Sunday
September 6
The Senses of Prayer
By Marsh Chapel
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Be opened. Ephphatha. Be opened.
Jesus’ utterance today, in the swirl of two strange stories,
commands an opening of the senses, a new opening of the senses in prayer.
Today the Gospel asks you about your soul, about your inner life, about
prayer.
Prayer is a kind of shadow boxing, the struggle of the soul for
one’s own life, over against all the forces outside arranged against us.
As Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote in Gift from the Sea, “Every
person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year,
some part of each week, and of each day.”
Prayer is the possibility of an inner life, of communion with
God—whether in the graveyard, the library, the symphony hall, the art
gallery, the study, the beach. Or, in church.
A sanctuary is a place to be quiet, in order to reconstitute our
real life: “the very best prayers are but vain repetitions, if they are not the
language of the heart.” (J Wesley)
The soul, personal or collective, is boxing with its shadow in
prayer….
Before the firelight of a hard decision, as your soul sees its
shadow lengthen into something like fear
Before the blue haze of the computer glass, as your soul sees its
shadow lengthen into something like listlessness—acedia
Before the searching, searing floodlight of clear and painful
memory, as your soul sees its shadow lengthen into something like hatred
Prayer is one great battle, your soul locked shadow boxing in
combat with what maims and harms life.
What are the senses of prayer?
Sound
Prayer tunes out many of the frequencies of this world. Prayer
is deaf as a post, stone deaf to the text beep, to the telephone, to the radio, to
the world around.
One older, beloved hospital patient, who had only one working
ear, found peace and healing at a fine medical facility by lying with his good
ear straight down, planted firmly in bedding, muffled in the starchy pillows.
He turned a deaf ear to the orderlies and nurses and heavy constant
dehumanizing noise. Prayer is like Beethoven at the end. So in prayer, if
you will steal away, you will hear another music.
The song of the soul
The chance for an inner life
The language of the heart
Ears to hear THE REAL YOU, your own-most self
Listen…Breathe…Listen…Breathe…Listen…Breathe…Be
Opened…
Remember Job, “Be not rash with your mouth, nor let your
heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God is in heaven and you are
on earth, therefor let your words be few.”
Taste
Prayer has different taste buds. An inner life makes room and
has a taste for even what is sour and bitter. No sweet tooth for prayer, but an
openness to hurt, to empathy. Such an unlikely taste in taste.
In prayer we can taste the grief of a husband’s death.
In prayer we can taste the anger over a co-worker’s cancer.
In prayer we can taste the emptiness at a mother’s passing.
In prayer we can taste the fury in conflicts of vision.
In prayer we can taste the ashes of defeat, which salt us all.
In prayer we can taste the sting of adolescent and adult
mistakes. We all make mistakes. No one is good at everything.
In prayer we can approach the sense of violation another carries
after vandalism, literal or spiritual.
In prayer we can taste the awful bitterness of lament.
So central, then, in worship, are the psalms, for they are, simply
said, of two types: thanksgiving, or lament, thanksgiving, or lament. To
them we return every Lord’s Day.
Scent
There is the smell of the desert in prayer, the arid and heated
dryness of the desert.
Some of you have traveled to Israel. Do you remember going
to Qumran at the Dead Sea? Down in the Dead Sea valley, 1000ft below sea
level, did you see the remains of that ancient Essene community, 100
degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. Do you recall the scent of the desert—a
land stark, lonely, without any potable water, without any green, not a sign
of life. Wind, sand, stars, heat.
Why in the decades before Jesus lived, would 100 men come to
the desert? Why, they had that scent of prayer. They smelled the difference.
They came to prayer, in secret, to the Almighty God who sees in secret.
They came to enter the closet of Palestine, and to shut the door. They knew
about boxing with the soul’s shadow. They knew that life is short. They
came to struggle in mortal combat for the possibility of an inner life. They
craved that “purity of intention without which none of our outward actions
are holy” (J Wesley). There is such a thing as inward holiness. God’s heart
is open to you there. There is such a thing as inward holiness. Prayer is its
womb.
Inward holiness prompts you right now to find and hold a
particular moment in worship, as God’s approach to you, and your response.
Mine is the hymn. Hers is the prayer. His is the sermon. Theirs is the
offering. In coming to worship we pray for, we anticipate, an experience of
the genuine. Of beauty, truth and goodness in music, word, and prayer.
Touch
To be touched at the heart is to be forgiven.
The heart of prayer is forgiveness. The point of prayer is
forgiveness. The goal of prayer is forgiveness. Yes there is much
else—entreaty, expostulation, confession, thanksgiving, recollection, praise,
adoration, meditation, intercession. Still, the heart of prayer for the
followers of Jesus is forgiveness. Jesus prayed, according to Matthew, at the
critical moments—in the wilderness, in teaching, in the garden of
Gethsemane, on the the cross—“Father, forgive them for they know not
what they do.”
Do you seek forgiveness?
Are you earnestly awaiting its touch?
Are you adept at its arts and ways?
Do you pray for it?
In specific cases?
Among nations and groups as well as persons?
In rumination this summer I wondered about the two phrases,
‘Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.’ (Matthew 5: 44). It
had never occurred to me before that they might, perhaps should, be read in
apposition. Here is how you love your enemies: you pray for them.
Sight
Did you ever wonder why now and then in the prophet Isaiah
there is the comment about seeing and yet not seeing? There is a kind of
blind sight that is all too common to us.
Some years ago, we buried a man of faith and of sight. He was
a photographer. In his last year he wrote out what the sight sense of prayer
can be. For those of us who see and see and yet do not perceive, this is a
gift.
“A photographer’s function is to see so clearly that others will
see the work that they have not noticed previously. By analogy with guide
dogs for the blind, we can think of photographers as seeing-eye people. We
are helping people that don’t see much. Unfortunately, that’s most people,
because we don’t pay attention and see clearly much of the time. We can
get a lot of help from photography, which doesn’t censor reality as much as
our unaided minds do, and forces us to focus.
“Practicing the art of seeing should become a habit in all of us.
In that practice, I soon learned that there is beauty in almost everything if we
only will look… In order to see God’s work, humans have to make
themselves “see” the detail in creation, to become aware of the fact that God
is truly around us all the time.”
It takes a practiced blindness to the rush and blur of the way we
live to sense the sight of prayer.
Perhaps this is why, at the end of his faithful, shared life, Oliver
Sacks wrote about Sabbath, and about his memories of Sabbath. His mother
exchanging her surgeon’s attire to make gefilte fish. The ritual candles. The
fresh clothes. The silver wine cup. The chants and blessings. ‘The
observance of the Sabbath’—he quotes Robert John—‘is extremely
beautiful…It is not a question of improving society, it is about improving
one’s own quality of life’. (NYT 8/16/15)
Call to Prayer
Beloved
A Deaf Ear to Dehumanizing Noise
A Touch of the Heart in Forgiveness
There are Senses of Prayer
The Arid Scent of Inner Holiness
A Taste for Empathy and Lament
A Sight that sees the details
Be opened. Ephpatha. May our lives be opened to the senses of prayer.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
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