PeaceBang

Prepare To Pray

I said to my students last week that becoming a minister means becoming one who is willing to pray with people when they ask you to. And they will ask you to. They don’t want to hear about your theology and whether or not you still subscribe to a traditional God, and they don’t care if you’re a Trinitarian or a Unitarian or any of that. If you have a “Rev.” before your name, you should be ready, willing and able to offer up prayers for folk. We all have to find our way to do it with integrity.

Today I was asked to give the invocation at an Eagle Scout induction. I went right from there to a rally for Marriage Equality and prayed there, too (they wanted me to speak but I have a funny way of making even the most general speech into prayer, or what I call “spiritual ranting”).
On Sunday morning I’ll be going over to the Firefighter’s Memorial and praying for the boys over there who didn’t re-invite a local priest to do it, “because we’re not all Catholic, and he was making a big religious thing out of it, and for most of us, our religion is love.” Sounds good to me; I’m happy to do it. Honored, in fact.

I’ve been asked to pray with people on buses, in hospitals, in prisons, on airplanes, in restaurants, at country clubs, over the phone, in conference halls, at Starbucks, on the beach, in backyards, hospitals, homes and classrooms. No one told me when I got ordained that I was being named an official “pray-er,” but given that I’m asked to do it so much, I’ve made it a point to make my peace with what’s happening when we pray together out loud. It’s coming more naturally, getting in my bloodstream some, and even changing the rhythms of how I think about things.

New priests and ministers, especially those doing your CPE residencies right now, I wish you peace and grace in your career as those who pray on behalf of others.

Here’s how it works for me: someone says, “Reverend, would you pray with me?” and I say “Of course” and then I have this terrible, swift knock-down-drag-out fight where my Intellectual Brainy Self pipes up and says, “Oh, excuse me, this is the dumbest irrational thing ev -” but before she can get that out of her mouth, my Spiritual Heart Self wacks her over the head with a baseball bat and stuffs her body in the pantry and locks it, and sweetly says, “I’m sorry, how can I help you?” Then I ask my Spiritual Heart Self to please provide some words and she says, “Darling, I’d be happy to.” And I try real hard to listen to what she’s dictating to me and if my Intellectual Brainy Self isn’t hollering too loud from the pantry, I can get a real fine prayer out of it.

For me, people asking me to pray for them or with them is pretty much equal to them saying, “Would you mind terribly believing in the power of love with me right now, out loud, I mean?” In my experience, it is only Unitarian Universalists in the act of corporate worship who, when they hear the word “prayer,” stiffen up in a communal sense of proactive offense and get out their mental thesauri so they can replace all the words you’re saying with the ones they prefer. Oi! Mi gente!

I love the story of the 90+ year old Unitarian woman who, when the hospital chaplain went in to visit with her and asked if he could pray with her, replied with her special twinkly charm, “No thank you, I’m a Unitarian.”