The result of all their involvement is a sense of importance, usefulness, and appreciation. A major part of their lives derives its meaning from this dedication to the inner community of their chosen organization. Often this inner group becomes their adopted family, their brotherhood or sisterhood, their church. At every convention, there is a time set aside when some president or chair “wants to thank all those who made this possible.” The group that stands are the nuns, priests, acolytes, and bishops of the church. The convention is the cumulative ritual observance of the activities that give their lives meaning and purpose—high church.
There is also an exhibit hall. A zillion dollars are spent on this dimension of a convention—where new products, new technologies, new services, new systems, are displayed. There are music and flashy displays and excitement. Books, gadgets, pamphlets, gifts, souvenirs, and demonstrations are available. Salespeople reach out to you in every creative way imaginable. It’s one more way of knowing that you and your group are important and that there is a progressive, active, cutting edge to your common enterprise.
If all this weren’t important to us, we wouldn’t spend billions of dollars on it.
The penultimate ritual occasion of a convention is the banquet.
In the main ballroom of a hotel, in a setting that speaks of King Arthur and his court, we sit at round tables set with fine linen, excessive silver, glasses for wine, flowers, and favors. Cocktails, music, special lighting, and decorations are added.
It ain’t like this at home.
Precisely. That’s why you come. That’s why you dress up—suit and tie, fancy dress and makeup, jewelry, perfume, the works. Tonight is something special. And you are with special people like you.
At your table are essential elemental ritual items:
fire—in the form of candles: matter becoming energy
water—the metaphor of life
bread—the staff of life
sugar and salt and pepper—the sweet and savory and bitter
wine—the product of fermentation and time
special utensils—goblets, silver—with richness of purpose
and friends—members of the brotherhood and sisterhood
and manners—you will use your most graceful ritual behavior.
These items are not present by accident—they are the necessary signs and elements of a celebrational ritual. Pizza and beer and paper plates won’t do it. Do you remember the children in kindergarten sharing cookies and milk? We’ve been in training for these occasions for a long time.
When it works well, this is reunion—coming together in convention.
The rite of self-affirmation by association—being with people like us.
The ritual of relevance—of belonging to a community of significance.
You hate these things, you say? You dread going?
It’s not the conventions that are the problem.
You’re involved with the wrong people.
Find your group and get in with them.
GOD
I continue to be surprised where my thinking about rituals has led me. I had not considered how often we return to a place or thing or person or concept to reconcile our relationship with it. This spiraling quest for being settled within ourselves and at home in our world lasts as long as we live.
So far, we’ve considered reunion with self, with friends and family, and with places and things. One more reunion: with God—or with whatever you feel that word refers to or whatever word like it that you would use to point at ultimate concerns. You may believe that God is a verb or a noun, and that God is the fundamental process of the universe or a person. In any case, we still have grounds for conversation about times of alienation from and reunion with exactly that concept or process. There are times when one is in sync with whatever gods there are, and times when anything divine or holy or sacred or ultimate seems far away, and we are lost.
This problem is pinpointed in a typewritten message I found last year stuck to the inside of the door of a toilet in a men’s rest room in a seminary classroom building of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.
God, I have a problem.
I’m just a man and I’m feeling so alone.
God, I know you have no name, but I need to call you something.
God, I know you are not a man like me, but I need to think of you that way.
God, I know you are everywhere, but I need to talk to you somewhere.
God, I know you are eternal, but I need you now.
God, forgive my limitations, and help me.
Amen.
I had seen several versions of these sentiments before. But never in such a place. Somehow the location and the thoughts went together. A cry from the daily dunghill of existence. Job would have understood.
This plea just about nails down the quandary modern men and women often feel about relating to God or anything godlike. Rational thought takes us just so far. Sometimes we reject every notion we consider. Still, there is this insistent need to relate personally to Something, Sometime, Somewhere. We still have a longing not to feel alienated from ourselves, our world, our universe. A longing for the ultimate reunion—the ritual of reconciliation with God, under exactly those paradoxical conditions found on the door of that toilet.
According to many surveys I have seen, most Americans say, when asked, “Yes, I pray.” If you expand the question to include, “Or do you meditate, contemplate, or spend any time in spiritual reflection?” there is an almost unanimous positive response.
Allow me the utilitarian simplicity of saying: Prayer is talking to God. However you may define each of those five words, I’m comfortable. I’ll make my circle of understanding as large as need be in order to keep the conversation going. We can get into semantics some other time.
Why do we do this thing we call “praying”?
To worship—to connect in a positive way with the ultimate ground of being.
To confess—to cleanse ourselves of shame, guilt, or remorse.
To thank—to express appreciation for comfort and sustenance.
To petition—to ask for something.
Interestingly, there’s not a lot of modern evidence of direct divine response to prayer. Holy books record that God literally spoke in ancient times on many occasions for many reasons. Only about ten percent of those who acknowledge praying say that God has spoken to them. Athletic teams and television evangelists seem to have the most consistent response.
Is there something wrong here? Is this a problem? No.
The responsibility and the opportunity for the relationship belong to the one who prays. God is always there. To put it into scriptural language, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
And the work of that Kingdom is carried out in the human heart.
Prayer is its own reward.
In the ritual of reaching in and in the reaching out.
Another view.
In the realm of Buddhism, prayer takes two complementary forms.
Meditation—the process of inner focusing—of sitting so quietly and silently that the mind is slowly emptied of thoughts and one is not only at the center of one’s being but at the center of Being itself.
Action—the achievement of merit by acting in harmony with the best intentions of human community and divine values.
I noticed the intersection of meditation and action in Thailand.
Homage is paid to an image of Buddha by lighting a candle or stick of incense, putting flowers in front of the image, and daily, consciously committing an act of charity to someone in need.
Thais frequently purchase a tiny square of gold leaf and attach it to the image of the Buddha where it will affect the worshiper in a specific way. This is called “pid tong lung pra.” It is believed that gold leaf pressed on the Buddha’s lips will bring the worshiper the gift of eloquence. On the head—wisdom. On the heart—a loving spirit. If the petitioner is ill, the gold leaf is placed on the corresponding a
rea of pain.
It is said that those who have reached a higher level of understanding place the gold leaf on the backside or underneath the image—not for themselves, but for the common good of humanity.
And there are those who say that when one really understands the idea of merit most fully, the money used to purchase gold leaf is instead given directly to someone in need, or placed in an alms box for the temple to disburse.
It is said there is no limit to the amount of good a person can do if he does not mind who gets the credit. This is Enlightenment. This is seeing one’s self as an integrated part of the creative forces of life and not just an occasional contributor. The Thais say this is ritual prayer in its highest form—one prays by Being and Doing that which is in harmony with the best interests of all living things.
The reunion with God is often sought in a time of crisis and personal tragedy.
We turn to prayer when we are in need.
Or a time comes when we long to settle our spiritual affairs.
To summarize the character of many conversations with others about this longing, I’ve constructed an imaginary inner experience:
–
His wife was away for a week.
Alone in bed at night, for no apparent reason, he thought about praying.
He had not prayed in years.
One night, as he was drifting off into sleep, the image of the way he went to bed as a child unexpectedly returned to him. He remembered. With his mother watching from the doorway, he had nightly knelt beside his bed. In his Hopalong Cassidy pajamas, he clasped his hands, closed his eyes, bowed his head, and prayed:
Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
Four corners to my bed, Four angels there aspread:
Two to foot and two to head,
And four to carry me when I’m dead.
If any danger come to me, Sweet Jesus Christ deliver me.
If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
God bless Mother and Father and everyone and everything.
God bless me. Amen.
The part about maybe dying before waking had worried him. So did the angelic pallbearers standing ready to haul him away. It was hard to get to sleep under these conditions.
After he learned the “Pledge of Allegiance” in school, he complained to his mother that he didn’t like praying aloud anymore. When she agreed he could pray silently to himself, he substituted the “Pledge of Allegiance” for his prayer. It made him think of all his friends. Best of all, there was no threat of overnight extinction—nobody died in the “Pledge of Allegiance.”
When he was old enough to go to bed unsupervised, he gave up bedside prayer. As far as he could tell, nobody else in the family prayed, so why should he? Besides, praying seemed like speaking to a wall. He had talked to God for years. God never talked to him. It was a one-sided conversation. He would wait until God got back to him before he said anything else.
By the time he entered junior high school, the issue of prayer was buried by his busyness. He got involved in school sports and had a morning paper route. He was too occupied to appear at family mealtimes, so he didn’t have to worry about saying grace at meals. In fact, the rest of the family was seldom around for mealtimes, either. Father and mother left early and came home late from running the family store. Meals became quick and convenient. No time for grace—not even the quick and convenient sort.
Still, he attended church, mostly for social reasons—to be with friends, to date nice girls. But the hymns and prayers and sermons happened outside of him. Church was another day of school—only on Sunday. Most of what was said and done in church passed over him, not through him.
There was one crazy, desperate time when he tried to make a deal with God. He had taken his father’s pickup truck without permission, driven far out in the country with a girlfriend to find some secluded spot where they could park and neck. She had also broken her family rules by going out with him on a weeknight. About the time they realized how late it was, they also noticed the gas-tank needle on the dashboard gauge pointed to Empty. They were in trouble. Big Time. If what they feared came true, they would be stranded out there in the boondocks, perhaps triggering a search by the Sheriff’s Department, and they’d certainly be punished. Their families would throw the book at them: lying, stealing the truck, going out on a school night, being in a strange place doing evil things, annoying the sheriff, making the parents look bad, and adding one more log to the you’re-driving-us-crazy fire they had kept burning in their parents’ brains for some time now.
So he turned to prayer. Asking God to get them home without any trouble, and if He did, he would never doubt His existence again, and at the next Sunday-evening church service he would walk the aisle in penitence when the call for sinners to reconsecrate their lives to the Lord was made.
He was desperate. If there was ever a call for a miracle in his life, this was it.
And a miracle was exactly what he got. Not only did the truck make it all the way back, apparently running on fumes, but at both her house and his the parents were elsewhere—themselves out late for an evening. He and his girlfriend got home absolutely free.
Which meant, of course, that not only did God exist, God answered prayer. He didn’t know which was a more devastating turn of events—to have been caught by his parents or dealt a bargain hand by God Almighty.
He did his penance. But he wasn’t happy about it. And the whole thing confused him. What kind of God was God who could fill gas tanks and manipulate parents when a teenager had done something he knew was wrong in the first place? Maybe he had contacted the Devil instead. His mother said he was going to the Devil. Was this how it worked? He had picked up the phone—but who was on the other end of the line? Maybe nobody. Maybe he was just lucky. Having talked himself out of the corner he was in, he quit going to church altogether. He was beginning to think that more trouble comes from answered prayer than unanswered.
Through college he led a high-speed life. Neither he nor his friends could be described as religious in those years. Prayer was a dead issue. To pray at bedtime or say grace at meals would have seemed most uncool. The only religious event he recalled from his college years was when a fraternity brother reported seeing God during a drunken weekend, but nobody took him seriously. The Devil was still at work.
When he married and had children, the habit of prayers never quite got established in the home. He and his wife talked about it a few times, and both agreed it would be a good thing for the children. Neither one of them took the lead, however, and, like other good intentions, family prayer faded from conscious concern.
During most of his adult life, he only had to deal with prayer at political events or service-club luncheons. How he hated the pontifical braying of men who prayed in public. How finite God must be if He needed these pious yahoos to explain the needs of the world to Him. He figured God didn’t need to be informed about anything, least of all the ambitions of businessmen and politicians.
The aversion had lived within him for decades. But now at age fifty, to his surprise, he felt an irresistible urge to pray. It made him uncomfortable. Made him feel vulnerable. How stupid he would feel to be caught on his knees alongside his bed like a small boy. Though he and his second wife talked pretty easily about sex or money or politics, he had never even mentioned prayer to her. He couldn’t bring himself to ask if she prayed. And he couldn’t figure out why.
Still. Still, increasingly, he felt like praying.
He turned it over and over in his mind.
He wondered if correct posture really made any difference. He knew that prayer posture varied from religion to religion. Catholics got down on their knees. Muslims got down on their knees and then prostrated themselves. Buddhists sat with legs crossed in the lotus position, hands open on their knees. The Russian Orthodox stood. And the Dervishes and Native Americans danced their prayers. Others poured water over themselves or beat themselves wi
th whips. The Bible suggested one get into a closet and pray in solitude instead of aloud in public.
None of these called to him.
What was he supposed to do?
–
One night during the week when he was home alone, he decided to at least try getting in a good frame of mind before going to bed—to go to bed gracefully, for a change, neither rushing at it to meet an arbitrary bedtime deadline nor numbly stumbling into it.
First he changed the sheets on the bed.
Then he lit a candle and placed it in a holder in the bathroom.
From the linen closet, he fetched a towel and washcloth usually reserved for company and opened a fresh cake of lemon-scented soap, likewise meant for guests. It was OK. Tonight he was his own guest.
After a shower, he brushed his teeth, combed his hair, and put on fresh, clean pajamas and his favorite bathrobe.
Walking through the house to his bed carrying the candle, he felt like a priest in some solemn vespers ceremony.
–
Getting down on his knees by the bed didn’t appeal to him at all.
He settled on getting into bed, getting all squared away for sleep by lying on his back with his eyes closed and his hands clasped across his chest.
His mind began to wander.
He considered saying the prayers of childhood, even the “Pledge of Allegiance,” but that was nostalgia for then, not prayer for now.
Instead, he thought about the day just passed—what was good in it, which he held on to, and what wasn’t, which he let go. It seemed he might just pray a summary “Yes” and “No,” affirming all that was right, rejecting all that was wrong.
He thought about his life and considered how long he might live.
He thought about his wife, her face, their love, the sweet pain of her absence.
He thought about his family, those alive and all those long gone.
He thought about his country, seeing it from above—sea to shining sea.
An image of the earth floated up into his mind’s eye—in a photograph taken by the astronauts from the moon—this mottled blue-and-green-and-white ball hanging in black space—the earth rising from the moon’s surface just as the moon rose on earth.
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