“The Prayers of Your Hearts”
Rev. Robert M. Hardies
Sunday, 19 August 2007
It’s a great delight to be back in the pulpit and back with all of you this Sunday. It’s a tradition at All Souls that on my first Sunday back we do a question and answer sermon. But I thought that maybe after seven months of sabbatical, you’d expect something more, an actual prepared sermon, on my first Sunday back. So we’re going to do the question and answer sermon next week and I’m going to try to preach this Sunday.
I want to begin with a reading, just a short one, from one of the 19th Century Unitarians that I’ve been spending a lot of time with on my sabbatical, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson writes:
It’s not only when we audibly and in form address our petitions to the deity that we pray.
We pray without ceasing. Every secret wish is a prayer. Every house is a church. The
corner of every street is a closet of devotion.
So, I’m holding in my hands a bundle of prayers, your prayers, written on three-by-five cards, the day I left for sabbatical in January. Maybe they look familiar to you. There are two kinds of prayers here. Some are your prayers and good wishes for me on my sabbatical and others are the prayers of your hearts that you asked me to remember for you while I was away. Now maybe you can’t tell from far away but the prayer cards, frankly, are looking a little ragged around the edges. But I don’t want you to think it’s from lack of care. On the contrary, I think they are a little worse for the wear for the same reason the velveteen rabbit was; I think they got loved a lot.
At the very least, they are well-traveled prayers. They were first read here in Washington just hours after you wrote them on that Sunday in January. The next day they flew to Barcelona where they spent most of their days. They took a side trip to France and Italy, and summered in California before returning here to Washington, D.C. on Wednesday night. The prayers always traveled safely beside me in my carry-on luggage. I would not expose your prayers to the risks and perils of checked luggage. [Laughter] And all along this journey, they were read and reread, sifted through, organized by category and read again. So yes, a little ragged around the edges but for all the right reasons.
This morning I want to do two things. First I want to tell you about a couple of the places where your prayers and I traveled together, places where all of you were especially present in my heart and mind during the sabbatical, just a couple of snapshots. And secondly, I want you to hear your prayers again. I want you all to hear each others’ prayers. Now don’t worry; I’m not going to “out” anyone’s specific prayers this morning and I won’t break any confidences. But I do want to give you a sense of them because, for me, reading a hundred or so of your prayer requests at the same time was such a powerful experience, such an important reminder of who we are as a people, that I wanted to share that experience with you. I want you to have that experience too. I want to reflect back to you the prayers of your hearts so that we can all get a better sense of both the diversity and the commonality of our struggles as a people united.
So, two things. First, where did your prayers and I hang out for the last seven months? Well, one day back in February, Chris and I were exploring for the first time the dense maze of streets in Barcelona’s medieval quarter, the Barri Gotic. These labyrinthine streets are so narrow, no cars can pass. As a pedestrian walking through them you feel lost in a narrow canyon of stone wall punctuated every few feet by wrought iron balconies overflowing with flowers or hung with drying laundry. Smells of the mid-day meal – saffron and garlic, calamari, cured meats – pour out the windows, filling the air.
But on this day, the air was filled with something else too, something special. There was singing in the air. Somewhere nearby, a choir was singing a lush renaissance motet, a piece that seemed right at home in those ancient streets. Like a siren, the music lured us to its source -- the doors to the chapel of a 15th century convent. We peeked our heads in and the building looked as we might have imagined: stone arches, light pouring in through high windows, faded mosaics on crumbling walls and a dimpled stone floor that seemed to bear the imprint of 500 years worth of footprints, nuns scurrying to evening prayer. And there in the nave of the chapel, sure enough, were forty figures in a circle, singing the heavenly polyphony.
There was only one problem: The figures weren’t human beings. They were speakers, forty of them, perched on stands of varying heights, almost as if they were human beings. And that’s when it dawned on us that this building we’d stumbled upon was no ordinary chapel but, in fact, part of a museum. The speakers were a sound installation, part of a larger exhibit of contemporary art. There, in a renaissance chapel, in the heart of the medieval quarter, we had stumbled upon a work of 21st century art. After getting over our initial disappointment, we were delighted by the exhibition and we returned often, drawn by the lush sounds, the holy site, the free admission [Laughter]. Drawn, perhaps even more so though, by the spell that was cast over the people as they walked in.
You’ve got to realize that when Europeans go out for the day to the museum, they like to really dress up and be all sophisticated. You might have been to a museum in Europe and seen that. They put on their tight-fitting jeans and their expensive Italian shoes and their enormous Prada sunglasses, and they really do it up. For me, it was fascinating to watch these hipster, mostly secular, Europeans walk into the center of this holy space with its lush chanting and high ceilings and, almost to a person, assume a posture of reverence. Some raised their heads to the heavens, some lifted their hands in prayer or meditation, still others, risking damage to their 200-year-old denims, got down on their knees and prayed, just as the nuns had, half a millennium before. And many simply sat on the stone, cold floor in silence or in tears. I could often be found among this last group for truly this became my funky little church away from home. This was where I worshipped most often during my sabbatical. And sitting there, eyes closed, music pouring over me, I often imagined that you were there with me. Your prayers and I spent some time together there.
There is one other place, though, that I want to tell you about, a long way from Barcelona, where thoughts of you all flooded my mind. On the coast of northern California, tucked away in a wooded gorge a half-mile in from the Pacific, lies the Buddhist monastery called Green Gulch. There, Zen monks in flowing robes and shaved heads, spend their days alternating between meditation and, this being northern California, growing organic produce. [Laughter] I spent several days there earlier this month. At 4:30 every morning, the sound of a deep gong pierced the fog that had rolled in from the ocean that night, calling us to the meditation hall to sit zazen. I shuffled and tripped through the forest, arriving half asleep and even remember a passing thought as I did that which was that if anyone were to tell me that 9:15 was too early in the morning to come to church, well then I’d have a story for them. [Laughter]
In the zendo we sat on mats facing the exterior wall. Long periods of silence were interrupted only occasionally by chanting and the ringing of chimes. Though in a religious environment completely foreign to me, I once again was overcome with the sense of awe and reverence. I’d warned the monks ahead of time that I wasn’t a Buddhist and had asked whether, instead of meditating, I could simply pray in silence. They welcomed me without hesitation. And so, in that foggy Green Gulch, tucked into the banks of the Pacific, your prayers were with me once again.
So those are just a couple of postcards from the sabbatical. And, you know, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression. I don’t want you to get the impression that your minister spent his entire sabbatical praying on the stone floors of European cathedrals and meditating in the forests with Buddhist monks. We did get lots of work done on this sabbatical and also had loads of fun and relaxation. And I know you’ll hear some of those stories as we move through the fall. But at this time, I just want to say for all of it, for allowing me this time and this space in the first place, I am extremely grateful to all of you, and thank you.
But let me now finish by giving you the flavor of the prayers that I’ve been talking about. What were these prayers? Because, as I said before, it was invaluable for me to get a sense of the range of joys and concerns on your hearts and I really think that you all need to hear them as well. All of the prayers I’m going to mention today were offered by more than one person, so if you hear one that sounds familiar, it may very well be. But you’re not alone in these prayers. So here, in no particular order, are some of the prayers of your hearts. I want to invite you to just allow them to wash over you, to take in the range of joy and concern among this people.
Your parents are growing old; you are caring for them and worried about them. You pray for their peace; you pray that the end will be gentle. Your children are growing old, too. And you are caring for them and worried about them because growing old doesn’t necessarily mean growing up. All you ask is that they be healthy and happy. Between your parents and your children, you sometimes feel overwhelmed; you pray for strength.
You are searching for love, seeking a relationship; you are grateful for the love you’ve found. Your relationship is in jeopardy and you’re trying to make it work. You wonder why love is so difficult and pray that we learn to love better.
Someone you love is dying of cancer. You’re angry and wonder how it could happen to someone so young. You, yourself, are living with cancer. You’re grateful for every day, but fear that your days may be numbered. We all fear our days may be numbered. Our days are numbered.
You’re out of work. Your work doesn’t make you happy. You’re trying to find work that fits you and your values and pray that a path will open up before you. You’ve found work that you love, but it takes such a toll you’re afraid you can’t sustain it; you come to church to help sustain that commitment. You pray for resilience. You pray for a springy, bounce-back soul.
You struggle with demons, the same demons you’ve struggled with your whole life. You pray that you can make peace with those demons. Your demon is a drug or some other habit; you pray for the strength and the grace to overcome it.
You are believers, dreamers, even. Naïve? No. Disillusioned? Sometimes. Cynical? Rarely.
You dream of a world better than it is today and pray for that day to come. You believe in, and work for, values like justice and fairness and compassion. You notice and mourn when they are absent. Your thoughts and prayers are often with those throughout the world who live amid war and injustice, in Darfur, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, in East Timor and in Iraq. You grieve the war in Iraq. You are angry about the war in Iraq. You pray and work for peace.
You possess a deep and abiding faith in the unity of the human family, the unity of all creation, and you notice, name and work to end racism, homophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, classism and the degradation of our earth. You love your church and you pray for it. You come here because of all your prayers; you come to learn how to love better. You come to find strength and resilience and grace. You come because you want to be with others who share your values. You come because together we can be a powerful voice for those values in the world. And you pray that All Souls will grow to be an ever-greater embodiment of the values that you hold dear: more diverse, more justice-seeking, more spirit-growing.
In short, you are a beautiful and flawed, strong and vulnerable, joyous and hurting, loving and trying to love better, people. And I, for one, am grateful to find myself among you again. One of the old ones stood up into the morning light and spoke to those who had come back to the river: “Now we have come again to this place. My life apart from you is not as strong. Yes, I have danced and I have told the stories at my own fire, and I have sung well. But when I am with you, my friends, I know better who it is in me that sings.” May it be so for us all. Amen.