Mary Oliver, a favorite poet of preachers everywhere for the simple clarity of her language and her reverence for the created world, has said of prayer:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, …1
And also:
… just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.2
A dear friend who is not particularly religious once said (of a group of friends from the divinity school), “You all keep talking about prayer. I don’t know what that means. Is it like concentrating all the love I have in my heart and directing it toward the person I’m ‘praying for’ and holding them in my mind and my heart with gentle intention?”
“Wow. Yep. No notes.”
For all the beautiful and evocative and true things that have been and will be said about prayer across the ages, I have sometimes had an uneasy relationship with it. Especially when people want to understand the mechanism of prayer as it relates to God. As in, “how do I get it to work for me?” When we start down this road, prayer starts to be transactional. “Pastor, the verse says: ‘ask and it shall be given to you,’ so why isn’t God answering my prayers?”3 If I do x, I should get y. And if I don’t, I must be doing something wrong.
This was the passage and the topic of my last sermon at Plymouth, nearly four months ago. I addressed it through the lens of our own struggle with fertility. The challenge of confronting regularly unanswered prayers as part of my own personal and pastoral life. The challenge of the deep desires of our hearts toward parenthood not being diminished by the struggle, but strengthened.
I won’t rehash the whole sermon here, though if you’re curious, it’s available. The points that seem most salient in this moment are that 1) I still, absolutely, reject the idea of prayer as transactional, as though God is some sort of hopped-up prayer vending machine that we just have to figure out the right inputs to get what we want. (A congregant presented me with an amazing doodle of a prayer vending machine that she created during the service that day, pictured below.)
Liz Belden’s excellent rendering of a “Prayer Vending Machine,” shared from her bulletin, July 24, 2022.
And 2) I believe the strength and persistence of certain prayers turn into invitations. If we listen closely enough to our own prayers, we may hear the Holy One whispering an invitation to let our lives be shaped by our prayers. To let our lives become an answer to our own prayers and to the prayers of others.
This invitation to let my life be shaped by my prayer was central to my decision to step away from parish ministry during this season of life. (At some point in the future, I’ll write more about my belief that if women can truly have it all, it probably won’t all be at the same time.) It’s a decision and an understanding of prayer that I still stand by.
And yet, there have been other experiences in the past few months that have asked me to keep expanding the ways I understand prayer. Namely, the community that has been holding us and our prayers in their own.
When I left Plymouth, even though I was definitely in community, my working understanding of prayer was pretty individualistic: this is my prayer, this is the invitation I’ve received, this is what I’m going to do about it, this is how I’m going to let my life be shaped by it. I was prepared to make those steps on my own and in partnership with Lucas.
What I was less prepared for was the way that, when I shared our prayer and struggle publicly, a community, a whole net of prayer, emerged for us. It is hard to describe the peace that this has offered. The near physical sense of being wrapped up. Of being held gently in love. A calm confidence that whatever this journey would bring, we would be able to weather it. To learn that a fellow swimmer and former congregant was praying when she was swimming next to me when we ended up sharing a lane at the Y? To learn that so many of you have held us in your hearts with intention and love? That has been deeply humbling and moving.
I still have no claim to knowledge of the mechanisms of prayer, especially when it comes to God. But when it comes to people, I know that prayer has left me feeling lightened, encouraged, accompanied, and at peace. So thank you for your prayers and for being part of our community of prayer.
Much love,
Lindsey
Oliver, M. (2020). The Summer Day. In Devotions: The selected poems of Mary Oliver. essay, Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Oliver, M. (2007). Praying. In Thirst: Poems. essay, Beacon Press.
Matthew 7:7