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The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost One of the things that seminarians are required to do as part of their out-of-the-classroom training is to complete a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education, CPE for short. For most of us that means spending a summer as a hospital chaplain intern, seeing patients, praying with them providing pastoral support for both patients and their families, and participating in group work to process our experiences. CPE is a little bit like trial by fire—and one of the hardest parts is for many of us was coming to grips with prayer. Praying with people was our job, and as people preparing for ministry we thought we knew something about prayer. But we quickly learned that whatever we thought we knew or understood about prayer would be tested and tried and pushed to its limits. And what I discovered in this process was that none of my easy explanations of what prayer was for or did worked anymore. I spent weeks trying to make sense of it all, but the conclusion that I finally came to that summer is this: I don’t understand prayer—when all is said and done prayer remains a mystery. Now when I first said that to someone who was raised Roman Catholic, he said, “That what the nuns said when they didn’t have an answer for a question--it's a mystery!” And I suppose saying that prayer is a mystery could look like the same sort of cop out, but I don’t think it is. For me, accepting the idea that prayer is a mystery allows me to pray more freely than I could when I thought had it all figured out. There is, I believe, nothing so fundamental to the life of people of faith as prayer. In our corporate worship we join in prayers to praise God and to ask God’s blessings for ourselves and others. As a parish we regularly pray with for forgiveness, for healing, for strength, for patience. In our private prayers we ask for guidance, for God’s presence in our lives and for help in living as God would have us live, lives more fully grounded in God. Prayer is our means of maintaining a connection with God and as Episcopalians with a rich prayer book tradition, prayer is where and how we ground our theology, frame our worship, and express our beliefs. And still prayer remains a mystery. As fundamental as it is to our lives, in many ways, there is nothing harder than prayer. Prayer requires us to open ourselves up, to bare our souls to God, and to let go of our need to be in control. At times, rather than being a source of peace and comfort, prayer can raise our anxiety levels. We wonder if we are praying enough, if we are we doing it “right”. We wonder what should we pray for and what it means when our prayers aren’t answered or at least not answered as we’d like them to be. We wonder if prayer still matters in our 21st century world. Our questions about prayer are as ancient as the practice of prayer itself, and some of them are easier to answer than others. In today’s gospel, Jesus gives us one answer to the “how” questions when his disciples say, “Lord, teach us to pray…” As faithful Jews, the lives, of Jesus’ followers would’ve been grounded in prayer, and in their time as disciples, traveling with Jesus, they certainly witnessed him taking time to pray, grounding his life in that prayer in between times of intense ministry and yet, they still had questions, they still wanted instruction in prayer. Jesus responded by teaching his disciples a prayer, the universality and persistence of which attest to its power. The Lord’s Prayer Jesus taught them provides us with a wonderful model of prayer, and our tradition is rich with hundreds and thousands of others, prayers which have poured from the hearts of the mothers and fathers of the early church and the multitude of the faithful who have come after them, helping to answer the question of how we pray. Scripture and tradition give us reasons WHY we pray as well: We pray because God asks us to. We pray because we spring from a long tradition of prayer, a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of the people of Israel and witnessed over and over in scripture. We pray because Jesus himself modeled a life of prayer, prayer than connected him with God and sustained him throughout his ministry. We pray because prayer connects us to something larger than ourselves, to both God and community. Those are perfectly good reasons to pray, but in our modern and postmodern world, this leaves the most niggling and bothersome question of all—does prayer do any good? Even for people of great faith, it’s hard NOT to ask that question because we live in a world in which science tells us that there is a rational explanation for everything, a world that we understand to operate on the principles of natural law. What then do we understand prayer to do? This is the question I struggled with during my CPE summer. During that summer I prayed with desperately ill patients. I saw some get well, and some die. I saw some face their illnesses with incredible grace, and others—well not so much. I saw situations that would make me want to cry out, why God? This just isn’t fair. If prayer really worked, how could things be so awful? But through it all I kept praying, not having any idea of whether my prayers or anyone else’s made any difference. I kept praying when I might have otherwise stopped, because it was my job to pray. I kept praying and the more I prayed the less I understood what I was praying for. But somewhere along the line I began to accept that my role in praying was not to understand what my prayers or anyone else’s did. Rather my role was to be willing to enter into the mystery of prayer and to entrust the outcome to God. And that was enough. In some way that I could not articulate then or now, I knew that my doing so mattered, that my prayers and those of my colleagues mattered—to the people we prayed for, but even more importantly, to God. And therein lies the mystery. I don’t know how our prayers work or what God does with our prayers; but I do know that our prayers matter and that God works through the mystery, and I have to trust in God’s work even when the outcome isn’t what I’d like it to be. When we give our prayers to God, it is a bit like letting go of a helium balloon. We let go, and we let them to where they will, knowing hat we cannot control what God does with our prayers. But we can trust that God receives them and that they matter. It’s a mystery, but in a way it’s a wonderful mystery, a deep mystery, one that I invite your to join me in. AMEN
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