Good morning, everybody. So the topic of today's Dharma
talk is going to be prayer. I chose this topic because I do
a lot of it in my work as a chaplain, and it took me a long
time to be able to do it authentically.
I've also going to believe that prayer could be a powerful way
of connecting with others in a deeply human and healing way.
My hope today is to offer a way of thinking about prayer that
might be usable for the Sangha, especially given all of the kind
of pseudo praying we do in the service prior to this.
So with that in mind, I will begin.
So I started my journey with prayer as a chaplain intern at
Children's. At the time, I had very little
experience with prayer. In fact, most of my experiences
with prayer had been fairly negative.
People would tell me that they were going to pray for me, which
I found usually meant that they hoped that God would change
something about me they didn't like into something that they
did like. I think of this kind of prayer
as a something like a backhanded prayer.
Other times prayer showed up for me when I was in some kind of
deep emotional turmoil and the spirit of my prayers was
something like, you know, F it, I will try anything to make this
situation change. And so my kind of thoughts on
these prayer, they're kind of like Hail Mary prayers.
Hail Mary in the sense of throw it up there, not like Hail Mary,
mother of God, that kind of shit.
And then there was a third type of prayer, which I think of as
intercessory prayer, the idea that some God or Saints or
bodhisattva would step in and fix things for me.
Like many rituals that I assumed were mostly Christian in origin,
I found this kind of prayer to be particularly offensive to my
kind of secular sensibilities of the time, and so I scoffed at it
for most of my adult life. To me, it felt like a mythical
helper that would who could only help when you had the decency to
ask for it. Right.
So my assessment at the time was that prayer was something
accusatory, sometimes maybe desperate, but almost certainly
something beneath me and really, ultimately futile.
And yet, as a chaplain, as you might expect, this was something
that it was not only expected of me, it was something I was
expected to do well. And as you can also probably
imagine, the first time I was asked to pray with a family, it
went really, really well. It did not.
Up until that point, I had been able to skillfully avoid praying
with patients and families, but this particular moment caught me
off guard and I froze and launched into a directionless
ramble of spiritual words that I had heard in seminary.
Something to the effect of dear God, something, something grace,
something something mercy, maybe some healing and Amen.
Which earned me a side eye from the patient's grandmother.
And in that moment, I felt incredibly exposed, like I had
been found out as this kind of spiritual fraud who, to be
truthful, at the time, I'd always thought that I was worse.
Prayer really matter for this family, and they had asked for
it, and I had let them down. So having had this happen, and
like any good fraud, I decided that I would avoid prayer as
much as possible for as long as possible.
And so I became something of a prayer magician or Houdini, able
to disappear anytime the possibility of prayer arose.
And this worked in my chaplaincy career for a little while, but I
had a supervisor who was much more skilled for me and she
noticed the pattern. And so one morning during our
morning report, she left me dead in my soul and said, Joe, you
seem to enjoy praying. Will you lead us today?
Hell. And so I tried.
I really did. And it was bad and really,
really bad. And at the end, she looked at me
and said, thank you, Joe, that was fine, which was somehow
much, much worse than if she had told me I didn't do well.
And so after our morning meeting, she said, Joe, can I
see you in my office? Well, you know that feeling when
you get caught cheating on the test or you get caught stealing
something? Well, maybe so we don't.
But I know that for me, and I felt very ashamed and exposed.
So I went into her office, and she just let the silence stretch
uncomfortably, which is a tactic I'm very familiar with as a
father now. But at the end, she just kind of
laughed. And she said, Joe, you don't
know how to pray with being. No, no, I didn't.
And so after some conversation about my upbringing, she kind of
understood where I was at. And so she was gracious enough
to teach me how to pray. She gave me a framework.
This framework and a kind of Buddhist way of understanding is
going to be kind of what the rest of the talk is about.
So we'll start with the framework.
And it was much simpler than I thought it was.
Invoke something larger than yourself.
Name the situation. Ask for something specific.
Name what you think the outcome that you want is.
Offer a blessing and then close. Or kind of more simply,
divinity. This is the situation.
This is what I mean. This is what I hope it does.
Can you help? Thanks.
Which sounds flippant, but it was incredibly helpful for me
because like any good Buddhist, I now had a formula to work
with, and I am very comfortable with formulas.
But more importantly, this framework forced me to do
something that I had not been doing, and that was to actually
listen to people. See, in order to know what to
say, I had to understand and listen to what patients and
families were actually experiencing.
And over time, I found myself becoming more deeply engaged
with their stories, with their beliefs and their lives.
And that, I think, is where the magic happens.
To know what someone believes, you have to care enough to ask
them to name what a situation is.
You have to actually listen to what is going on and to
understand what someone hopes for you.
I have to ask them what they need.
And so before praying, I began asking patients and families or
whoever what they wanted. And what I heard was surprising
to me because what I had assumed was that's what they wanted was
for some God to take away whatever was harming them,
whether it be illness or grief or whatever.
And what I heard was really about the disease itself, but
about the disruptions that it was causing in their lives.
I heard people ask for peace, for safety, for their families
not to fall apart. I wasn't hearing please for
miracles. I was hearing hopes for
emotional and spiritual healing. And I can tell you from
experience that this is an incredibly intimate thing that
happens. When I asked people for what
they wanted me to pray for, they shared themselves that they're
most vulnerable, what their fears were, what their hopes
were, who they loved, why they loved them.
They placed their most sincere longings into my hands.
And that is something precious and sacred.
And because of it, something in me shifted.
And the best way I can describe this is instead of wanting
things for people, would you to have this, I started wanting
things with them. I had thought previously that
prayer was about changing reality.
And what I found was that prayer was more like a way of
listening, the way of connecting to people and a way of allowing
vulnerability to be spoken in a Safeway and to be encountered
with another individual or individuals.
And that feel like I'm using special a lot.
But that, friends, is something special because when you, when
you really listen to someone like that, when you stay present
with what they're hoping for and when you let it matter to you
without really needing to fix it, that's what compassion is,
right? When you present enough, when
you're present enough to actually hear what's being said,
not just the words that they're saying, but the life and the
person that's underneath all that, that's, that's
mindfulness. And when you realize that their
hopes and fears aren't separate from your own life, that they
are entangled and that you are similar and that you have the
same hopes and fears, well, that's a real good window into
interdependence, right? And so it's very Buddhist in a
sense. And so, and now sometimes when
I'm at work, I get the the question, do Buddhists pray?
Well, yeah, yeah, we kind of do. In almost every Buddhist
tradition there is prayer or something very close to it.
We do chanting, we make offerings, we have specific
sutras and things that we read like the four measurables and
the Heart Sutra and the end major Canon go where we call on
bodhisattvas. These can all be understood as
kind of forms of prayer. And yet especially for me
sometimes, and in Western Buddha, my Buddhism, I think
that we sometimes act as though prayer is something that we
don't do or shouldn't do, or something that other people do.
It is icky. And I worry that maybe we are
letting go of something profound because we don't really
understand it. And so put it, putting it in
perspective, sympathetic concern for the suffering of others.
That sounds like compassion, listening deeply and being
present with another human person.
That sounds like mindfulness, understanding that their hopes
and fears are bound up with your own.
That sounds like interdependence and kind of karma, right?
And so practicing compassion and mindfulness, understanding
interdependence, that all sounds very Buddhist to me.
And when understood that way, prayer sounds very Buddhist as
well. And I will, I'll take it one
step further. And that's our order talks about
rigorous self honesty a lot. And I know that many of you may
not move in circles where prayer is common, and that's fine.
What I would encourage you to do is maybe when you're on your
cushion and your mind is wandering a lot or you're
looking for some kind of focus as maybe a check in, consider
praying for yourself. What do I mean by that?
Think about what it is that you want, what it is that you need.
Why do you need those things? Error can be an opportunity for
reflection, for honesty and for care.
Or think about somebody else and maybe try and pray for them.
Imagine what it's like to be them or to be with them and then
to want something with them. Maybe it's peace, maybe it's
well be whatever arises from that place of kindness.
And then if you want to follow that down rabbit, or you may be
surprised when you ask why, what kind of answers that you get, I
would encourage you not to get hung up on God language.
Use it if it works, let it go if it doesn't.
I think what matters is that you engage sincerely and figure out
what prayer is for yourself. It has become a regular part of
my job and somewhat of a daily practice for me, and I can say
that it has changed me an awful lot for the better.
So in conclusion, I hope I've offered you a way of
understanding prayer that is grounded in kind of Buddhist
practice as a way for you to cultivate compassion and
mindfulness and maybe develop a different kind of appreciation
for interdependence. And I guess more to the point, I
hope it gives you a way of meeting your hopes and fears and
joys and suffering more directly and somewhat.
I hope you find it useful. So thanks everybody.
Didi has her hand up. I thought she might go ahead.
Didi, Joe. Thank you so much for that.
As I'm sure Joe remembers, I have struggled with this concept
for a long time. And you gave a perfect
perspective on it. And I was, I'm at work and I was
literally just taking notes in an e-mail to send to myself.
I haven't taken notes on a talk in a long time.
I really loved what you said about being with someone in
compassion and I'm in the process of trying to learn how
to do that for myself. So I really liked how you
brought it back to that. I just, it really gave me a new
perspective and I'm pretty good at being compassionate with
others. But the idea of prayer, I've
always recoiled from that and even spoken with my husband
about it because he's an A A and he also doesn't believe in God.
And he's like, you know, whatever it is for you, the God
part, the higher power, you know, with him, it's like music
and how the universe keeps bringing that into his life.
So I, I'll be on a new journey of figuring out what that is for
me and how I can sit with myself with empathy and understanding.
So thank you so much. Oh, thank you, that was
wonderful, Carrie says. What are the most prayer like
things we do in the OPB? Yeah, if you're looking for from
a liturgical aspects, you know when whatever we chant, we are
doing that for a reason. We say in the four measurables,
whatever, whenever what we are doing is done with the intent of
changing some aspects of reality, whether it be within
ourselves or with the world, that in some ways should be
considered prayer. Now without getting into the
weeds of it, and I think this would be a better question for
the order, if we want to bring it up during the the call for
what specifically how the order understands prayer, I think we
could we could talk about that on a random Sunday.
But I went in to bring up, you know, we talked about the
divinity aspect of it. And I, you know, sat with my mom
in the hospital when the priest will come in and visit her.
And she knows that I am no longer Catholic.
And she always says, I hope that didn't make you uncomfortable.
And I'll be honest, it used to sometimes, but now I know that
that brings her comfort and I'm thankful.
So when they come in to give her comfort, I'm thankful to them.
And I think many of us get hung up on the divinity words.
And I mean I found it helpful every morning.
To go through a list of gratitude, I'm thankful I woke
up today, I'm thankful for my husband, I'm thankful for my
dogs. And to me, it's more setting an
intention and putting it out into the universe.
And whether you believe in manifestation, all those things
are a muscle. And I found myself being more
grateful for things since I've started doing that.
So I think prayer can take many forms.
And I just want to end it with, I wish I remember the author,
but it was in Lion's War magazine.
One of the stories, the person said he met the road manager of
eight from ACDC and he he mentioned something about God.
And the road manager said God is just the blanket we put over the
unknown to make it familiar. And he said, how come I grew up
in a spiritual household and they never told me anything like
that. It was always like, God is this,
God is this, God is this. And it's like, no, it's it.
If you believe in the deity, it's so much more than.
That. Go go to ACDC.
For your you know, it, it wouldn't have been my first
choice, but now I can see the connection with son.
I want to kind of touch on something you said, but in a
different way that we often see prayer as something we do to
something. Like it's like we are when, when
my, when I think of how I object to prayer, I put up all of these
barriers like, Oh, well, it's not my God or they're trying to
do something unscientific or they're trying to do X or Y.
And I put up all these barriers sometimes.
And for me, it helps to kind of call that back and see prayer as
a, as kind of an invitation to be in relationship with somebody
in a different way. And yes, that can be
challenging, right? But practice was never supposed
to be easy. If it was, we wouldn't call it
practice. And so finding avenues and ways
of being in relationship with people authentically or in
dialogue with them, where we are not necessarily trying to
separate ourselves from them, we are just trying to come
alongside them, is one of the things that we are trying to do
as well. One good people, but also as
Buddhists as we try and figure out how this self thing works or
doesn't work or how compassion works or doesn't work.
Coming up alongside people and and accepting their invitations
as or, or making the invitations as flawed as they are on one end
or the other is a way to engage that.
And usually by engaging in authentically or at least trying
to, both sides of that equation should become better people
because of it. So there's that.
Sorry, Joe has his hand up. Joe, you're up, man.
Thank you, I really love this topic and thank you for the
meditation. I just left a meeting.
I go to two Buddhist recovery groups and they're guided
meditations mostly. So it was really lovely to come
into the bells, inviting the bell, right?
The topic is amazing to me. This, this was my mom.
She's still my mom and my heart, Francis.
And she was a Christian. I was raised that way, but it
really wasn't the thing for me. I kept looking up at stars
thinking, well, I don't know, I don't see how that can be.
And when I went to a A for about a year, year and a half, I
really loved the serenity prayer, which starts with God.
May I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom
to know the difference. And I found one secular version
just now. It's just the serenity prayer
without God. I do like that prayer, that word
in this case, and that's really all I wanted to share that some,
I guess you could say I found an alternative that works for me
and I even carry the 124 hour a a coin in my pocket, even though
I'm not an A a attendee anymore. And I scratched out the word
God. So thank you all for letting me
share and thank you again for this lovely topic.
No, thank you. It's so personal, isn't it?
That's I guess what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, I think it is. Good morning, everybody.
Of course, Glenn has said that the Serenity.
Prayer. Is.
A very Buddhist prayer once again, if you.
Take the God out even if you leave God in depending on the
fruit of or the type of Buddhism you like.
But I digress, Perry. Go ahead, Nancy.
Oh, hey, Joe. Hi, everybody.
I I grew up Catholic and was an altar boy and all of that, but
I. Never really gave my per.
Self permission to believe. I guess I was agnostic.
I wanted proof. I then rebelled, came to
Protestantism, and that didn't seem to fit either.
And then I went into some kind of wacky psychics things for a
little bit where I first learned how to meditate.
All of this left me. That didn't fit either.
So all of this left me with this, this strong aversion to
anything spiritual and certainly the God thing.
Like Joe, I'm in recovery. I used to do 12 step and the God
word in the Serenity prayer always freaked me out.
I have come to a place where the aversion is lessened, but it's
still there. And among the things on the
verse 2, that remains a very strong aversion.
That said, I, I need to reconcile that because I would
like to do some some chaplain work myself, but I'm AII have
this fear that arises also that if I, if I can't figure out a
way to reconcile that, that I'll just, I'll be a fraud.
Your Dharma talk tells me that I don't have to be.
And moreover, whether I become a chaplain or not, I do wish to be
with people regardless of their spiritual framework, in a way
that that may be helpful to them.
So yeah, this is kind of, you know, a, an exploration I would
like to do. And thank you for your
tournament talk that really spoke to me on this.
If one of the things that helped me in my chaplaincy journey,
which this may help some of you in a non chaplaincy sense, is
that at least with prayer or at least when dealing with other
people's spiritual or religious beliefs, mine don't matter.
Mine are for me. But what matters in the moment
is dropping those barriers between myself and others and
realizing that if it's important to them, it's important to me,
right? I had a friend of mine back in
the day that was fond of saying, if you like it, I love it.
And when when understood that way, and I understand that there
are lots of ways that religion can be kind of a toxic thing,
but in an individual meeting people where they are since in a
chaplaincy sense, that's being able to say if it's important to
you, it's important to me. And we'll just let that ride has
been incredibly helpful in figuring out where I can put
down my stuff and pick up other people's stuff.
But Perry, if in the future you feel like the chaplaincy is
something that you want to pursue and you'd like to talk
about what that looks like more, that's my wheelhouse, friend.
So feel free to reach out man. I just want to add really quick,
I came to the realization that when Muslims say Allah, when
Christians say God and Jesus, when Native Americans pray to
nature, when Hindus pray to all their pantheon of gods, they're
all really trying to define the same thing that is undefinable.
And that helps me not be triggered as much.
And you know, I, I'm not going to define it the way they define
it, but that's OK. We're all really sort of meaning
the same thing. If you just mean the universe,
if you just mean you know, you don't know what you mean.
I think for me, curious as to why it words like when in my
youth I was kind of a we should call it not the not the most
friendly to faith. And it was a one of the easiest
way I could shut people out like it was it was this wall I could
put up as soon as you said God, I could put up a wall and then I
didn't have to deal with you at all.
Or if I did, it would I could come at you completely
antagonistically and I felt good about it.
Man, did I feel good about it. I loved feeling that way, but it
wasn't great, right? And one of the things I've tried
to develop over time is that whenever I see that wall, in
whatever sense it may be, whether it be based on religion
or race or socioeconomic class or the way they speak or
whatever, whatever thing that shows up in me is like, oh, this
other person is. I don't, I don't have to like
them or I don't have to do this or I can.
If I replace that feeling with curiosity about what this wall
is about, I can usually figure out a way of dropping that wall
and finding some way of interacting with this person
that is meaningful to me and sometimes to them.
I don't want to speak for them, but curiosity is the for me,
it's that wall breaker. And sometimes walls are helpful.
Walls are healthy. I'm not trying to.
There are certain people that are going to come at you and
you're like, you know what? Boundaries are boundaries and
they're good. But sometimes we put up
boundaries just because we don't like people and we don't want to
like people or we don't want to be vulnerable.
And a little bit of curiosity about what that's about can
really change things and how you approach people.
And Tim lean to pretty interesting relationships.
So I would encourage, encourage you that whenever you to pay
attention to when you are building walls and then use
curiosity as a tool to overcome whatever they may be if you
want. Yeah.
Is that not committal enough for everybody?
Cool. Harry posted Excuse me, the
Buddha's perspective on the Serenity prayer.
May I notice what I am attached to and a verse to.
May I recognize and accept all that I cannot change, control,
or influence. May I reside in equanimity and
be skillful in thought speech. And action that sounds very,
very, very good. And so with that, why don't we
transition to the Bodhisattva ballot, the four measurables,
which I think the four measurables several at prayer
quite nicely. All right, we'll start with the
Bodhisattva. Val creations are numberless.
I will strive to freedom. Delusions are inexhaustible.
I will strive to transform. Reality is boundless.
I will strive to perceive it. The awakened way is
unsurpassable. I will strive to embody may your
thoughts, words and actions be corrected and comes together
pragmatic Buddhist path. May you approach this week with
deference of dignity, and may you spread your personal peace
to all those who encounter every place at the all time.
They all beads and joyful contentiousness causes the all
beads and. Jewelry of suffering, that's.
Causes and all beings find joy jewelry of others may the all
beads by inequality never overpowered by attachment.
Or a brush. Small with Kuptans, filled with
our limited understanding, we offer our world of great
mountains and settle valleys, its ever moving clouds and
overarching sky. The universe we see, we offer to
the universe we barely comprehend, and remembering the
assembly of enlightened ones who having been or with us still we
wish all merits thriving now or in the future, from these are
practices to be distributed everywhere for the good of all.