"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." And after that recitation, I, in all my childhood innocence, kneeling at the side of my bed, would ask for a blessing for each of a litany of names of those I loved and cared about (my mother and father, my dog and cat, my aunts and uncles and grandparents, my friends and teachers), and those I'd heard about who were suffering, like the children in post World War II Europe and Japan.

It was a basic, a primary expression, from my heart. A deep yearning to protect and to be protected, to be approved of, and to be loved, from my heart and from my growing Moral Self (my Super Ego)---that conscious part of me that was learning about the norms and rules of my family and culture, and how they had to be followed and obeyed if I was going to be a good boy, and grow up to be a good man. In my own childish way, I was fulfilling St. Augustine¹s prescription: "True, whole prayer is nothing but love." St. Augustine of Hippo who lived in North Africa in the third century of the first millennium AD. St. Augustine, who for all his faults we UUs catalog, not the least of which was a deep-seated misogyny, still, a human like the rest of us, a man who struggled with his desire to love---and finally, a man who came to know love's power and centrality in our hearts.

"True, whole prayer is nothing but love." What Augustine is telling us is that when we are truly praying, we are loving; and this points to what is equally true: when we love, we are in fact praying. Love calls us to wish the very best for the ones we love. Love opens us to the ones we love so that their radiance is evident to us. Love renders all our defenses and our arguments and our criticism mute and useless. Love connects us so thoroughly, we would, if called, give our life for the other. Practically expressed in daily life, love manifests most commonly and powerfully through kindness---the tender, attentive gesture of care. All of that is what prayer is about, according to the North African Saint. It is about loving.

Prayer, then, is possible and profitable for anyone, whether they are theist or atheist or agnostic, Pagan or Christian or Jew---because prayer is an intentional act in which we welcome a consciousness of love. Larry Dossey, physician, pragmatist, researcher makes it clear when he asserts that here, now, in the twenty-first century, it is time to reevaluate our theories about prayer. Prayer does not have to be bound to an image of a Supreme Being, it can be, as Augustine discovered long before modern times, the expression of, the dwelling in, love. As with our children---who express a simple wish for harmony, for the safety of those they care about, for the world in which we all live---to sit down in something we call prayer can be an opportunity to develop our capacity to pay attention in love, to pay attention with intention to the deeper wishes and beliefs that run in the underground rivers of our psyches. It is my assertion that it is good to make our deepest wishes known, to make our deepest loves known, to make what we most deeply believe in, known---even if it brings us into conflict with others in our lives, even if it brings us face to face with what we fear, even if it exposes deep desires and yearnings that we have for years kept in the closet of our unconscious, locked and bolted behind the thick door called denial.

Consider this. It can be that in prayer, both silent and spoken, with nothing before us but the raw openness of the moment of our lives, we can see our inner landscape with stunning clarity; we can hear the voice of the child we once were wishing/hoping/praying in a way that is deeper than the power of the adult voice we now use; we can touch the palpable, breathing goodness of life and of our selves that is usually so elusive. Prayer doesn't have to have anything to do with groveling before some all powerful judgmental being. Nor does it have to have anything to do with abdicating one's integrity and personal authority. Nor does it have to have anything to do with some wishful beseeching after magical solutions to needs and desires---no matter how legitimate they may be. Instead, prayer can be an opportunity, the opportunity that we rarely take, to look deeply into ourselves, and to open ourselves for clarity, for understanding, for strength, for compassion, for peace.

To pray is to express an intent, an intent to be real, an intent to let it all hang out, an intent to let go of the busyness of our lives, and focus on something deeper, more central, more compelling. And doing that, we are called into speaking, even if it is only with our hearts, and out of our pain---speaking with words that may originate in the unintelligible, may even remain inarticulate---but it is an expression that comes right out of our very beings.

It is the same kind of expression that we can feel when we abandon ourselves to dance, or song, or love-making, or work that we love. It is the abandon that is key. The giving of ourselves so intently, that we step out of our selves, and our usual concerns and preoccupations.

And when we do this, when we undertake such a radical act of vulnerability, we open the gates to the Sacred. Big words, big thoughts, to be sure, but Larry Dossey argues that when we enter a state of meditation or prayer we expand our physical locality in both time and space. He uses the term "nonlocal" to describe the dynamics as well as the effects of prayer. Dossey's conception affirms the beliefs many UU's share that Divinity resides within, that the real locus of sacred awareness lives within us---and is a sure and trustworthy guide, if we but learn to open to it. Dossey delineates five major differences between traditional Western prayer and a modern conception of prayer. One of them is what he calls "spatial characteristics."

Traditional Western Model

Prayer is "sent" elsewhere, usually to a Supreme Being who is "out there." This external entity then relays the prayer to its object. This is God as communications satellite.

A Modern Model

There is no place for prayer to go because it is inherently ³nonlocal²---i.e. it is infinite in space and (he also argues) time, it takes us into ourselves, and it connects us, in a very deep sensibility, through what we UUs would call the "interdependent web of all existence," in very real ways, with all of life. Moreover, if "the Queendom/Kingdom of Heaven is within"---which is the "Divine within" concept that is part of most of the world's religious traditions---one cannot in principle pray to an entity exclusively outside one's Self.

So, in Dossey's and many other modern religious thinkers¹ views, prayer is directed toward, and from, the within---and it is done simultaneously. It is a paradox, the like of which has just the kind of edge, originality and depth to deflect superficial criticism and call us to more significant and meaningful reasoning and understanding about the phenomena of prayer. The expression of what we might call prayerful intentions implodes toward some center in us that is connected to anything and everything in the universe. And this is not just theoretical talk. Those who have explored the rarefied and rich world of prayer, in this non-local definition, attest to its concrete reality, to its gritty, life-changing power.

The center, within us, which is the cauldron for this communication fission is one of the sacred places of the world. Hidden in the human heart, at the fourth Chakra, where many religious traditions claim prayer is truly to be located, or also lodged near the Pineal gland, at the seventh Chakra, or perhaps circulating between them like the orbit of the elements of an atom, or a solar system---each of us houses one of the universe¹s most sacred places. That is what the sacred in prayer is all about. Entering into that inner domain where silence dwells and thrives, so that the expression we do make can be clean and direct, from an inner place of creativity---the intricacy, depth and beauty of which causes our intellects to falter, and then expand.

All of this is wonderfully metaphorical, but for me, as you probably know, metaphor is one of the most precise of linguistic instruments for deciphering reality. Our deciphering, however, is only able to point the directions toward which our hungering intellects and spirits might travel. Ultimately, in order to travel within to discern truths, we must be stripped naked of many of our usual investigative tools. Certainly we can take no electronic equipment, nor lenses, nor tools of chemical analysis; we can, however, take our powers of observation, and minds freed from ideology (whether religious or scientific, cultural or familial), as well as hearts rendered into openness by the depth and truth of our desire and passion. And doing so we are given the opportunity to both perceive and receive the living textures and energies of the inner landscape so few of us know anything about. And then when we "return," we can describe our experience with well wrought metaphor.

So . . . Love. Silence. Nonlocal Expression. The Sacred. All of these are dimensions involved in the phenomena we call authentic prayer. And those elements, those dimensions make up a rich field of forms of prayer. Richard J. Foster, Quaker theologian, [in this morning's reading] delineates twenty-one separate categories of prayer. He also says, "Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of the spiritual life." That is a conception that excites me, that riles my inner yearning for understanding and contact-slash-experience of the Divine. In the end, however, whoever, or whatever is the fundamental recipient, arbitrator or mediator, of our prayers depends upon how we conceive/experience the universe, and whether there is something that is imminent, or transcendent, or both, or nonexistent.

For myself, I have no definitive answer about why I pray. I only know I must, it is like breathing. And, along with poet Marge Piercey, I feel with each passing day, more palpably, the strength of the Mystery. Certainly one of the great blessings of being a Unitarian Universalist in the 21st century is that the spiritual field is open.

For myself, however, as wide as the possibilities are, there is a discipline that I practice. I have made, and continue to make, a commitment to move with conviction and care through some very specific life experiences, and that movement frames a life I understand more and more to be a life lived in prayer. I commit to "move" with:

The impulses of my spirit as it hungers---and as it exclaims, "Ah Ha!" and "Yes!"

The dictates of the world in which I live (including the people with whom I am in relationship) that call me to show up on time and to do my share of the work to be done, and to offer my self authentically.

The yearning I have to be known, that includes but extends beyond the need for attention from other humans, extends into feeling known in, of and by the Mystery in all its radiant strength.

The felt need for a disciplined exploration of my inner life, my heart and soul landscape---that leads me to practice meditation, prayer, dance, art, study and research, and to engage in good conversation.

The fire I feel to live in the heart of a prophetic sensibility, and at the edge of its commands to challenge the status quo.

The response of gratitude for the great blessings of life that flow to me so continuously, in small and large forms, in astounding and unexpected ways.

And, finally, I commit to move with the promptings of love, love that calls me to care for others, that opens my heart to them, that fires my creativity in all the ways that I live and move and have my being.

In the prayer, living in my heart at this moment, feeling the life in this room, the energy of it, the wild outrageous beauty of it, in all the wonderful particularity of each of you, and all the vital power of this interwoven community; and up against the words of Dom Chapman, in one of our centering thoughts for today, "To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world."---in the midst and in the face of all of that, I ask:

May you find a discipline that allows you to come to grips with that disorder, the disorder of hate, the disorder of violence, the disorder of greed, the disorder of disabling despair, the disorder of too much comfort.

May you find yourself, more and more, rising up against the disorder of the world, and may it bring you gratitude, may it still the craziness, may it quench your thirst for truth.

May you find a path that opens your heart, regularly, to love and to the bigness of being that calls you to give, more than you believed possible.

May you find a way to peace, for if there is any gift that prayer, that meditation, that silence may give to us, it is peace.

May it all be yours.

Ashé-Amen-Ameen. Shalom. Blessed Be.
Gracias y Namasté.

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