The Force of a Prayer
THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Matthew 1:18-25
May Christ at his coming find in us a mansion prepared for himself.
Casey, our Golden Retriever who died two years ago after a very long life, loved cell phones. He was born about the time people started carrying them everywhere. One day as I was walking him around the top of Mt. Sequoyah, he all but pulled me off my feet when he saw a young woman talking on a cell phone. He assumed she must be talking to Jim. As he got older, he decided that only my cell phone got calls from Jim. By the time he was grown he had revised his view again. By then he could tell that only sometimes was it Jim I was talking with; I think he knew from the sound of my voice and the pattern of what I said.
When Jim was on the phone, Casey would wait in eager anticipation. And when we had finished, I would say “Casey wants you to say hello to him.” Then I would put the phone against his ear, and he would roll on his back, his big tail whacking the floor in ecstasy as Jim told him what a wonderful dog he was. If I was inconsiderate or in a hurry, from time to time I would forget Casey. Whenever that happened, he would look so devastated that all I could do was to call Jim right back, and the tail whacking would begin.
“Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’.” God is with us, no wonder we get excited about Christmas, year after year. For Joseph the news came in a dream. Mary was pregnant, and it would absolutely be all right. For me, among the most constant ways I sense God’s presence are the beauty of the natural world, the music sung by St. Paul’s choir, and relationships with other humans and, yes, dogs. And for me, one of the more problematic ways has been prayer.
I am fairly sure I have at some time said something about prayer in a sermon, but I have not done so in a very long time. True, when I was ordained to the priesthood twenty years ago, it came about because at midlife I had discovered contemplative prayer, sitting in silence every morning and carrying the sense of that silence with me throughout the day. That experience changed me, and it changed what I was teaching and writing. I assumed that I had found a way of praying that would be with me for the rest of my life, but life changed.
First came Casey, who could not imagine why I would just sit there instead of throwing the tennis ball down the hall for him. And my last years as a philosophy professor, there just seemed to be more and more work. Internet access, not only on the computer but on cell phones, has been distracting for just about everyone, especially in the turmoil of recent years. Probably I should have tried harder to find a way to be faithful to my practice of prayer through all that. But then rheumatoid arthritis happened; too often, sitting in silence or even slow, meditative walking means being too much aware of pain.
I am thankful that, for me, however I am feeling and whatever the state of the world, the eucharist has never become less meaningful. And I regularly pray for others. But having lost the rhythm of prayer I once had, I am more grateful than ever for Richard Hooker.
The Elizabethan Richard Hooker can be called the foundational theologian for Anglicanism. He is best remembered for the way he valued reason and tradition along with scripture, but his thoughts about prayer deserve to be remembered too. For Hooker, “Everie good and holie desire though it lacke the forme, hath notwithstandinge…the force of a prayer” (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity V.48.2). Every good and holy desire has the force of a prayer.
On campus, I loved Hooker’s understanding of prayer because of its inclusiveness. It does not divide folks up by their presumed world view but sees our common humanity. I have also come to value it because Hooker has changed how I think about what I actually do.
Scholarship and writing are a way of seeking truth which to me can feel like prayer. Surely scientific exploration and artistic work and concern for those who need our help are expressive of good and holy desire too. But what about anxiety, of all things? I don’t mean just that anxiety leads us to pray, which it does, but that in itself it can be an expression of good and holy desire. We don’t get anxious about things we do not care about, and we do care, not only about our own lives and our family and friends, but about our community and our country and world, and about our ever more fragile planet. And even when our desires seem to us too selfish or destructive to be called good and holy, I think God can find goodness and holiness within them.
I happened some weeks ago to hear an interview with the great 20th century dancer Twila Tharp. Her advice for getting moving in the morning was to play a John Philip Sousa march. I don’t want to wake Jim, but in my head, I have tried it, and sure enough, it helps. Can playing a Sousa march be prayer? And even though Hooker was thinking of human desires, when I think of the look in Casey’s eyes or his rolling over and whacking his big Golden Retriever tail when he would hear Jim’s or my voice on the cell phone, I cannot believe that good and holy desire is limited to human beings.
St. Augustine, not St. Augustine the first archbishop of Canterbury, who lived in the 6th century, but Augustine of Hippo, the late 4th-early 5th century philosopher and theologian, said, “If we were trees, we could not, of course, be moved by the senses to love anything; but we should seem to desire, as it were, that by which we might become more abundantly and bountifully fruitful. If we were stones or waves or wind or flames or anything of that kind, we should, indeed, be without both sensation and life, but we should still not lack a kind of desire for our own proper place and order” (City of God X1.28).
Augustine got his understanding of physics from Aristotle; for Aristotle everything in the cosmos is drawn to its proper place by what he calls its weight. Rocks fall to the earth because of their weight, but Aristotle thought that it is also because of its “weight” that fire rises. In part, St. Augustine wanted to contrast human beings, whose souls long for God with the rest of creation; our “weight,” in other words, our love, draws us to our natural place, which is God. Yet for Augustine stones and waves also have a natural place to which they are drawn, and they are drawn there because it is good. What draws them to their good is God.
“O ye sun and moon, bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever. O ye stars of heaven, O ye showers and dew, O ye winds of God…,” many of you will know this magnificent canticle from Morning Prayer. Fire and heat, winter and summer, mountains and hills, for Augustine, such things have a place, a way of being in relationship to everything else in which they flourish. If we say that the mountains and hills praise God, they need not be thought to praise God with words, or by our personifying them. Aristotle’s physics or ours, the hills praise God by being what they are. Yet if the stars of heaven praise God by their very existence, then so do all created things. And that means we do too. In a way that is more constant than anything we can be aware of, like winter and summer, we praise God by our very being.
Of course, we also praise God when we meditate or read Morning Prayer, and certainly we should have a practice of daily prayer, insofar as we possibly can. Unlike frost and cold, or even Casey, we can pray intentionally; we can know that God is with us. But prayer is much more than one activity among others. If all creation praises God just by being what it is, prayer is, for all of us, unceasing. God is with us in our sleeping as well as our waking, Joseph knew. We pray, even when it is unknowing, in all our complexity and limitation.
In the name of the One, Holy, and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
© 2020 The Rev. Dr. Lynne Spellman
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas