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This Sunday: thank you youth. A Sunday off from the Pulpit. Please pray for Maggie Wardell, Carrie Fippinger, and Alex Palmer, our skilled triumvirate of youth, who will “bring it” on Sunday.
So…last Sunday’s sermon. The preacher’s attempt was to examine how prayer works. Or does not work. I spoke about how prayer does not have a predictable effect (like a pipe wrench). If it is an instrument, it is a feeble instrument of vision, like binoculars seeking to peer into some distant galaxy, enabling us occasionally to catch a glimpse of some other reality that is wholly different from the cause-and-effect reality in which we now live.
In an important sense, prayer is not just some mechanism for asking the universe to yield up what we want, to bend it to our will. It is a means of seeing, of glimpsing a whole different universe.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of my favorite spiritual writers, in his book The Meaning of Prayer speaks of developing our ability to see this other world, through prayer. Prayer creates in us the ability to see.
He writes of a “frivolous American who in the Rembrandt room of the Amsterdam Gallery looked lackadaisically aroudn and asked: ‘I wonder if there is anything here worth seeing’.” He goes on,
one has only to recall the women who climbed an Alpine height on an autum day, when the riot of color in the valley sobered into the green of the pines upon the heights and over all stood the crests of eternal snow, and who inquired in the full sight of all this, ‘We heard there was a view up here; where is it?’ To see that there is a spiritual qualification for every experience, and without it nothing fine and beautiful can ever be real to any one. ‘Mr. Turner,’ a man once said to the artist, ‘I never see any sunsets like yours.’ And the artist answered grimly, ‘No, sir. Don’t you wish you could?’
I recall a beautiful sermon I heard recently at our WiNK (Worship in a New Key) service, in which the preacher spoke of having a vision of angels visiting her in the Australian desert when she was young, one on each side. She had been lost in the woods, and the vision took her unawares; and said it seemed as real as anything she’d ever seen. And what struck me was this: she wondered if she’d ever see such a thing again, now with a mind so full of knowledge to prevent it. The mind that is capable of seeing that is not filled with knowing, with facts about the cause and effect world.
Perhaps prayer is the way back – back to the naivete of childhood, back to the innocence through which we can see God.
I’m wondering if there are any out there who have had such a mystical experience of prayer – one that enabled you to see into what we might call God-truth, God-reality?
I’m also curious: On Sunday I spoke of the efficacy of prayer – I do believe that prayer is not just about changing us; I believe in some mystical (and unpredictable) way, beyond cause-and-effect, it does change the universe. We indeed ought to pray for what we desire, pray about what we fear. Have any out there had the experience of miraculous prayer? Prayer that you felt changed something about yourself, another, the universe?
Love to hear from any of you.
Meanwhile, blessings and peace; take care of yourselves, and each other.
