Rev. Betsy Mead Tabor UU Fellowship of the Eastern Slopes June 10, 2018 Join your voice to the listening world. Always Listening

“Lord, hear our prayer.” Since ancient times, these words begin and end prayers that humans send out into the world. Prayers of petition, outrage and sorrow. Prayers of gratitude and wonder and awe – prayers author Anne Lamott famously boils down to “Please, Thank You and Wow.” “Hear our prayer” suggests a listening God, if not a listening world. Every one of us wants to be heard. We might even live to be heard. Really heard and understood and appreciated.

Not all of us pray. I recently asked a dinner party of non-church people who prayed – more did than I expected. How many of us right here would say that you do not or do pray. Who doesn’t? Who does? Organized prayer, doctrine and creeds can drive people out of houses of worship. Some find meaning in this creedless faith that instead offers a few words and a time of holding every Sunday. Holding space for our own hearts. Many of us look forward to that holding on Sunday morning. Please. Thank you. Wow. And perhaps “I’m sorry.”

The P word Prayer can feel edgy. We talked about discomfort with prayer here, two springs ago, when we first met. UU communities can dance around the word. Some orders of service name a “pastoral prayer” and, to make room for our diverse beliefs, others use the broader phrase, “Prayer and Meditation” or just “Reflection.” By any name, prayer has a place here, here in this roomful of humanists and atheists, this place also of theists who love and pray to God. All of us experience wonder and awe and gratitude. All of us know longing, sorrow and regret. For all of us, reverence for this perplexing thing called “life” makes us tick.

It helps to get out of our heads on this. Away from debating the existence of God – we won’t decide that this morning. Let’s think instead about what we hope for, what we love, and where in our lives, if anywhere, we make room for these most ordinary and essential longings and joys? Who in your life knows about them? Who hears them? Who listens to everything that’s going on with you, no matter what, no matter the hour? Surely we need this.

Well, Alexa listens, you might say. Alexa is Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant. A box that sits wherever you put it – say, on the kitchen counter – and listens. Alexa, you say, how long does it take for bush bean seeds to germinate? “8-10 days, sometimes up to 2 weeks,” she will say. Alexa, play “Imagine” by the Beatles. She will, at whatever volume you request.

Hugely popular, over 20 million Alexa devices have been sold. Imagine every word spoken in 20 million homes and offices is “heard” round the clock. Alexa is always listening. Recently a couple found out that their Alexa had recorded their conversations and then – oops! – randomly sent audio files to someone on their contact list. The company is working on that glitch….

What a world! Some of us will not utter our innermost thoughts even at a whisper, while others of us pay hundreds of dollars for a device that listens to everything we say 24/7.

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Who has visited the African American Museum in Washington, DC? That’s one for the bucket list! It’s been open two years, the crowds still huge. Tickets sell out weeks in advance. I was there last week and am still reeling. You start out packed into a large elevator, the majority people of color. It goes down, back in time, until you’re deep under the ground. You feel as if you are in the hull of a slave ship. Then, with these same people, you travel slowly and painfully through our history of slavery. In graphic detail, images and words, visual and out loud, create an almost unbearable sense of burden and sorrow – people solemn, some weeping openly.

Religion is a character in this story, people singing and praying in the holds of the ships, slave masters wielding Christianity as a way to control slaves, and slaves hiding behind barns, gathering to speak and sing their own prayers.

I catch a phrase on one of the plaques – about “the spiritual needs of slaves.” Can you imagine the spiritual needs of someone who has been ripped from their home, shackled, separated from children? Someone who has stood on an auction block? Can you imagine the spiritual needs of a person with a whip-wielding master? With no privacy, no rights, little hope? Can you imagine the spiritual needs of someone whose parents or grandparents or great-grand-parents lived such a life?

One gift of this museum is – after several hours of sorrowful, oppressive witness – rising up out of the ground into the light. The top floor is a celebration of African American culture, an exuberant explosion of music and dance, art and movement, creativity in every form. From pain, remembrance, sorrow and generational remorse bursts joy. To me this felt outright prayerful. Excruciating, thrilling, horrifying, beautiful.

Of course, we don’t need to be taken out of our lives to feel this way. Mahatma Gandhi, the peace-loving Hindu considered by many the father of modern-day India, suggested that prayer belongs in our every day. “Prayer,” he wrote, “is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.” Think of what words at the beginning of the day might unlock it. Open it up. Start it well. A morning prayer, an affirmation, can be simply a statement of a truth that anyone might offer the listening world.

A teacher of Buddhist meditation starts her day with a prayer time of sorts. Before meditating, she again goes over a passage from whatever book she’s currently reading. This, say says, makes a difference in how the day goes.

Every morning, my neighbor names aloud what he’s grateful for that day. Then he names his troubles. “More than you can imagine,” he says. Lastly, he names what he hopes might unfold for him that day. A daily ritual. Like a key.

Mary Oliver: “Standing just outside my door, with my notebook open,” she writes, “is the way I begin every morning.”

We don’t know what or who hears us. Nor can we say for sure – research is not conclusive – whether our praying for another person has any impact. But we can make time for what matters 3 to us. And this changes us. It quiets and centers us. Broadens our perspective. Our own words comfort us. A bit like a conversation.

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Even when we know someone all our life, somehow we can miss key details. A childhood friend tells me she keeps up with her high school chemistry teacher, now in her 90s. This sounds remarkable to me. They’d had a rough start some fifty years ago when my neighbor, then a junior, refused to take this horrible woman’s class, only to be placed in it again senior year. She remembers copping an attitude the first day, slouching in the back row, her feet up on the desk, and realizing that Miss Menamy, who’d had polio and walked with quite a limp, was slowly coming her way. Leaning in close so no one else could hear, the teacher said, “You put your feet on the floor and sit up and get ready to learn.” She did, and today, Miss Menamy and my friend talk on the phone at least once a week. “You are the answer to my prayers,” Miss Menamy tells her every time they speak. The both feel that same way.

And as she and I catch up, the first time in years, I learn some things I didn’t know. I learn that she votes Republican. Then she mentions praying. “You pray?” I ask her. This surprises me since she can be seriously irreverent.

“Are you kidding? Yes! I talk to God all the time [she says]. Especially when I’ve handled something really badly, like with my siblings, and know I could have done better.” She goes on to describe such a conversation with God.

“God,” she says, “I know I shouldn’t have spoken that way to her. I know I’m a better person than that. What I wish I’d done was….” She goes on with her lessons learned. The gist of it is, “I’m sorry, I’ll do better next time.” She goes about her day feeling better, another conversation central to her well-being. ~ ~ ~

Those of us without a daily practice of prayer might be missing out on something. What would it take to try, to put words to our amazement or our pain? To say it out loud? We might start by just stepping outside our door and listening to the world. Taking it in. Not so much we the subject and the world the object of our attention. After all, we the listeners of the morning birds are not separated from the world. Even as we hear it, the world becomes part of us.

And the world? The world is always listening. If, like Mary Oliver, we “happen to be standing just outside our door,” which is the way she begins every morning, what about – like the wren in the privet – adding our voice? Our prayer?

This isn’t silly talk. Imagine waking up on a good day, feeling exuberantly alive, the birds singing, the red of your breakfast tea gorgeous, the bright pink peony buds peeking out from the blue iris, the green canopy mesmerizing. What would the neighbors think if they heard you call out, “I’m in love with you, life!”? Chances are they’d be jealous.

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Or maybe start with a whisper – who’s to know? For some reason, this can be hard for some of us! We feel constrained, silly. Life’s too busy for such things. Even privately, with no one around, it’s hard to engage breath and voice and SPEAK our love. But there is something in the act of doing this…you speaking to the listening world, saying out loud on a good day, World, I love you. Green and blue, I love you. Hard stone, soft petal, I love you.

And on those days we awaken not with joy? Perhaps most days. We lie there a bit longer, maybe despairing or lacking the energy for another day. Sometimes we hurt. So vulnerable, the task even of waking feels daunting. But come. Come with Mary Oliver just outside the door. Listen to the world. Even if your ears don’t hear well or can only hear bits of it, look for what might be singing or humming or rustling. Feel the vibration of presence in your body.

Join your voice to the listening world. Speak your loneliness. Your need. Put into words what matters to you, knowing that no one’s editing, no one’s judging. The world, if only the wildlife nearby, is simply listening. Neutral perhaps, perhaps loving. You know best – after all, you are part of the chorus. Part of the conversation. And while your circumstances on this hard day may add to your feeling alone or vulnerable – take comfort, even joy, in knowing that you are fully part of it. Vulnerable too is the insect, the nest of newborn bunnies in the field, the unfolding flower.

I can’t say what you will experience if you stand just outside your door in the morning and if, to the listening world. you utter aloud your hardest most vulnerable words. But chances are that saying them will enliven you. Unlock the morning. Take you to a different place. Why not?