“He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who lovest best
All things both great and small.
(Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner pt 7)
Those opening words, were the words of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from his poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. My use of Coleridge’s words are deliberate because Coleridge did, at one time, consider going into the Unitarian ministry and was, for a while, a lay preacher in Dorset and the west country. So perhaps from our point of view what he had to say on the subject of prayer is a useful start to answering the question ‘to pray or not to pray’.
Prayer is not an easy subject for many Unitarians – me included. Some of you will have read the erudite piece ‘Praying to a non-tribal God’ by Martyn Baguley, in the latest Enquirer. However, bear with me, for my attempt to bring some answers to this question was written before his piece was published and I am sure that there will be some of you who haven’t read it yet.
It’s a question I think that certainly deserves consideration because on the one hand it is perceived by some as being what religious practice is all about – and I don’t think that’s the whole story – and on the other of being a complete irrelevance – and I don’t think that’s quite so either.
I was reminded of these issues when, a few years ago now, I was visiting an art exhibition in a town near our home in France. The curator of the ‘maison d’arte’ as it is called used to be a neighbour of ours & she knows us fairly well. On our arrival at the exhibition she rushed up to me & said that she had someone there who she knew would like to meet me – ‘he is a priest like you were’! Indeed! The local Roman Catholic parish priest, like I was! He spoke good English & was quite charming as I hedged around my status, describing myself as a ‘non-conformist’ minister. Coward! Eventually, when he started to enthuse about a Bible study group he was starting & perhaps I would like to join it. I had to tell him that my French would not be up to such a group and that my non-conformity was as a Unitarian. ‘Ah well’ he responded, ‘but perhaps we could find some time to pray together one day’! ‘Perhaps’, I replied, wondering who we would be praying to & we took our leave of each other.
So just what is prayer all about? Who would you pray to?
Well for a start I would like to find another word – though I have to admit that so far I haven’t managed to!
However, I do rather like the definition in the Tibetan ‘Book of the Dead’ that uses the Tibetan word
| “smon-lam”, which though often translated simply as prayer, actually means literally ‘wish-path’. It is not a request to an external deity, but a method of purifying and directing the mind. It acts as inspiration by arousing the mind’s inherent desire for good, which attracts the fulfilment of its aim.” |
If we take that definition – a method of purifying and directing the mind – then the word meditation might be better. But that too carries unhelpful pre-conceived images for many people. Perhaps then, reflection – but is that a strong enough word?
Unitarians are sometimes accused of sitting on the fence over difficult issues and certainly you will often find that in our services we use phrases such as ‘ a period of reflection and prayer’, a period of ‘prayer & meditation’, a period of reflection’.
I don’t think that this is really sitting on the fence though because until we can find one word that carries no ‘baggage’ – that isn’t going to put people off because of their pre-conceived ideas about what the word means then I think that this is quite a good and acceptable way of inviting people into a period of the service during which the mind can be inspired toward it’s inherent desire for good.
So; ‘to pray or not to pray’ that is the question. How one answers the question depends then on how you define prayer. My answer would be that I contemplate; that my, rather vague, definition of prayer is ‘a period of focused contemplation with a desired end result’. That end result being the answer to a difficulty or simply ‘feeling better’ within myself – perhaps through having been able to forgive myself for some perceived fault.
You may or may not agree with this, because, being Unitarians, we will all have our own views on prayer, (and on many other things!), our own definitions and our own practices – and long may such diversity of ideas live.
But the word ‘prayer’ on its own just isn’t going to be helpful if we hope to attract new people into our Meeting Houses and Chapels. The words of so many of the ‘prayers’ chanted in our established, main stream churches are just, to my mind, so much ‘mumbo jumbo’ and we in the Unitarian movement have to make our worship meaningful and helpful. We have to make our periods of reflection periods in which the mind can be inspired toward helping us to act for good. I do think that we need to have periods within our worship services for contemplation and that the spoken word can be helpful for many people during these periods.
We are not, I hope, into the prayers of begging, though
the word prayer in English does, unfortunately, mean just that – begging. If we are to have periods of quiet contemplation and, I think, that we should, then we have to make any words we use meaningful, understandable and accessible so that newcomers in particular can feel comfortable with us. If they have come to us to escape the baggage of mainstream religion then finding that we too use similar ‘prayer’ concepts will surely quickly see them disappearing into the sunset.
In our periods of reflection we need to enable worshippers to focus themselves and draw on their own interior sources of inspiration and resolve, for as Gibran says in ‘The Prophet’ “For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?”
Amen
Ray Seal
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 