Nancy E Petty
Chuck Korte
Cathy Tamsberg
Pullen Memorial Baptist Church
July 29, 2007 – Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Taizé Service
Prayer in Words
Nancy E. Petty
By nature I am an extrovert. And as a rule of thumb, extroverts like to talk. Rarely, am I at a loss of words whether I have something to say or not. This somewhat unbecoming tendency of mine often shows up in my prayer life. When I pray, I do a lot of talking to God. My prayer usually goes something like this: “God if you will only get me out of this mess I’ll do better next time.” “God, the last time I spoke with you I know I said I would do better but here I am again. Can you help me out just one more time?” “God I know I said I wouldn’t ask for any more favors but this one is different.” OR on occasion my prayer may go: “God, thank-you, thank-you, thank-you…thank you for getting me through that sermon.” Someone once said that prayers come in two categories: help me, help me, help me, and thank you, thank you, thank you. For many years, I was stuck between the “help me” and “thank you” mode of praying. Even as my understanding of God and how God acts in the world and my theology of prayer changed I would still find myself talking to God in these comforting and familiar ways.
From my earliest years growing up in church I was taught that it was my Christian duty to talk to God. I was to “lay my burdens down” at the feet of Jesus. I was to tell God what I longed for and what troubled me. From Sunday school teachers and preachers I heard the message that there wasn’t anything that I couldn’t say to God. And so I used my words to talk to God—to tell God what I needed and when I was scared. I prayed for relief in the form of things, people and jobs. I asked for what I thought I wanted. And sometimes I would even beg for a specific outcome to life’s problems. I prayed for my friends when they were sick or in trouble. And I believed that God was listening and that my prayers would make a difference. I believed, because I was taught, that prayer was talking to God and any “good” Christian prayed at least once a day. And so, I prayed talking to God as though I am talking to you right now.
Then somewhere along the way I got the notion that talking to God was a less than mature way to understand prayer. God had larger problems to deal with like world hunger, evil, and war. In the grand scheme of things my concerns were minor and really I shouldn’t bother God with my pettiness. After all, did I really believe that God was a God who intervened on my behalf to solve my life dilemmas that most of the time I brought on myself? In my head I knew God was not a God who heard the prayers of some and intervened and heard the prayers of others and didn’t. The concept of a personal meddling god just didn’t seem like a healthy theology that I needed to keep engaging in. So, for a while I stopped talking to God—I stopped using words to communicate with God and started practicing other forms of prayer. And while I could feel a deepening within as I sat silently or sang a Taizé song I still felt a longing to speak to God—to “lay my burdens down” by telling God what troubled me.
So, like the Psalmists, I have continued to talk to God—just like I am talking to you. Daily, I speak out loud my concerns and my joys. I pray for the people I love and care about. When I say to one of you that I will pray for you, I pray for you with my words. But there is a difference in what I say. I no longer ask God for specific things like… for the report to come back cancer free or for that new job to come through or for a good sermon. Most of the time, I still acknowledge that I long for those things. But when I speak to God now, I pray for things of the spirit: for compassion, strength, and guidance. I use my words to pray for God’s spirit to sustain me and you when the world sucks and to grace us with humility and generosity and love. And nowadays, more often than not, my prayers are answered.
I am reminded that Jesus taught us to pray, with words, saying: “Our God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”
Prayers of Silence
Chuck Korte
It is a little surprising to me to be standing before you today to share my experiences of silent prayer, or what we might call listening prayer - sitting silently in god’s presence. For in fact, this has been a form of prayer that has for me been more of a struggle than a success over the years. My mind is usually pretty busy asking, and being dubious about - is this working? Is it doing anything for me? Am I hearing god or sensing god’s presence? But when I was asked to share my thoughts on silent prayer, I knew that it was because I have recently spent a week in silent retreat at Mepkin Abbey , a Trappist monastery in South Carolina and that it was a very wonderful week of significant spiritual renewal and a time of my feeling god’s presence very strongly.
There are others at Pullen whom it would be good to hear from about their significant and long term experiences of silent prayer and others who have been to Mepkin Abbey , but here I am, with my story.
Let me start by sharing with you the different ways by which I have tried over the years to practice silent prayer.
1. Like many people at Pullen, I have sometimes worked to develop an effective practice of sitting meditation - sometimes eyes open, sometimes eyes closed, sometimes focusing on just my breathing, or just on a word or phrase. One thing I found very helpful were various images of the peacefulness, stillness, and emptiness that I was seeking in this silence. The trick is to do this without falling asleep!
2. I have spent some time in a centering prayer group, which I found fit me very well. It helps me a lot when I am praying and meditating with other people and I find the use of a repeated short phrase very helpful for opening up to god’s presence. Pullen’s spiritual life group, of which I am a member, opens its meetings with an extended period of silent prayer which I find very helpful.
3. I cannot resist sharing the most unusual method of silent prayer I have experienced, the teaching stick, which I probably do not recommend. I experienced this during a 24 hour retreat at a beautiful Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan. The teaching stick is carried by a roving monk in the meditation room who is watching those in prayer for any signs of our tilting from the upright position we were supposed to maintain. Any tilting would result in a pretty strong whack on the back from the stick. What I didn’t know was that short term pilgrims, like myself, always got a souvenir whack during their final meditation - it did sting but there was no fear of my falling asleep while meditating at that monastery.
4. Now for wonderful Mepkin Abbey. My week last month at Mepkin was a time of total immersion into silence, worship, and prayer. I went with John Hilpert, plus there were eight other retreatants, but time there is spent on your own, in daily worship, and in silence, which, by the way, even includes mealtimes. Mepkin is a beautiful place on the cooper river, with gardens, a library, an outdoor labyrinth, and beautiful, beautiful grounds. I participated in all the daily worship services, even though they begin at 3:20 am. I found the worship to be lovely and moving and was always eager to get back to the church for each service.
So what did I learn about silent prayer at Mepkin?
First. It takes a lot of work to still the mind and brush away all the distractions of our lives. Special places like Mepkin are a great help in centering your heart and mind on god’s presence and on the very gentle nudgings from god that are normally so hard to notice. We each probably can find such places nearer to home - a walk in the woods, Pullen Church, a local retreat facility like cedar cross.
Second . My week at Mepkin helped me remember all the different ways that god can speak to us or by which we can sense god’s presence.
* I feel I am better now at sensing god through the beauties of nature - a star-filled night, soaring clouds, beautiful birds, a flowing river, a lovely flower.
* I have always found music to be a powerful way of centering myself in god and sensing god’s presence in me.
* The most unforgettable experience of hearing from god within my lifetime so far occurred in a dream, something else we should keep in mind.
* And finally, I learned at Mepkin to pay more attention to the thoughts that just pop into my head. This is a tricky area - where do these thoughts come from? - but I believe if we are very careful, we can sometimes sense when these thoughts are very important to pay attention to and may even be god talking to us.
So I did learn a lot and experienced a lot at Mepkin and plan to go back there on a regular basis. The challenges of silent prayer are still hard work for me, but I now feel more clearly that god is there in the silence and that sometimes we really can quiet ourselves enough to hear that soft brush of god’s whisper.
Prayer in Action
Cathy Tamsberg
On some days—probably my best days, I come into this sanctuary shortly after arriving at work and sit in the balcony. I chose that spot because it lets me look at Jesus in our stained glass windows at eye level. Like many of you, I wish we had some women in our windows and I relish the current conversation about how to add female lines and images to this space. But Jesus—this image of Jesus—has become an icon for me. I gaze at him eye-to-eye and wonder, “Who were you? Who are you?” As much as I dislike the popularized “WWJD—What would Jesus do?” with all of the theology and commercialism attached to it, that is probably my fundamental faith question. So I look at that face and ask, “What WOULD you do if you had my life and my job in this church in the complex world of the 21st century?”
Those are the days when my prayers follow a contemplative mode. But on many more days and in many more settings, I believe my actions are prayers. When I greet the people lined up for lunches and a bus ticket at the back door on a weekday afternoon; when I go back down there for the third or fourth or fifth time in a single day or take yet another phone call from someone who wants financial help; when I attend meetings of groups trying to address community needs; when I stand with some of you to read the names of Americans and Iraqis killed in the war; when we took our In Our Own Back Yard youth to the warehouses of Stop Hunger Now and the Interfaith Food Shuttle so they could help feed hungry people; even, and perhaps especially, when I talk with one of you about how you can get more deeply engaged in outreach, I am praying. That is, if I do these things with patience and humility and compassion. Then I believe these actions are prayers. They are prayers for a just and loving world, that God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven. They are my way of doing what I believe Jesus would do.
I have spent the last fifteen years trying to be more contemplative. I hope those of you for whom that comes naturally appreciate it as the gift I know it is. But because of genes or practice or personality, I am drawn to action. And I am making peace with my struggle to be better at meditative prayer by understanding that more often than not, my actions are my best prayers.
This week I’ve been viewing videos about Coventry Cathedral in preparation for our pilgrimage to Coventry in October. With the DVD player in my office, I learned the story of the rebuilding of the Cathedral after it was bombed by the Germans in World War II as I packed lunches for the back door ministry. In a service to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of that war, the congregation at Coventry sang a hymn to the lovely tune “Danny Boy.” It reflects my understanding of action as worship and prayer:
O sister, come, fold to thy heart thy brother,
Where mercy dwells the peace of God is there;
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.
For God whom Jesus loved has truly spoken,
The holier worship God desires to bless
Restores the lost, and binds the spirit broken,
And feeds the widow and the fatherless.
Yes, each kindly deed is a prayer.
Yet if I am serious about trying to do what Jesus would do, praying through action doesn’t get me off the hook. Our scripture text today describes Jesus teaching his disciples how to pray with words. And all the gospels note the many times Jesus left his healing or teaching or feeding to be alone and pray. So I know that when I plead for healing for a loved one or for insight in making a decision, that is prayer. When I come into this sanctuary and gaze at Jesus, or experience the silence of the woods broken only by the song of a bird, that is prayer. And when I use my time and intellect and energy with love to meet the needs of others, that is prayer as well.