Sermon
Many, I'll venture to say most, Unitarian Universalists do not like to pray. We aren't adverse to contemplation, meditation, journal writing, visualization, dream interpretation, or even table blessings but just don't ask us to pray! If you are ill or in crisis, I'll keep you in my thoughts and hold a desire for your recovery but please don't ask me to beg God on your behalf for help.

Thinking about prayer reminds me of a Unitarian fellow who was a Big Brother and took a little 6-year-old boy fishing with him one day. They put out the line and then went up to the cabin. After an hour, they went back down to the river to see if they had caught anything. Sure enough, there were several fish on the line. The boy said, "I knew we would catch something." The man asked, "How did you know?" He replied, "Because I prayed about it." So they baited the hooks again and put out the line and went back to the cabin for supper. Afterward, they went back to the river; again, there were fish on the line. The boy said, "I knew it." The man said, "How?" "I prayed again." So they put the line back into the river and went to the cabin. Before bedtime, they went down again. This time there were no fish. The child said, "I knew there wouldn't be" and the man asked, "How did you know?" The boy said, "Because I didn't pray this time." The man asked, "And why didn't you pray?" And the boy said, "Because I remembered that we forgot to bait the hooks.[1]"

Prayer aversive Unitarian Universalists don't like to pray because they don't believe in a God who listens to prayer and answers it. The Universe is governed by immutable laws. Physics rules - not God. Look at all the suffering in the world! Many of these suffering people pray for relief and get none. Or more personally they remember, "I prayed long ago for healing and felt abandoned when my faith proved empty of results." Many UU's see pastoral purveyors of prayer as praying mantis using their pious stance as a ruse to capture their dinner.

I know prayer phobia well since it lives within me. My scientific rationalist upbringing and academic training fills me with defensive suspicion when someone wants to pray--particularly in an interfaith gathering. I have to turn on my universal translator to sift though the theistic language in which most prayers are couched as I search for meaning I can affirm in the speaker's words.

And in this defensive place, I have heard prayers which have moved me, opened me and healed me. I use some prayers in my own religious life which kindle my passion and love, and cultivate my sense of commitment and devotion. My life experience and my theological training has got my feet planted in both worlds.

My motivation for discussing prayer this morning comes from listening to taped lectures by Caroline Myss who is a medical intuitive. Medical intuitives are individuals who are able to diagnose illnesses without the benefit of medical technology or even having the patient physically present before them. Myss' intuitive gift has been rigorously tested by Dr. C. Norman Shealy, a courageous doctor willing to explore this western medical frontier, and he has carefully validated her ability.

In developing this ability, Myss discovered that along with the impressions she received about a patient's illness she also intuited information about dysfunction in the patient's energetic system. She intuited locked in patterns of thinking and behavior which were making the patient vulnerable to illness. She could sense the emotional traumas, unhealed physical injuries and self destructive adaptations wired into the patient's mind which prevented the body from healing itself.

Because of my own experience with physical illness and trauma and with the capacity of the mind to participate in the healing of the body, I found her work both stimulating and validating of what I already knew about the mind body connection--but also quite challenging. Myss comes from a Roman Catholic background and frames her understanding of what she calls "energy anatomy" theistically. God is the one who works through her senses and reveals the information. She passionately believes it is our closing ourselves off and turning away from God that brings on our suffering.

Myss' ideas, powerfully presented on the audio tape, are striking but hardly unusual. Diagnosing and healing the sick has been practiced since before the dawn of recorded history. The techniques she recommends are not new as she draws heavily on both Eastern and Western thought and practice. Too often people are dazzled by the healing magic and miss the timeless wisdom. Remember, Jesus got much of his notoriety during his ministry not from his teaching but from his reported capacity as a healer.

Another healer I've been reading about is the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy who shares many ideas with Myss. Mary Baker Eddy has a lot in common with Unitarianism too as she grew up in Boston during the heyday of Transcendentalism. She met many of Boston's great 19^th century thinkers as they came to visit her father.

Eddy was a sickly woman who experienced spontaneous healing while reading the Bible in 1866 at the age of 45. By studying the Bible, she was led to the belief that only the mind is real and the material world is subordinate to it. She believed our minds can completely control our health. If we disbelieve in illness we can cure it. While we today are likely to see her view has important limitations especially with broken bones and an appendicitis , she had some powerful insights into the nature of psychosomatic illness.

The reason I'm mentioning both these women this morning is because both Myss and Eddy share a belief that healing comes from an attunement to the divine which comes through prayer. It is their challenge to our understanding of prayer I bring before you this morning.

These women do not champion vending machine prayers that view God as an Automat. They do not advocate prayer bribes buttering up God telling her how wonderful she is while trying to coax her to give you what you want. They are just as critical as many of us would be of the kind of praying done by a particular backsliding hunter who skipped church one Sunday morning during deer hunting season. He got separated from his buddies in the thick overgrowth of the forest and when he found the path again, he looked ahead of him and saw a great big bear. The bear growled and came running toward him. Instantly he regretted not loading his shotgun a little earlier. As he looked around for an escape route, he saw a couple of bear cubs playing near by. "I'm in trouble now," he thought. He could see he wasn't going to be able to outrun the bear so in desperation he got down on his knees and began praying. He pleaded with God to step in and do something. He opened his eyes and to his amazement the bear kneeling a few feet away from him. "Brother Bear," said the relieved hunter, "my prayers are answered! I see the Lord has spoken to you and brought you to him this very day." The bear looked back a little confused and said, "I don't know what you're doing on your knees but I'm saying grace."

Self serving, ego centered prayer is of limited value. The Psalms in the Bible are full of pleas for rescue from the hands of enemies and disease which may bring comfort yet miss the most meaningful form of prayer which to ask for nothing but to be directed in the service of life. The kind of healing prayer Myss and Eddy advocate are ones which open us to receive and do the will of God. The key to healing isn't suppression of disease using the metaphor of battle but rather an intimate familiarity with the disease, a listening attentively without fear, which allows the path of healing to arise spontaneously into awareness. In Eddy's words, "Prayer cannot change the Science of being, but it tends to bring us into harmony with it.[2]" The miraculous already resides within us.

I think we may have the paradigm wrong. We commonly have understood the nature of health as a castle that needs fortified walls to ward off disease. I like better the vision of the body as a finely tuned living system with many levels of defenses which work together harmoniously to ward off illness. Our vulnerability isn't the weakness of the walls which can defend us but the responsiveness and stability of the complex relationships within the body coordinated by our minds. We have amazing unrealized capacities for healing built into our biology we are only beginning to understand.

For all the rigidity and destructive denial within Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy brought to us a powerful understanding about how minds held captive to fear can work against the organic processes already within us able to bring healing. As research into the mind body connection expands we are seeing just how much our minds participate in controlling our health and healing.

I heard a wonderful interview on New Dimensions radio with Peggy Huddleston, a psychotherapist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has developed a great system to help people prepare for surgery. Her mind body techniques allow people to feel calmer before surgery, have less pain afterwards, recover and heal faster. She has worked with women having major abdominal surgery who greatly reduced their need for narcotic pain medication and were able to leave the hospital days earlier.

In her book she quotes a study by Dr. David McClelland, a Harvard psychologist, and an influential scientist in the field of motivational psychology. He was one of the first to study how care, compassion and altruism enhanced the immune system. When he had students watch a video tape of Mother Theresa, they found it increased secretions of an antibody in the saliva that protects against colds. When the students viewed a film about Attila the Hun, their antibody levels dropped[3].

Access to levels of consciousness which affect health may not be easy for those of us accustomed to living in the world of ideas and symbolic thinking. The processes of the body reside in ancient parts of our brain that our cerebral cortex thinks it has tamed. The home of our autonomic functions and our emotions are also very sophisticated but don't usually express themselves in words. They speak to us by changing our heart rate, inserting extra adrenaline, or prostaglandin, or endorphins into the blood stream to get our attention--usually much faster than a word can appear on our lips.

I believe this is an error that has crept into liberal religion and I discover in myself. We have developed an over-reliance on rational discourse as the way truth is transmitted from mind to mind. The truth of shared experience often cannot be captured in words but its truth force is just as real and life sustaining as a sentence or paragraph. How can one verbalize the healing power of loving touch to restore a feeling of self worth critical to our health? The healing power of laughter was popularized by Norman Mailer? The vibration of harmonic sounds and uplifting music which can calm the troubled mind and restore the spirit? Healing has a great many more dimensions than the lexicon of knife and pill.

Prayer is one of these tools reaching beyond the edge of language deep into the mind and perhaps beyond it. A prayer, different from an inspirational story, a stimulating poem or meditation calls us to acknowledge and reach beyond our limited, mortal ego-self and step into the eternal stream of being. God, the Force, Spirit of Life, the interdependent web, are some of the many labels for the living reality from which we came, in which we live and to which we return upon death.

The fundamental error of human consciousness is to see oneself outside the currents of creation that constantly swirl around us from before the moment of conception till after our last breath. Prayer can prepare the conscious mind to release its grip on the oars fighting the currents of reality and raise the sail to catch the winds of the spirit and harness its energy.

The power to be discovered when one allows the truth-force of reality to work through us is tremendous. It heals. It energizes. It parts the Red Sea and leads the slaves out of Egypt. What unlocks this power, is love, the act of commitment and trust which expands our energetic boundaries beyond our skin.

Real prayer is making love with the universe.

This leap of faith does not require an image of a stained glass God or a broken body on a cross--only an intuition that there are loving forces of good operating in and around us we have witnessed countless times in our lives. From the selfless devotion of parents, the steadfast support of a spouse, the unrecognized saints who comfort us in time of need, the Samaritan who stops to aid the wounded, the leader driven by commitment to civil society, we intimately know the power of good is real and eternal. This loving force, for most of us, however we name it, is as familiar as a smile.

I invite you this morning to struggle as I am with what stops us from lifting our hearts up in a prayer of thanksgiving for the glorious gift of a chance to love a child as Daddy Warbucks discovers when he first meets Annie. I have mentioned three women, Caroline Myss, Mary Baker Eddy, and Peggy Huddleston who are stimulating teachers of the intercourse of the divine and human spirit. No doubt some will find flaws in their instruction, yet the flaws do not blot out the truth to be found in their words. Imperfection is no excuse to avoid hearing what is true in their message. This is one the great gifts of Unitarian Universalism: we know the limits of words to express truth. We take on the responsibility as Unitarian Universalists to find out for ourselves. Today I bring these women before you because I believe we have much to learn from them and other wise women and men who use prayer as a path of mapping out the way to love.

As we wrestle with our feelings about prayer, our question to whom the prayer is addressed isn't very critical or even that important. Our question should be what holds us back from giving ourselves completely to loving this life we have been given and seeking healing for ourselves and the world. And as we seek, let us not be afraid to pray for the answers to our questions.

Closing Words
May those who love us, continue to love us;
And those that don't love us,
May God turn their hearts;
And if He can't turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles,
So we'll know them by their limping

Go in peace, Make peace, Be at peace ... and watch out for your ankles!

Copyright © 1998 by Rev. Samuel A. Trumbore. All rights reserved.

[1] Adapted from:Robert Goodrich, What's It All About (Revell), as found in Speaker's Book of Illustrative Stories by Maxwell Droke (Droke House, Indianapolis).
[2] Eddy, Mary Baker, Science and Health, P. 2.
[3] Huddleston, Peggy, Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster: A Guide of Mind-Body Techniques, Angel River Press, Cambridge MA, ISBN 0-9645757-4-4, P.50, http://www.healfaster.com/