First Friends Meeting
Matthew 6:5-13
‘Alignment’
Doug Gwyn

Last Sunday, I described how my message that week had come together. I realized that my mind was working on two different tracks over the summer. On one track, Sunday by Sunday, I was working methodically through the parables of Jesus. On the other track, I was writing that song about the philosopher Nietzsche ending up in heaven, much to his surprise. Then, much to my surprise, the two tracks finally converged in last Sunday’s message. I observed that, much of the time, my left brain doesn’t know what my right brain is doing.

Of course, that was partly a play on words – we usually say that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Well, that got me to thinking about prayer. Many of us, when we were small children, were taught to pray putting our two hands together. Either like this, palm against palm, or like this, with the fingers interlaced. Some people continue to pray that way the rest of their lives. I think there’s something to it. Most of us have noticed in one way or another how physical exercise is good for the mind and the spirit. It can help us burn off stress, feel more together in body and spirit. I know my 20 minutes of jogging three or four times a week is an important part of my spiritual life – even if I do run with loud, raucous music playing on my headphones. But it’s not just a matter of exercise. A variety of physical habits can strengthen our mental habits and keep us centered spiritually. So when you think about it, putting our hands together, even interlacing our fingers perhaps, is a way of letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing. And that can serve as a physical aid to getting our left brain and right brain in alignment. And that mental exercise is part of the spiritual exercise of getting ourselves aligned with God.

Most of you are aware of this left-brain, right-brain business. To put it very simply (probably too simply), the left brain is mainly occupied with the business of linear thinking. Logical thought. Do these figures add up? What steps do I need to take to accomplish this goal? That sort of thing. By contrast, the right brain does more wafting around. It’s more involved with enjoying the beauty of a fall day or a work of art. Or it supplies those moments of insight and intuition – the ‘aha’ moments of our lives. The right brain is non-linear. It works by leaps and hunches, not methodical steps and careful analysis. Now, most of us may enjoy a walk in the woods more than doing our taxes. But clearly, we need both sides of our brain working. It’s not just a matter of survival. It’s a path to wholeness and integration. Getting your taxes done can make that walk in the woods a lot more enjoyable. Likewise, if you’re stuck on a problem, like your taxes maybe, a walk in the woods may help you find the solution. But it usually works in some indirect, mysterious way.

So the human brain has these two major hemispheres with different specializations. But it also has a great mass of cables connecting the two together – the corpus calosum. Like the interlaced fingers when we fold our hands in prayer. The wiring is there, to integrate the system, to align the hemispheres. But we have to exercise it. And at the highest level of our being, our spiritual lives, prayer is that exercise, that work of alignment. Or maybe I shouldn’t say the spiritual is the highest level of our being. It’s the most integrative work of our being. Spiritual life isn’t some rarified abstraction. Our spiritual lives are really about integrating everything together – our work, our finances, our families, our moral lives, our mental lives, our physical bodies, our consumer choices, our religious participation – into a sense of relationship to God.

That means that nothing in our lives is too trivial to bring to God in prayer. Of course, there are the proverbially trivial, even venal prayers we think of. Praying for a good parking space. Praying for a flashy car. Praying for your team to win the big game. Well, if that’s what preoccupies your mind, the best way to deal with it is “bring it to the Lord in prayer.” Prayer helps us stop cycling around in petty things. You take trivial things before God and you begin to see how trivial they are. Or you begin to see that they are really about something more important, and you get on to praying about that. If prayer is about integration, alignment of the different parts of our lives, everything is potentially a matter of prayer.

But that means that prayer is not just sitting down, giving the Supreme Being a long list of things to do, and then rushing off. Sure, bring the list. But that’s just the beginning of prayer. When you bring those things to God, unburden your heart by talking to God about them, you’re really just starting to pray. Now you can just be with God. That’s the goal of prayer. And where is God? We believe that God is within each of us. Of course, the biggest obstacle to just being with God is that the mind and the heart bounce around all over the place, far afield from where we actually are right now in our bodies. So we have to draw our racing minds and troubled hearts gently back into the body. Feel your breath going in and out, the pulse in your hands. Your grumbling stomach maybe. You’re putting body and spirit together. These are not only the practices of Eastern mediation. They’re part of the Christian tradition of prayer too. It’s about getting in touch with yourself so you can get in touch with God.

The Bible tells us that we are made in the image of God. Well, that could mean a lot of things, I suppose. But one thing it suggests to me is that getting in tune with ourselves – mind, body, spirit – gets us better in tune with God. But at the same time, it works in the opposite direction. When we align our wills with God’s will, we become more truly who we are. We become better attuned to ourselves. I think that’s what’s going on in the Lord’s Prayer that Ann read for us a moment ago. First, Jesus says, don’t pray like a hypocrite. Al Inglis reminded us a couple weeks ago in open worship that we’re all hypocrites, really. We all catch ourselves talking one game and playing another. It’s unconscious most of the time. A hypocrite is literally someone who doesn’t discern things deeply enough. Well, that’s all of us, in one way or another. But Jesus says, whatever you do, don’t be a hypocrite when you pray. Prayer is your best hope of getting real. So don’t make matters worse. Don’t pray to look good to other people. And don’t just fill the air with a lot of words. Pray as honestly, as earnestly as you can. And usually, the best way to do that is to pray in secret – which can mean either alone or silently.

It’s true -- public prayer is tricky. I guess that’s why the Worship Leader usually lets me do it. I get to be the hypocrite! The influence of the group seems to pull us in one direction or another. For example, in our Prayer Concerns time here every Sunday, it’s almost entirely about personal health and safety. We pray for those who are ill and for the safe travel of our loved ones. And those are not trivial things. But we almost never pray together for the many millions who are suffering in poverty and starvation, or in the middle of war or oppression. We almost never pray together for the health of our Meeting. Now, individually, our prayers may be more balanced. But the habits of a group tend to focus our attention in certain directions. And that may stunt our personal prayer life.

When Jesus offers a prayer, he doesn’t say “pray these words,” he says “pray in this way.” I think that means the Lord’s Prayer is a model to help us learn how to pray, not a magic formula we simply repeat. First of all, the Lord’s Prayer goes up from us, not just me. We pray as part of a community of people trying to know and do God’s will. We also pray on behalf of a whole world with lots of troubles. And the front-and-center thing we pray for is that God’s will be done. We pray for heaven and earth to get better aligned with each other. We’re a bit out of synch, Lord! Help us be part of the realignment. But we’re also physical beings, with physical needs. Please sustain us, all of us, with the daily bread of our basic needs. Forgive us, let us start over with you Lord, as we commit ourselves to starting over with each other. And remember that we’re fragile, we’re fallible. As Oscar Wilde put it, we can resist anything but temptation. So deliver us from evil. Make it easy to be good. Those are the basics of prayer.

With that in mind, and as we move into Open Worship, let’s just be together for a while, with these friends and with God.