It Ain't Just Talking / Advent Day 11

So, I arrive in Oakland on Bart, find the 62 bus, and hop on. I have an address, 23rd Ave and 29th Street. In the first quarter mile, we pass a 29th Street. I hop up and ask the driver, who’s securing a man in a wheelchair, is this it? He says, there aren’t any streets on this run, only avenues. I reiterate what I have. He reiterates what he said.

Then an older woman plunked behind him intervenes and tells him, it’s just before MacArthur Avenue. He says, I don’t think so. The younger woman sitting next to her says, there certainly are streets on this run. I stand in the balance. The women, who can’t be seen by the driver, wink to me and reassure me that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, I’ll be fine, they’ll show me where to get off.

This in a bus in which I’m the only Caucasian. I love big cities for how lovely, funny, compassionate they are. They create needs, and anxieties, and they just as easily satisfy needs and soothe worries away, in the most memorable ways.

Not to mention their various smells, which remind me of the four years I spent in NYC just out of seminary. Total deja vu on public trans today.

At the Center for Ministry, I am way early. I sit around and download my e-mail on their wi-fi. I do yet another test, a true-false thing, where a lot of the questions seem bent on smoking out paranoia, like, "people are out to get me," and "many people often misunderstand me," and variations thereupon.

Finally the good doctor arrives. He’s a former priest, smart, funny, relaxed. Whew.

It strikes me how easily Dr Charpentier launches into a prayer before our session begins. I don’t entirely release myself into his call upon God. I listen to the words he chooses, and the images, God, Jesus as God’s son, who promises to be with us whenever two or three are gathered, formulas that once were mine. I withhold, and I also submit. It’s a little like observing a doctor as she palpitates your gut, possibly to save your life.

One of the things I loved about having been a pastor was the opportunity to talk to God with other people listening in. I often have to stop myself from doing it when I’m leading a Chalice Circle at the UU Fellowship. I just want to close my eyes and start the thanking, the wondering, the longing, the asking.

For me, praying was a lot like writing poetry. You allow yourself to plunge into deep feelings about the moment and the setting, the people, the need. You do it following strongly felt sensibilities, the "rules" that enable you to take that audacious leap – who do you think you are, anyway, to speak poetically about this moment? You have these personal rules about how to say the word "God" (like God can’t be followed by "he" no matter what), or what has to be in your head and heart when you say Jesus, or hope, or even help us.

I used to have strong sensibilities, firm rules. You had to be talking about real stuff, real food, real people, by name, real experiences, and you had to be telling the truth about these things, and the truth had to hurt no one who didn’t really deserve it. There had to be passion, there could be anger. The words had to be as important and as lovely as the people, emotions, struggles that they were describing.

"Describing?" Maybe I should say "incarnating." Because prayer, like good poetry, is a profoundly spiritual thing. Spirit becomes flesh. Thought becomes reality. The flesh of the poem or prayer needs to hold up to scrutiny, to skepticism, it needs to lift up those who are bowed down, it needs to scatter the proud in their self-delusion, to quote Mary from the Magnificat, a wonderful prayer.

In my book, it’s the language of lover, of lovers. It can’t be faked, or rote, or prescribed.

But I don’t use it much anymore. UU’s don’t talk to that part of themselves or from that part of themselves others call God. The way intense part of you that is all shrouded in mystery and the unfathomable.

Though a part of the "wild," a prayer needs also to tend to the tender rows of little plants in the garden, the metaphors, the symbolic images and words which are rooted in earth and breathe sky, and nourish the hungry heart. Are the sprouts we offer up, speaking from our heart to the Heart of the Cosmos, alive, growing, real? Will they bear fruit in our imagination, and that of our children? Will they feed, and strengthen, and bless?

What happens in the course of the rest of the day after Dr. Charpentier prayed for us, itself becomes a prayer, a shared prayer. He asks me about my life, details of my childhood, my school, college, my parents and family throughout, seminary, the parishes I’d served. A web of related, midwiferly questions. It’s so wonderful to have someone helping you give birth to your life, by planting questions, and thoughtfully harvesting ripe answers.

Maybe that’s what prayer is all about – creating in the world around you a garden, a living environment where your gratefully receiving engenders gracious giving in others. When you receive as the holy universe – as God – receives, there giving abounds.

When two are doing precisely that, what’s going on between them is the blessing of prayer.