For the most part I expect my responses to the questions I was able to play with on Sunday to be very similar to what I said them. (Although I reserve the right to have changed my mind in the meantime!) There are also several questions that were asked more than once (in slightly different ways). I'll group them together here. (And I'd remind readers that these are only my responses, and my responses today, at that.)
Help me learn to pray, please.
Given that I've literally written a book on prayer, this feels something like a softball. (Simply Pray: a modern spiritual practice to deepen your life, Skinner House Books, 2005.) Yet before responding to this question specifically, I want to pull back and address the larger issue of "spirituality."
I think that the heart of "spirituality," shorn of any particular theological overly, is the universal observation that there are, let's say, two ways of living -- living in such a way that we are truly and deeply alive, and, well not that. Our Unitarian Transcendentalist ancestor Henry David Thoreau wrote in his classic book Walden that he wished to live in such a way that when he came to die he would not discover that he had not lived. (That's a rough paraphrase.) And this sense that there are two kinds of living can be found in nearly every religious tradition we humans have developed -- alive and dead, living in sin and living in the spirit, deluded and enlightened, asleep and awake. I could go on, but probably don't have to. "Spirituality," then, has to do with this living life rather than not-life. This would mean that spiritual practices -- like prayer -- are tools to use in the effort to be alive.
How, then, do you pray? I'd say that we should pray in the way that "works" for us. It's not necessary to believe in some anthropomorphic deity with whom we "talk." It's not necessary for "prayer" to involve "talking" at all -- either externally or interiorly.
I'll digress here to make a plug for another book project I've been involved with. In 1999, Skinner House Books published the ground-breaking Everyday Spiritual Practice: simple pathways for enriching your life. It's an anthology which offers an extremely wide variety of understanding of just what could justifiably be called a spiritual practice. Earlier this year, Skinner House Books published something of a successor -- Faithful Practices: Everyday Ways to Feed Your Spirit. I was honored to have been the editor for this anthology, which includes examples of spiritual practices as wide ranging as sitting zazen, blowing bubbles, walking through your neighborhood, chopping vegetables, playing roller derby, and "playing" with action figures. (Guess who wrote that chapter?)To learn to pray, then, in it's most expansive understanding, is to (again) feel your way to the answer. What are you doing when you're feeling most alive? Most connected to the universe? I'd say that you could call that "prayer" and that, after defining it that way, paying attention to how your experience of it might change.
[If, of course, this question was actually a specific request for help in learning to do the "talking to" kind of prayer, this response may not have been at all helpful. I would, somewhat modestly, recommend my book as one resource. There are many others I could suggest, and I know that I would be glad to talk with you directly if this is your question. (Whether you actually wrote this question or not.)]
I am trying to find my space in this liberal religion -- where there are more questions than anything else. Where do I start?
I'll begin my response by saying that, properly understood, Unitarian Universalism is filled with lots of answers as well as questions. It should! What would be the point of asking questions if we were never to find an answer to them? That said, our faith tradition encourages us to hold on to the answers we've found ... lightly. We're encouraged to be willing to let them go when new experiences lead us to new ways of thinking. There are two quotes I love which speak to this. The first comes from someplace I've never known, "if you're not willing (or able) to change your mind, how do you know you still have one?" The other, which I just heard a week or so ago, comes from the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. He once wrote, "If the you of five years ago doesn't consider the you of today a heretic, you're not growing spiritually."
All that said, I think it's important to remember that there are not set answers for you to find. Unitarian Universalism invites us to look to our own lives as "sacred scriptures," as full of depth and meaning as any text revered by one of the world's great religions. I've often said that for UUs, "experience precedes theology." I mean that, in a great many other traditions, we are told what, for instance, God is like, and are then encouraged to go out and look for experiences of that in our lives and in the world. We, on the other hand, invite us to first look to our own lived experiences to identify what we would consider "sacred" or "holy" (whether or not those are the words we'd use). Then, after discovering our own experience, we can apply more traditional religious language, or not. (I once wrote what I think was a pretty good sermon about this. I'll see if I can find it, and I'll post it here sometime in the future.)
Well ... those two questions took up a lot of space, so I'll hold it here for today and come back tomorrow with more responses to more questions.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
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