believe any of that religion stuff?

Armstrong responds by pointing out that, actually, most religions don’t imagine God as something that is strictly “out there.” Most teach that God is “a reality that is encountered in the depths of our own beings.” And it is in those depths that we become acquainted with ourselves. We encounter there our vulnerablities and our failures.

“By putting our unutterable weaknesses into words, we make them more real to ourselves but we also make them more manageable,” she writes. We shatter our defenses, which allows the Sacred to penetrate our beings.

Prayer also pulls us out of our busy, literal, habituated daily lives. By offering prayers of thanksgiving and praise — by expressing gratitude — we remind ourselves that our lives are miraculous, that each day is a gift. “Such prayers help to hold us in the attitude of wonder that is characteristic of the best religion.”

You can find Armstrong’s original essay in Every Eye Beholds You, edited by Thomas J. Craughwell, 1998, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

What do you think? What good is prayer anyway?

Filed Under: My Rocky Spiritual Journey Tagged With: abrahamic religion, guadalupe, karen armstrong, prayer, the sun

Book Openers: Simone Weil on Prayer — First, Pay Attention

April 6, 2009 By Barbara Leave a Comment

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

Simone Weil’s Waiting for God was first published, posthumously, in 1951. And readers beware: Waiting for God is a dense, highly politicized book. (Weil had been a Marxist and trade unionist before encountering mysticism.) But her startling insights into the nature of God and God’s relationship to humanity remain fresh and are truly worth the struggle through this imposing text.

Weil’s life was a short one. Born in Paris in 1909 to an agnostic, middle class Jewish family, she became a Christian but refused baptism for complex reasons explained in detail in Waiting for God. She died at the age of thirty-four of physical and mental exhaustion, after allowing herself only a meager diet in solidarity with society’s poor and the soldiers suffering on the battlefields of World War II. I’m inclined to conclude that Weil was an anorexic ahead of her time, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t also the modern-day saint and mystic that many believe her to be.

Listen to Simone Weil for yourselves in these selections from Waiting for God:

On page 59: “Prayer consists of attention . . . Students must therefore work without any wish to gain good marks, to pass examinations, to win school successes; without any reference to their natural abilities and tastes; applying themselves equally to all their tasks, with the idea that each one will help form in them the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer.”

On page 124: “Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”

On page 126: “God produces himself and knows himself perfectly . . . But before all things, God is love. This love, this friendship of God is the Trinity . . . The love between God and God . . . in itself is God.”

On page 127: “For those who love, separation, although painful, is a good, because it is love. Even the distress of the abandoned Christ is a good. There cannot be a greater good for us on earth than to share in it. God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh . . . The universe where we are living, and of which we form a tiny particle, is the distance put by Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance . . . ”

Hmmmm. Amazing stuff, don’t you think?

Filed Under: Book Openers Tagged With: book review, christianity, prayer, simone weil

GodsBigBlog: Sister Barbara Hazzard — How to Pray Without Words

February 24, 2009 By Barbara 5 Comments

Buddhist prayer flags, Sikkim

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

“Meditation, sitting in silence, is a prayer of faith. You totally let go of being in charge, which is different from what most prayer is about, because as long as we use words, we are in control. Most of us as Christians have been trained that prayer is talking to God. We feel the responsibility to do something, to be active when we pray, but in meditation, you enter it with the idea that you will let the Spirit transform you. You don’t talk, you listen.”

– Sister Barbara Hazzard, Roman Catholic.

What is prayer anyway? I haven’t a clue. These days, when I go to pray, I often find I haven’t a thing to say to God. Every tradition I’ve come in contact with in all my years as a religion reporter and writer recommends — no, insists upon — prayer. Yet right now I don’t know how to do it. I don’t even know why to do it.

That’s the reason I find this passage from the interview I conducted with Sister Barbara so compelling. (The interview was for the book I’m working on, Finding Holy: True Stories of Religion and Spirituality in America.) Sister Barbara has had a lot of experience with prayer. A Benedictine monk, Sister Barbara is the founder of Hesed, an urban, non-resident Benedictine community in Oakland, California, which teaches and practices Christian meditation.

Rome's Pantheon: A pagan, then Christian, place of prayer

What I’m hearing when I reread these words of hers is that there are many ways to approach — to be open to? — the sacred.

I meet twice a month with a small group that calls itself EFM Lite. Most of us are graduates of a program called Education for Ministry, or EFM, which is a four-year Christian theological education-at-a-distance program, involving mostly lay people, sponsored by the School of Theology at the University of the South.

Our group has been reading Kathleen Norris’ book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith this past year. Now we’re ready to move on — to the topic of prayer. Each of us will lead an evening’s exploration of some sort of prayer (prayer in the very broadest sense of the word), and provide a short reading for the group to read ahead of time.

I don’t know where to start. Help! I need suggestions and resources. What is prayer anyway? Why do it? And how do you pray — with words, or like Sister Barbara, without words?