Practicing the Presence of God
Ancient Testimony ~ Isaiah 59: 9-12
March 30, 2008
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

The texts today make promises that only we can keep.  We will be people who glow in the dark.  We will be people who restore the ruined.  We will be, as Rumi says, people who, wherever they go, make a great ceremony.  Tonight we will make a great ceremony about the joy we have in the cabaret and in Ruby Rims.  Be there.  But what about tomorrow?  That is sort of the question the Tuesday night service answers.  Most of us can cope on Sundays.  It is the Tuesdays that get to us.  The right-before-the-hump-days.  The days that occur before the ceremonies that carry us through.

This week, I asked an expert economist whether he thought the Wall Street situation was a crisis, an emergency, or a catastrophe.  He said it is an emergency on the edge of catastrophe.  Whether he is right or not, and he hopes he is not, many of us have had that bottomless feeling lately.  When will these worries stop?  Have we really sold the United States to China and to the war in Iraq?  Are we really looking at climate change over which we have no control, or that we choose not to officially exert control over?  We live in what Parker Palmer terms the “tragic gap,” the place between what we believe can be when all things work together for good and the reality of the moment.  We confront the distance between a world of grace and bounty, and a world fraught with anxiety.  Then, on Tuesdays and sometimes Sundays too, we live in the echo chamber of our own anxiety.

On top of the monkey of worry that is on our backs, and ever so much more threatening to people who already have credit card debt staring them in the face, there are real things that really bother us.   The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has so many death threats against him that he is under 24-hour, round-the-clock security. This situation has gone from crisis to emergency to possible catastrophe.  I know some of you think you don’t belong to that “Abomination,” the UCC.  Some kid coined that phrase for denominations and most of me likes the sound of it.  Some of you don’t even think you belong to the American Baptist “abomination.”  But guess what?  We do.  We may be post-denominational―in the sense of being a great mix of sources of institutional religion―but we are connected.  The fact that the UCC, one of our parent denominations, is now being investigated by the IRS, and that one of our leading pastors has death threats against him for the act of preaching, increases that “bottomless” feeling.  I am not always a fan of the President of the UCC, John Thomas.  But I can tell you now: he has done nothing since “preacher-gate” broke but support Trinity Church, a gorgeous institution, under terrible fire.  He is preaching there again this morning.

Then there are worries closer to home.  Real threat is different than worry.  But it causes worry as part of the way it does its deviltry.  Our sanctuary family, the Montrevils, have gone from crisis to emergency to near catastrophe as well. In the denial of Jean’s stay of deportation this week, the court has moved him ever closer to deportation.  While we can only imagine what it is like to be him, some of us know what it is like to be us.  There is a deepening helplessness after increasingly hard work, an uncertainty about what to do and what physical sanctuary might mean or do or be.  I want to congratulate our large task force and its leader, Katherine Hanson, for managing these external threats and internal worries with great wisdom―and lots of weekend time.

And then there is you and me and our embarrassing loneliness, or addiction, or unemployment, or underemployment.  We may have cashed in the dream of being an artist or whatever and work in a dead financial industry, too much of a cliché but too close to the bone for many of us.  We may not yet have become the artist/waiter cliché of our neighbors and friends, but we know the threat of that destination.

All of which reminds me of what Ruth Reichl said in a recent Gourmet magazine editorial (okay, now we all know what I do at night for fun―it is not reading scripture or policy statements):

We were in Italy, we were young, we kept ordering food.  It kept coming.  We became too frightened to ask for the bill so we ordered more food.  When the bill finally came, it was $3.00.

Ah, to be in Italy again.  Even young.  Heck, to be in Italy this afternoon instead of enduring a spring-deprived March in the Big Apple.  The wind chill is not just physical these days; it has developed a spiritual component.

We are the people who adored the food.  We are the people who got so afraid of the bill that we kept ordering more food.  When the bill came, it was not $3.00. 

So what is a Tuesday night antidote to this tall order that is going on our credit cards and is going to charge high interest?  I think one antidote is prayer, which I am going to define in a particular and peculiar way here.  Prayer practices the presence of God instead of the presence of worry.  One of the ways we pay taxes on this world and this social order is to let it get to us.  We let it take over our day thoughts and our night thoughts, our weekend and weekday thoughts.  We give it power way beyond what it really has. 

Prayer is the imagination of another kind of world than the one that thinks it owns us and controls us.  And prayer is not just for people who believe in God.  Prayer is more about trust than belief.  Belief is a word the punishmentalists use to keep us afraid of God.  God doesn’t use it.  God’s verbs are softer and less judgmental.  Love, comfort, forgive, just be, or if you can, be still―this is the kind of language we get from God.  Prayer is the habit of practicing the presence of God.  We practice in hopes that something like God would come close.  We can never pray right or address God right or be right.  Prayer starts in that great perplexity.  It is just a habit, just a leaning toward a trusting posture.  It is not just for those who imagine themselves good, or even for the sort of good.  It is especially not for the self-righteous side of believers.  Prayer is for the committed imperfectionist. 

Prayer turns everything into a ceremony.  It repairs what is ruined.  It glows in the dark―and not from radiation, although radiating is a part of its practice.

Prayer is a simple way to live in crisis, emergency, even catastrophe.  It changes the weather in the place where you live.  It takes the chill out of the wind.

When we pray as people who believe maybe, or kind of believe and sort of don’t, when we pray as the average Joe or Jane on bended knee, we make “tentativity” a high art.  Like tents compare to houses, our tentativity compares to certainty.  One is small, the other large; one is fluid, the other solid.  Of course solid people can pray solid prayers.  Mazel Tov!  Many cannot.  In their name, this suggestion about practicing the presence of God instead of the monkey of worry is given.

In prayer, we can lean toward a time and space that is alone yet accompanied.  We can at least stop the merry-go-round and get off it for a moment.  We can find the quiet corner in the loud party and there look and listen.  We can at least articulate what it is that we want.  Like a houseplant that bends toward the light because it doesn’t know how not to, we can say what it is we want and need.  If God is listening, great.  If God is not listening, at least we have spoken.

The Chinese spiritual practice of T’ai Chi imitates the way of water.  It acts without forcing.  So does prayer.  God will not be controlled or manipulated and that is the good news about God.  We pray to pray.  That’s it.  If God is listening, great. If not, who cares?  Prayer needs less of God and more of self.  It requires the articulation of the now moment in the eternal flow; God may or may not care.  We do.

Prayer is a Sabbath from the practice of worry and the necessity of obligation and commitment.  It is release from people- and God-pleasing, time off from something we are supposed to do for other people or their internalized, imagined punishing God.  Prayer is down-time, off-time, focused-time.  It is something we do for ourselves, not for God.  It is a drop of rest in a sea of blessed unrest.

Prayer is a decision to move out of time on behalf of time.  Spotted in the New York Times was this quote: “While walking past the Madison Avenue Baptist Church on East 21st Street, I noticed a message on the outdoor bulletin board, ‘Lord give me patience and make it snappy.’”  This good joke about prayer joins my other favorite projection, which happened while standing at the bedside of a dying patient. I asked if she would mind if I prayed.  She said, “No, not at all, if it helps you.”  The manipulations around prayer are constant.  That is why sin is so frequently defined as being stuck in the narrow place.  Here I am talking about prayer in an open place, to an open God, from an open person.  This is prayer that opens space, repairs ruins, glows in the dark, creates ceremonies.  There is very little manipulation of God possible anyway, so why not leave it out of prayer, except for its important place in the jokes?

Carl Jung kept a solid bronze plaque on the wall outside his office in Zurich which said, “Bidden or Not Bidden, God is Present.”  (Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus, Deus Aderit.)  I don’t completely agree.  I think that is possible, but not certain.  My prayers here are not sneaky ways to get you to recognize God.  Instead, they open the door on the possibility that the spiritual taxes we practice in obeisance to the fear-mongering of the social order might be better spent.

Here is my hunch: prayer is, as Robert Frost defines a poem, just a “momentary stay against confusion.”  Prayer is more a poem than prose, more creative non-fiction than fiction.   Instead of “O My God, they’re going to take Jean,” we pray, “God take care of Jean.  We’ll help.  Amen.”

Elie Wiesel, the great praying Jew who was in a concentration camp, also gives permission to pray freely without expectation: 

Why should God need our prayer?  Why should God need our flattery?  How come God is not repulsed by all that?...  God does not need our prayers.  We need them.  We need to be able to pray with sincerity and with beauty.  And the prayer should not be against somebody but always for somebody.  That is a true prayer, when it is for someone else, not yourself.¹

I’m sure Wiesel is right about the flattery part and less sure that we can’t pray for ourselves.  Jung thought we smuggled our biography into everything and I think we also smuggle our biography into prayer.

How dare we pray if we don’t believe?  Do we use God if we pray without belief?  I think not.  We (just) pray.  We pray the ancient prayer, “God I believe, Help my unbelief.”  We go as far as we can, and then we stop.  Prayer is first the act of stopping.  Then it is the act of speaking.  Prayer is the caesura in the music; it is a little wiggle between the notes that says stop, already.  Let the silence give life to the noise.  Let reflection grant meaning to action. 

Praying can be nothing more than a momentary stay against confusion.  It can also be something the heart does when it can do no more.  Prayer is the articulation of the self’s highest and higher order, and sometimes it is for the “Other,” and often it is for our smuggled self.

Prayer is not the capturing of God for our own needs.  Whenever I am asked to pray in public, I say,  “God who is beyond any name by which we imprison you, God whom some know as Spirit, others as Jesus, others as Christ, others as Yahweh, or Ruach, or Breath, still others as Allah, yet others as Force or Divine, release us from the foolishness of thinking we know your name.”  That is the starting place of prayer.  It starts when we acknowledge that we don’t know God and yet need someone to talk to who is not human, who is human plus, or human Other.  Prayer is a human leaning toward whatever it is that God is or is not.  Prayer is a human in full tilt boogie awareness that there is more to life than itself.

Prayer repairs what is ruined.  It is the first stop on the road to action and restoration of a real world where preachers are threatened with life, not death, where ceremonies abound and the dark is so well lit that people wonder if a new day has come upon us.

^{1Literature and Belief, Volume 26, no.1}