Pray without ceasing These might be considered some disorganized and odd thoughts about the nature of prayer. At first I found myself asking, "Why did I agree to do this talk, when I don't pray?" And because that's where I started, preparing this talk has been most interesting and surprising. It really made me examine my experience - how and why I live.
Noetic Sciences Review
Summer 1993
Some personal thoughts on the nature of prayer
I'd like to say a few things first about a definition of prayer. I have always been turned off by what is called "petitionary prayer." Perhaps most people think of prayer in this way. Certainly that's the sort of prayer I was thinking about when I said, "I don't pray." This idea of prayer seems to view prayer as a tool for change. Prayer of this sort reminds me of that remote control that comes with the television set. If you don't like what channel is playing, you press the button and the channel changes. If you don't like what's playing in your life, you pray, and hopefully that channel changes, too.
Prayer as a strategy for creating "outer" change has very little appeal for someone like me, and apparently for many others. Indeed, even people who look to prayer as a way to create outer change may only turn to prayer when all other practical ways of creating outer change have been exhausted. This is especially true in the medical system.
A friend of mine who is very ill had this experience. He was told recently by his physician that there was nothing more the physician could do for him. The physician then said, "I think you'd better start praying." So prayer is what you do when you run out of ways to make change yourself. Seen in this way, the "top line" is inevitably the "bottom line."
It's not just individual physicians who feel that way. This view is actually built into our medical culture. You know, there are many different medical systems. People have dealt with the ancient and profound issues of pain and illness and death in different ways over the history of the human race. Ours is the only medical system that does not admit the possibility of divine intervention, or evoke it as part of the healing process. In fact, we may not even recognize it when it happens right in front of us.
I had one very unusual experience with this early on in my medical career. When I was a medical student at Sloan-Kettering in New York, we had a patient who was admitted because of widespread metastatic cancer of the bone and lungs. I don't remember what the cancer type was, but I do remember the x-rays. They were very dramatic. But for some reason, after two weeks all his lesions disappeared and never came back.
Now this presented the medical staff with a conceptual problem. First thing, we sent off the slides to five pathology experts - perhaps this fellow didn't really have cancer after all. But the five experts said, "Yes indeed. This was cancer." So this man was presented to two hundred physicians in medical grand rounds. I remember there was much frustration but no sense of awe at all. The rounds concluded that the chemotherapy this man had completed nine months before had suddenly and inexplicably worked.
I was at peace with this. My professors were at peace with this and so I was at peace with this too. I never questioned it. At this point in the preparation of this talk, it occurred to me that prayer is not about making external change... and when I realized that, that there might be other ways of praying, I began to wonder if I did indeed pray. And then my whole idea of my own relationship to prayer changed.
Perhaps when we pray we don't change what's outside of ourselves - in some way we change what's inside of ourselves. We don't change life, we change our experience of life. We change our consciousness. We move from an individual, isolated making-things-happen consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. I think prayer is about relinquishing attachments in some way. It helps us to go beyond fear, which is an attachment, and beyond hope, which is another form of attachment. It's a way of reminding oneself about the nature of the world and the nature of life... not on a mental level, but on a deep experiential level.
We acknowledge a larger reality when we pray, however we pray. That reality is essentially mysterious. Prayer opens us to the possibility of unknowable purpose. The possibility of unknowable purpose is a source of great comfort in my life. Prayer also opens us to realms of unknowable meaning, which is another source of comfort to me in the work I do.
In praying, we stop trying to control life and may recognize that we belong to life. Prayer is a relinquishing of the sole ownership of life. The statement "If I take right action I can stay healthy" may not be the whole picture. Prayer suggests there may be more to the equation than that. "If I take right action I can stay healthy" is a cosmology, a statement about causality. Prayer involves a release of total individual causality and total individual mastery in a way that is enormously empowering.
In prayer we recognize that we are moved and there is That which moves us. It is easy to lose sight of this. When I first began my counseling practice I would devote the last meeting with each client to an exploration of the turning points in their therapy. What was it that had enabled them to gain greater peace, greater courage or free themselves from life-long self-destructive behaviors or attitudes? Prior to the session I would review this in my mind. I would be certain that I know all of those turning points - there was that brilliant intervention that I made back there in February, for example, or that major insight I shared in March. Usually the client would get this about half right. The rest would run something like this: "You know, there was that time when I hit bottom and said 'XYZ' and you leaned back in your chair and got a special look on your face and suddenly I knew what you were thinking..." and they would share some life-altering experience or insight and go on to tell me the many changes that have come of it and the concrete ways in which they use it in their daily life. And where was I? I didn't even know this had happened. I had probably been thinking about lunch.
I think this is how spirit operates: We witness it, we collaborate in it. But it is orchestrated elsewhere. That which moves us, uses us, too.
A little hard on the ego. These days there is a little mantra I use before I see each client. It's "USE ME"... just recognizing that I do not know why or even how our meeting may be of help, but I hope that it is. A movement from Mastery to Mystery.
Surrender and acceptance is very powerful. There's a lot of paradox here. If I favored any prayer, it would be an American Indian prayer which my anesthesiologist said to me many years ago in the operating room just before one of my surgeries. I had told him I wanted a moment to pause before he injected the drug that was going to put me instantly to sleep. I planned at that time to say my grandfather's prayer, the "Shema," the basic statement of the nature of the world which underlies Judaism. "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." When he told me he was ready to inject me, I repeated this prayer aloud in Hebrew. And then my anesthesiologist said, "I'd like to say a prayer also." I said, "Surely!" And he said, "Dear God, please help us to do what is right," and he injected the drug. I remember going with those words, with the deepest sense of peace, into the experience of the anesthesia and the surgery. My anesthesiologist's prayer speaks to unknowable purpose and to the willingness to participate in this purpose. It is deeply comforting in that way.
I would like to tell you about my grandfather and his concept of prayer. I had not realized that the story I'm going to tell you was a story about prayer and I had no idea how important it was to me, but as I was preparing for this talk, I realized it permeates my daily experience of life. Isn't it funny how something not in your conscious memory can do that? This is the memory that came back.
My grandfather was an orthodox rabbi and a student of Kabbala. My parents were young socialists who felt that religion was the "opiate of the masses." So Grandfather was my connection to any reality larger than the class struggle and social well-being. He and I used to have this secret relationship with God in which I was encouraged to speak directly from my heart to God and to listen in my heart for God's response.
When I was small, about five or six, they were still teaching religion in the public schools. Every week there was an assembly in which the entire school was gathered, and the principal, a fundamentalist, stood up and did a fire-and-brimstone kind of preaching. During one of these assemblies she said it was important that we get on our knees and pray three times a day because we needed to remind God that we were there. She may not have actually said this, but this is what I took away. You had to make Him look at you! Because if God turned His face from you, you would wither up and die, like an autumn leaf... and then she actually held up this large dried brown autumn leaf. As I looked at it I felt such fear, such enormous terror, because it seemed to me, even as a five-year-old, that God had a lot of things on His mind, a lot of other people. And in-between the times I was praying, He might blink and then what would happen to me? I became very insecure, depressed, anxious, and was unable to sleep.
Of course, this is not something one can discuss with young socialist parents, so I had to wait until my grandfather came to visit. It is very interesting to remember it as an adult - I don't think you can feel anguish like that as an adult. You have to be young.
After several days, my grandfather came. When we were alone I told him what had happened, and I asked him a question, "What if God blinks?" It was the only time that I've ever seen him angry.
What he said was, "Nischuma-la" (and by the way, for many years I thought "Nischuma-la" meant "Little Naomi" - it actually means "Little Beloved Soul"). He said, "Nischuma-la, if you wake up at night, would you know if you were alone in the house? Would you know if Mom and Dad had gone out to the movies if you wake up in the dark at night?" And I said, "Sure!" Then he said, "How would you know that you weren't alone in the house? Would you see them and look at them?" I said, "No." He said, "Would you hear them? Is that how you'd know?" I said, "No." He said, "Would they talk to you? Is that how you would know?" I said, "No," and I remember thinking, "How odd. He's asking stupid questions like a grown-up," because my grandfather never did that. I said with irritation, "No - I would just know. I would just know that I wasn't alone in the house."
My grandfather smiled at me with great love and said, "Good. That's how God knows you're there. He doesn't need to look at you. And that's how you know that God is there. You just know." In remembering this, I realized for the first time that perhaps this was what prayer was - that knowing. That's how you pray, by that knowing. You know that God is there and you're not alone in the house.
This is quite personal and not easy to talk about. But I realize that, for me, prayer is this knowing. It is an experience of relationship that never changes, like gravity. Gravity is the way I experience my relationship to the Earth. Gravity is a factor in my every movement. Everything I do takes gravity into consideration, all the time. Even though I'm unaware of it, every movement I make is a dance with gravity. God is like that, a constant relationship, and, like gravity, if It stopped I would know it instantly. But It never does.
So, this knowing is a way in which I orient myself. I know which way is up and which way down. It's as profound, as deep and unconscious, as gravity's impact on every cell in my body. I am held by the Infinite in the same way I am held by the Earth. Somehow this is what allows me to be in right relationship to the people I work with, as they struggle with pain, illness, and even death.
I'm trained in psychosynthesis, a transpersonal psychotherapy. I don't actually use its techniques a lot, but I experience its perspective and viewpoint. It's very natural for me. I remember the Institute training rooms where we learned to do one-on-one sessions with people. All the training rooms were furnished in exactly the same way. There was a couch for the client and there was a guide's chair you sat on. On the wall behind the couch was a huge and very beautiful photograph of deep space, with a nebula in it. So at all times, whether you were conscious of it or not in your field of vision there was the client and this big photograph. The client would be talking about his or her problems... with relationship, with aging, whatever. And there it would be in your field of vision: deep space, the context... like gravity. Gravity is the experience of an unceasing relationship in which we live, our relationship to the Earth. Prayer is our experience of the other unceasing relationship in which we live - our relationship to the Infinite. And somehow that informs our response to suffering in ways that I think make us much more useful to other people. I can't prove that, but I feel it. It is part of my "knowing."
The fact that the relationship is unceasing suggests to me that not only do I pray, I "pray without ceasing." That's an odd concept. The way I understand it is that it is a Catholic concept, originally, in which monks dedicate every aspect of their life to God, from brushing their teeth to singing Gregorian chants.
So it's about consecration of the ordinary, but I want to go beyond that. I want to say that in this sense of prayer there is no ordinary. There is only the sacred. We are always on sacred ground. Life itself is sacred. And that experience sustains me also. Reminding each other of the relationship which holds our lives - remembering through our being, not by talking, but just through the way we are. That remembering is a need. When you pray, you affirm belonging. That is a human need. The sense of connection to the larger reality is a human need. Without it we are lost and alone in the dark.
Several interesting studies suggest that the unconnected person - the unmarried, or the isolated - is vulnerable in his or her health. These studies focus on horizontal connection. David Spiegel's wonderful work on women with metastatic breast cancer indicates that, somehow, even connecting in a support group for a very brief time every week, for a very brief time in the course of an illness, can make a change in people's survival. Dean Ornish's work with people with coronary artery disease suggests that intense support group experience can help reverse heart disease.
So we have studied the effect of the horizontal connection, the outer social connection, the community, on health and survival. But who's to say that vertical connection isn't as important? That a sense of connection with universal pattern, even though you don't know what that pattern is, helps us to live? That communion is as important to health as community?
I believe that there are many ways in which people make and experience connection with a larger reality. It's my belief that the deep peace and acceptance that comes out of an experience of vertical connection and belonging is enormously empowering for people. And that the absence of that experience of connection has an adverse effect on health. I myself would love to see this as the subject of research.
The tribal doctors and shamans talk about "soul loss," which is a fascinating concept - that, somehow, soul loss underlies the vulnerability to illness and that stress comes as much from vertical isolation (loss of meaning, a sense of chaos or randomness) as from the absence of social support. We think of stress as not enough touching, not enough time, too many expectations. Yet the way we think about stress may not take in the full realization of what human nature is about. And without knowing human nature, we can't know what human needs are.
We are only just beginning to understand human nature. Perhaps prayer, knowing that we belong, that we are not alone in the dark, may be essential to our ability to heal and to live