Heart Without Words Rev. Lissa Anne Gundlach Unitarian Church of All Souls, NYC July 14 th, 2013

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1 Heart Without Words Rev. Lissa Anne Gundlach Unitarian Church of All Souls, NYC July 14 th, 2013 Even though my Sunday vocation would otherwise communicate, I m not generally an early morning person. Sometimes I wish I was the 6 am, seize the day runner type, of which I know there are many among us. The truth is, I m just not that person, at least not at this point in my life. At home in Brooklyn, it takes me a cup of coffee, the news or reading and at least a half an hour on the couch to awaken to the world. It s become a bit of an ongoing joke in our household. Over the July 4 th holiday weekend, my partner Alex and I spent time with her parents at their home on the coast of southern Maine. A few blocks from the beach, their home overlooks a lush, peaceful tidal marsh. Stumbling out of bed as usual in the morning, it was this unfamiliar natural landscape that greeted me. On one of the first days, I found myself in my old routine, reaching first for my cup of coffee and clutching my ipad. Alex s mother, one of those early risers who had already been awake for hours, was sitting on the couch with a pair of binoculars, her book, and her coffee, watching the activities of the marsh like some version of the morning news. Do you see them? she asked. See what? The deer out there, she said, pointing to the furthest edge of the marsh before it rejoined the thick evergreen forest. No, I didn t see them. I wasn t looking, and I hadn t even thought to do so, quite honestly. I was foggy headed and drowsy and fixated on my immediate caffeination. I stopped, put my cup of coffee aside and took a moment to look in the binoculars in the direction she had instructed. There emerged a tiny elegant group of deer methodically making their way across the grassy muddy marsh. And more. The white flashes of spindly egrets and sea gulls. The bright pink of 1

2 beach roses. And then I began to notice the smell of the marsh, salty sea water and earthy mud. Though still half asleep, I felt profoundly awake. By the second day, I was waking up in a very different way. The sunlight streaming through the blinds became my alarm clock. I sat straight up in bed and loudly declared to Alex, who was still dead asleep: It s sunny and pretty out! With little thought to coffee or the New York Times I was ready to explore the world outside our window. The marsh and the surf seemed to call to me into conversation, inviting a kind of sharpened focused often dulled by the hazy routines of my urban life. I could not help but respond, offering my attention by getting myself up and out to be a part of it all. I remembered the words of Rumi: The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don t go back to sleep. Now, back in the city, I m still working on my approach to mornings, but something has profoundly shifted for me after my time by the marsh. I wake up noticing more about my life, and am in turn offering more devotion to it, through little things like taking the extra time to do the undone dishes or to walk through my neighborhood before I get on the train. In these moments of devotion, my heart feels profoundly awake and open. Painfully, I find myself really seeing the homeless man, sitting alone on the bench by the subway, whose wounds I have often made a point to ignore. Pleasurably, I notice the beauty of the shading trees and climbing roses against the distinguished brownstones I so often take for granted. Monday I found myself in Prospect Park opening my arms to the sky to welcome the new moon. One of my current favorite authors, Barbara Brown Taylor is a former Episcopal priest who now writes and teaches world religions full time. She is preaching this morning at the Riverside Church so I want to share some of her writing with you. Reverence, she writes, is the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience. In her understanding, to practice reverence is to pay attention, to allow ourselves to be profoundly awakened to life using all of our senses. Once awake, we are invited into conversation and cannot help but respond. Our response to such reverence may be offering praise and thanks for what is good and 2

3 beautiful, grief and lament for what is lost and broken, and compassionate action when we can make a difference. Our response doesn t need to have words it could be expressed through silent witness or through music, art, touch, movement or gesture. American poet Derek Walcott illustrates this perfectly in A Lesson for This Sunday: The growing idleness of summer grass With its frail kites of furious butterflies Requests the lemonade of simple praise. One of our most beloved humanist ministers, David Bumbaugh has been an outspoken advocate of a language of reverence for Unitarian Universalists. Reverence reminds us that we are a vulnerable and precious part of a vulnerable and precious world An invitation to reverence is all around us. This invitation might be easy for you to accept, especially at this time of the year. During the summer, some of us retreat and refresh our spirits in nature, or experience New York City in a different way. Whether you find yourself at crystal clear lake upstate, in the green fields of Central Park, or riding the subway to work, you can practice paying attention to your experience. Slow down to notice the details of the landscape. Attune yourself to what s around you. Let the news be what stories have their grip in the media, but also what is happening in your neighborhood or in your family. Notice what moves your heart, with pangs of joy or despair. Witness the fullness of life, what is painful and what is pleasing, all of it. What, then, is your response to beauty? A dance, a painting, a poem? What, then, is your response to suffering and injustice? A protest, a petition, your service? For us Unitarian Universalists, practicing reverence may be the most authentic way we engage the set of practices commonly known as prayer. To me, prayer is our reverent response to our lives and our world. When we are most alive and present to our world, we are moved to pray. Perhaps ironically to some, prayer is something that we don t tend to talk a lot about in church. As our tradition emerged from the left wing Protestant tradition, we regularly offer spoken prayers in our worship services. We also sing prayers, like our doxology and ascription and on occasion Carolyn McDade s living prayer Spirit of Life, Fuente de Amor. Many of you may know these sung prayers by 3

4 heart, and use them in your personal practice at home. However, personal disciplines of prayer are not something we require of our members. Rather, each person is encouraged to explore and commit to spiritual disciplines that draw them deeper into connection with their truest selves, the larger world and their personal sense of the sacred. Prayer is one among many spiritual disciplines our members practice, but perhaps the most baggage-laden from many of our faith traditions of origin. The stereotype about Unitarian Universalists is that we have more than a few hang-ups. With our theological diversity, there are questions about what words we should use to pray. God, spirit of life, great mystery? Garrison Keilor has often poked fun at us on his Prairie Home Companion radio show that we address our prayers to whom it may concern. Then of course, there is the question of what, if any results we can scientifically expect. We don t want to be associated with more conservative religious people, whose prayers we may find on one hand offensive or hateful, on the other hand silly or magical thinking. All of these hang ups about prayer can often bog us down in our own rigidity and inhibit from actually experiencing it. That being said, I know that many of us who are a part of this religious community do practice some kind of prayer, finding great comfort, gratitude and strength from your practice. If you are curious about prayer practices as a discipline for yourself, I offer myself as a resource and a companion. Over the past few weeks, there has been a lot of talk about prayer in the news. The Pew Research Center continues to offer more data on those 2.4% of Americans who call themselves atheists, 3.3% of Americans who call themselves Agnostics, and the growing nones, or non-religious - nearly one-fifth of all Americans or one third of those under 30 who are religiously unaffiliated. In the latest Pew surveys of atheists and agnostics, 6% say they pray daily and 11% pray weekly or monthly. Of all Americans who say they don t believe in God not all call themselves atheists 12 % say they pray. What I take from these studies is that belief in God or religious affiliation is not a pre-requisite for prayer. An article in the Washington Post June 24 th entitled Some 4

5 nonbelievers find Solace in prayer, brought the Pew Research to life with personal stories of such nonbelievers. A subsequent conversation was convened in the New York Times between multi-faith religious leaders and scholars of religion and psychology about prayer s broad appeal and critique with the questions: Would it be fruitful for atheists to pray? For believers and others, what is the point of prayer? Though their opinions differed widely, reverence for life emerged as a common theme. One of the contributors to the conversation, Rev. Hal Taussig, is a religion scholar and was my New Testament Professor at Union Theological Seminary. Taussig writes: Prayer makes humans more vibrant and conscious. Prayer is not just one thing, but an inexact set of practices that allow people to connect more deeply to lived experience. Countless prayer gestures connect people to what is happening in their lives. As the Native American poet Joy Harjo puts it: To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you And know there is more. Taussig, a Christian, helps rethinks prayer for his fellow Christians and a secular world longing for ways to respond to their experience of the sacred. Unitarian Universalists, could we do the same? Rethinking prayer as a practice of reverence for life, prayer can become conversation between our deepest selves and Life and Love with capital Ls, as Anne Lamott puts it. To whom we address our prayer is less important than tuning our hearts to the fullness of life. To echo Mahatma Gandhi: It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. If we understand prayer as kind of reverence for life, what matters most are the feelings our reverence invokes within our hearts hope, gratitude, compassion, joy, despair, outrage, or grief. Let what moves our hearts be our living prayer. 5