““Addressing That-Which-Is-Larger-Than-Us” ~ © Rev. Erika Hewitt
UU Community Church of Santa Monica
6 May 2012

Holy One, take me where you want me to go
Let me meet whom you want me to meet
Tell me what you me what me to say
and keep me out of your way
~ Father Mychal's prayer

I have an acute inner timekeeper for cycles both small and large. What this means is that when a meeting runs long, my inner kid begins to squirm uncomfortably – but it also means that on most days I have a heightened awareness of where I was, and what I was doing, a year ago.

Exactly a year ago, I was returning to my church from a sabbatical in Portland, Oregon – the city that’s most home to me. Back in California, I missed Portland’s skyscape; its people; its rain – and I missed a certain group of people: Clara, Hank, Audrey; Mary and Rob. I still miss them... and before I go any further, I should mention that these are not real people.

Just to repeat: Clara, Rob, and Hank aren’t real. They’re an imaginary host of fictional characters who presented themselves to me, fully formed, last spring. They moseyed up and introduced themselves to me throughout my sabbatical, which turned out to be a glorious, trippy, and surprising dance with creativity. It turns out that meeting these imaginary friends of mine was a spiritual exercise – because a year ago I learned that the act of praying, of opening, isn’t just about speaking words to a god you may or not believe in; it also has everything to do with the creative spirit, which some call “God” and others call “the Muse.”

‹ The first book I read on sabbatical was Beginner’s Grace: Bringing Prayer to Life, by my colleague Kate Braestrup.  Among her quirky and soulful reflections, I discovered Father Mychal’s prayer:

Holy One, take me where you want me to go
Let me meet whom you want me to meet
Tell me what you want me to say
And keep me out of your way.

You know how sometimes you stumble upon a poem, or a song, or a quote, and it lights up like the Vegas Strip? Have you ever read something and heard a deep, ancient voice whooping, because it hits your soul in just the right spot?

It’s a nice feeling. It’s like being handed a map when you’re feeling lost, or coming up for air after being underwater. These words continue to have that effect on me. And: it feels important to call this “Father Mychal’s prayer.” He’s pictured here, in an icon created by Robert Lentz.

Father Mychal Judge was a Franciscan priest; he was also a gay man; a recovering alcoholic; a chaplain to the New York City Fire Department. He was known for ministering to the homeless, recovering alcoholics,
immigrants, gays and lesbians, and people with AIDS.

On September 11th, 2001, Father Mychal rushed to the smoking World Trade Center along with dozens of New York firefighters. He prayed with them, and with the survivors who staggered out of the buildings. But he was killed – like thousands of others who died that morning – when the South Tower collapsed. He was 68 years old.
‹
Prayer is one of the oldest human practices and one of the most universal. Still, I’m guessing that the word prayer makes some of you squirm, and makes others of you yawn. To you I say: we UU’s are defined by our curiosity. If we Unitarian Universalists believe that our spiritual journeys – our very lives – are dynamic, malleable, and always evolving to accommodate new perspectives on truth and meaning... can’t the words we
use be malleable and evolving, too?

For my part, prayer is a way to “connect and reconnect to the source of our lives.” When I pray, I listen for the steady, nourishing hum underneath the chatter I carry around inside of my head. Prayer is about my relationship with That Which Is Larger, That Which Is Wiser, That Which Is More Creative and More Compassionate than my
individual self.

Whether we approach the Great, Silent Mysterious with awe, despair, or soul-deep questioning, I believe that there must be something larger than us, or we risk putting ourselves at the center of the universe. Your “something larger” can be the collective unconscious, or creativity. It can be whatever you want to name it... but something shift when we’re willing to let “it” be out there, beyond our human selves. Let’s explore these words more deeply.

Holy One...

For me, Holy One is a good ‘nuff name for the All That Is, which is why it’s the only alteration I made to Father Mychal’s prayer: I changed it from “Lord.” As a Franciscan priest, Father Mychal clearly felt comfortable addressing the Presence in the Void as “Lord.” I don’t. So I changed it. You get to do that when you “connect and reconnect” to Life: do your own naming. That’s one of the rules.

Holy One, take me where you want me to go

The phrase “take me where you want me to go” is not a not a jettisoning of free will; it’s not a handing over of marionette strings to The Great Puppeteer in the Sky. I view these words as a healthy surrender; an acknowledgment that we can’t steer our lives through sheer will (this has been an important lesson for me, these past, oh, let me count... forty years). Take me where you want me to go is an invitation for a Wiser Knowing to be our co-pilot, and counter our willful impulses.

This is what writer Martha Beck hints at when she explains, “My God is... amorphous, more of a universal constant, like gravity or magnetism. This constant doesn’t pick favorites; it simply flows into any opening we make for it.”

Goodness, or Mystery, flows into all openings available to it, including the openings we create in ourselves. That same notion is reflected in one of Taoism’s4 most important concepts: wu wei, which means “doing without doing,” or “no action.”

The idea [of wu wei ] is that when you are aligned with the wisdom in yourself, open to joy without clinging, [you’ll be carried] along like a raft on a river. You’ll end up moving with great speed and power, but all of
that energy is generated by the current, not by you. The only thing you have to do is float.

When I catch myself revving my engines willfully, this prayer reminds me “to ride the current without struggling.” It’s about trusting that, if I get out of my own way, great things will happen. And they do.

Let me meet whom you want me to meet

This just might be the juiciest, ripest line in the entire prayer (for an extravert, at least). Each day delivers unto us surprises; responding to those summons is a form of receiving. Call it “That Which Larger and Wiser Than Ourselves” or call it “the Unconscious,” but Life addresses us, and invites us to respond, to receive, at every turn.

Again, I don’t believe that we live in a puppet master Universe; I don’t believe that our paths are pre-charted and criss-crossed with dotted lines leading us to the people that Destiny wants us to meet. I do believe that when we open and attune to the world, we rest in a current that has its own force and direction.

“It is clear,” says Gregg Levoy, that ‘living means being addressed,’ as the theologian Martin Buber once said,
and whatever or whomever is addressing us is a power like wind or fusion or faith: we can’t see the force, but we can see what it does. If I suspend disbelief and trust that The Current Which Is Larger Than Us carries us
towards people who would teach us, help us, bless us, cheer us... well, it shifts the way I engage with all people, whether stranger or friend.

Tell me what you want me to say

This is where things get trippy. When I began to read and pray this line, it twanged the strings of my growing creative hunger. Months before my sabbatical started, a story began stirring in me, asking to be written. I trusted that creative stirring and decided to find out what wanted to emerge. As soon as my feet were planted in Portland, I sat down and invited the Muse to work with me. Tell me what you want me to say. And boy, did she show up.

At the end of those three months, I’d written – well, not a complete novel, but a 50,000- word second draft of one (the equivalent of twenty-five sermons); it’s a frame that I’ll return to this summer, to embroider it into a finished work. No matter how many hours I spent pulling that story out of the ether, I didn’t write it by myself. The ghosts of my characters knocking on the door, trying to get onto the page, were there all along.

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert says, 

I... believe that the world is being constantly circled as though by gulfstream forces, ideas, and creativity that want to be made manifest, and they’re looking for portals to come through to people and if you don’t do it they’ll go find someone else. You have to convince it that you’re serious; you have to show it respect; you have to talk to it and let it know that you’re there.

What you’re hearing is Gilbert’s conviction that if we view the source of creativity – or wisdom or compassion – as coming from inside of us, then we’re doomed. Putting that much pressure on ourselves – to be the Source, to be the fountain – means that eventually we’ll fear falling short, or running dry; we fear burning out or going mad.

But If the source of ideas is outside of us, it becomes possible to get some distance, negotiate, even fight with it, instead of beating yourself up all the time. It’s an it, or a her. It’s not you.

This is how the singer Tom Waits found his artistic liberation:  he was driving on the LA freeway and a little fragment of a beautiful song comes to him, but he has no way to record it. He feels the old pressure: I’m not good enough, I’m going to lose it, It’ll haunt me forever. But he backed off, established that negotiating distance, and said:

Excuse me. Can you not see that I’m driving? If you’re serious about wanting to exist, I spend eight hours a day in the studio. You’re welcome to come visit me when I’m at the piano. Otherwise, leave me alone and go bother Leonard Cohen.

That’s another rule: you get to push back and set some terms for the Muse. “You don’t need to prostrate yourself to it, because it’s not fragile,” counsels Elizabeth Gilbert, but you do have to show her that you’re serious, because the Muse rewards “people who are at their desk at six o’clock in the morning, working.”

Tell me what you want me to say. Let me meet whom you want me to meet.

As it turns out, my Muse – my Larger-Than-I – wanted to introduce me to the gaggle of fictional characters riding on her train, asking to be born. Mystery flows into all openings available to it. My job was to show up, willing and waiting, and put in the work.

 What an all-purpose prayer: it’s an invitation for the Spirit of Life, and a contract for partnering with the Muse! And then, this sweet ending:

And keep me out of your way

This line, says Kate Braestrup, “is the most important”:

Oh! May I not prove to be an obstacle... May I be transparent, vanish! so
that your light may shine through me. But if I can’t make things better,
[Holy One], please, please, don’t let me make things worse.

That alone, friends, is a darn fine prayer: please, don’t let me make things worse. Some days, that’s the best we can hope for.

Sturdy Grace, take each of us where you want us to go,
Let us meet whom you want us to meet,
Tell us what you want us to say,
And keep us out of your way.

Endnotes:
1. Rev. Kate serves as a chaplain in Maine. Her other books – highly recommended reading, here! – are Here If You Need Me and Marriage and Other Acts of Charity.
2. Rev. Erik Wikstrom, in Simply Pray.
3. Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints, p. 194.
4. In fact, Beck lived in Asia for a number of years and picked up on a lot Asian spirituality. She explores images like being “a leaf in the stream” in Leaving the Saints, and also offers brief reflections on Asian spirituality in Expecting Adam.
5. The words of the Rev. Sarah Moldenhauer-Salazar.
6. In Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck, p. 196.
7. In Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, p. 2.
8. In the years since Eat, Pray, Love was published, Gilbert has turned her attention to creativity – and, in her words, “How you can live a lifetime of creativity without cutting your ear off” – without falling into madness by trying to “top” yourself. Her most vivid thoughts about creativity can be heard in her TED talk (see YouTube) and on the March 8th, 2011 “Help!” episode of WNYC’s Radiolab podcast.
9. This story was related by Gilbert on RadioLab (see previous note).
10. RadioLab again!
11. Beginner’s Grace, p. 112.