The Dialogue Venture

Posts Tagged ‘prayer’

The next three weeks have me engaged in activities that, unfortunately, will take me away from our weekly discussion here. I’ll pick up again with new thoughts in January, but in the meantime, here are a few worthwhile sources to check out: 

• The Interfaith Amigos. A priest, a rabbi, and an imam discuss—with extraordinary grace and intelligence—the very issues we cover here. Check out, for instance, their article about dialogue with people who believe their way is The Only Way.
• The Clearness Committee. A brilliant method for hearing the Divine voice, Clearness Committees come to us from the Quakers. A person with a life decision or issue gathers five or six others whose entire job is to ask honest, open-ended questions—no judgment, no advice, no chitchat—in an atmosphere of quiet attention. Typically, these questions (and the person’s responses) generate ever deeper questions and responses, clearing the way for the person to hear the “divine teacher” within. I’ve participated in one or two of these, and they can be life-changing for both the “focus person” and the questioners.
• The Prior’s Column. The prior of “my” monastery (I’m an associate) has lived the spiritual life for many years, and his insights—particularly around meditation, prayer, and the monastic way—carry a great deal of wisdom.

That’s it for now. I wish you the most blessed of holidays.

On Tuesday evenings, several of us in the local chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society get together for prayer, including the ancient monastic rite of Compline. Because of the liturgy we use for Compline, we always pray Psalm 91.

I don’t like Psalm 91.

Psalm 91, for me, is so upbeat as to be out of touch with reality. It includes verses like these:

Because you have made the Lord your refuge,

and the Most High your habitation,

There shall no evil happen to you,

neither shall any plague come near your dwelling….

[His angels] shall bear you in their hands,

lest you dash your foot against a stone.

I pray these words as my inner realist chimes in with “Yeah, right.” But I do pray them. That puts me in good company: people across faith traditions have prayed sacred texts for millennia. I’m sure most, if not all, have recited a text that did not fit their mood or mindset that day. Sometimes they’ve prayed texts that chafed against their whole outlook on life, as Psalm 91 chafes against mine.

So why even bother praying this way? Because it does so much good. Among other things, it orients us toward dialogue.

The key is what happens inside us as we pray words we don’t like. In this prayer, we allow the deepest part of ourselves to encounter wisdom outside ourselves, and the conflict between the two stirs up all sorts of things: 

• For one thing, the conflict awakens us to the fact that we—our feelings, our concerns, our schedules—are not all there is. We recall, instead, that we are part of a larger flow, which allows us to put our place in the universe in the proper perspective. In other words, the praying of sacred texts fosters humility.
• For another thing, the conflict with a sacred text confronts us with the disturbing possibility that God, life, other people, the universe are not exactly the way we understand them. This brings us to the mindset of I don’t know. The more I realize what I don’t know, the more curious I become about what you know, because together we might understand more clearly.

That curiosity, that realization of our own incomplete knowledge, drives us into dialogue with one another.

Have you prayed sacred texts as part of your practice? How have they changed you? Use the Comments function below to share your experiences.

The next post for this blog is all ready to go. It deals with dialogue and airport security. I’m very interested in getting your thoughts on it.

But I can’t bring myself to post it. Not this week.

The complete devastation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, overshadows everything else for the time being. Our divisive issues melt away, at least for a while, in the face of such suffering. While our daily work is certainly important, calamities like this remind me, at least, that it’s just one part of the human endeavor.

At times like this, other parts of the human endeavor take precedence.

There will be plenty of time for dialogue on Haiti, especially in addressing governance, susceptibility to natural disasters, and the grinding poverty that plagues so many Haitians. Now is not that time.

If you are a person of faith, I invite you to pray, or meditate, or light a candle—whatever your tradition calls you to do—for the people of Haiti. My prayers for them inevitably start and end with silence, because words fail me. But God hears silence too. 

Just as important, please give whatever you can to the relief effort. www.redcross.org is a great place to start. 

We’ll talk more next week.