My sister, Dinah, was born with a chromosomal deformity. Then, as a newborn, she suffered a 108 degree fever that caused brain damage. She’s now 51, and it’s a miracle that she is still alive and functioning, as well as she is. Her vocabulary consists of about 50 words and hand signals yet she is bright and has a depth that seems almost mystical.

Each year before our Thanksgiving meal my mother always asks me to read a scripture and then my father prays. But a few years ago mom told us she wanted to start a new tradition. She asked my wife to read a scripture, and my daughter to read a poem, Then she shocked everyone by telling us Dinah was going to pray.

My sister and I had grown up going to church, but I’d never heard her pray and had no idea what her concept of God might be, if she even had one.

She bowed her head, as she’d seen us do hundreds of times, and said, “God” with more clarity than I’d heard her say any other word, and then she said, “I thank . . . “

Then she named us around the table one by one.

How is it with you and prayer? While it may come naturally for the simpler more transparent people among us, it isn’t an easy matter for most.

"There is a moment between intending to pray and actually praying that is as dark and silent as any moment in our lives. It is the split second between thinking about prayer and really praying. For some of us, this split second may last for decades. It seems, then, that the greatest obstacle to prayer is the simple matter of beginning, the simple exertion of the will, the starting, the acting, the doing. How easy it is, and yet -- between us and the possibility of prayer there seems to be a great gulf fixed; an abyss of our own making that separates us from God." Clinging Emil Griffin

In this morning’s text Jesus goes off to pray. Is it because his prayer list is long or does he just need room to breathe?

Prayer in the first century amounted to morning and evening prayer plus prayer in the afternoon at the same time as the sacrifice took place in the temple.

Disciples wanted to learn to pray, too. They weren’t asking what to pray but how to pray.

At one time or another, we all want to know how to really pray.

Twenty five years ago I went to a monastery in Lafayette , Oregon. I met the guest master there, a Fr. Timothy. Fr. Tim had been a fighter pilot in Korea. Joining the Trappists was his way of trying to get over what he saw and what he took part in.

When I think of the boys and girls coming home from duty in Iraq I think of Fr. Tim. How will they possibly manage? The damage a war causes. It is so much greater than the body count.

I asked Fr. Tim, "What is prayer?" It was like I was asking the disciples' question: 'Teach me to pray."

What Fr. Tim did was so simple. He put his left palm under his right elbow and lifted it up as he opened his hand and said, “Prayer is like a flower opening to the sun.”

That was all, it is still the best lesson in prayer I’ve ever gotten.
Prayer is merely opening the self to God, like the flower opening itself to the sun

That is what Jesus' Prayer does --
when we pray to God as our cosmic parent we are opened to the mystery of our birth
when we pray: thy will be done, we open to the fact that our private will is not the last word in the universe
when we pray for our daily bread we open to the fact that food is a gift
and when we pray for forgiveness we open to the truth that forgiveness too is a gift, every bit as much a gift as finding within ourselves the grace to forgive others and then ourselves.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta has said, "Prayer enlarges the heart until it makes room for the gift of God himself."

Prayer is a making room.

The Hebrew word for salvation: Yasha, literally means, "To make room"

Making room in a world that seems ever at work to crowd out anything that is truly worthwhile.

You know, I don’t care if Paris Hilton is in jail or in custody at home. Why do I need to know that? Why does the media think that is as important as what is happening in Iraq?

As someone has said, "As long as prayer is only one of a thousand things that must be done in our lives it will never touch us. It is only when prayer becomes the one thing necessary that real prayer begins."

It almost seems like a natural movement in this world is to close ourselves off from God
from others. To close ourselves up as tight as a poppy is in the habit of doing each summer evening.

God's Spirit works to open us up. Why? Because we are so often closed.

Of all people, Mother Theresa confided the following to her diary. “I am told that God lives in me, and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Where I try to raise my thoughts to heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return to me like sharp knives.”

But prayer can open us -- it can, IF we pray what is truly on our hearts. Whatever it is.

It’s about being honest with God. and with ourselves.

I love the confession of a man now in his thirties, looking back to growing up in North Carolina.

Growing up on a tobacco farm you worked, regardless of your age. The first job I was given, at the age of seven, was to walk behind the harvester and pick up tobacco leaves that had fallen off the trailer or been dropped by the croppers. This is the easiest job in the field, and also the most boring.

For the croppers who had to pick the leaves as the harvester rolled past the plants, the pace was frenetic. Meanwhile I trudged along behind them, over hot, sandy ground with no shelter from the blistering sun, wishing for something, anything, to break the tedium.

To fight the boredom I considered what I would do when I grew up. Anything other than tobacco farming)> I also developed my own rudimentary form of walking meditation, in which for brief moments all things outside myself ceased to be and I no longer felt the heat and fatigue. I contemplated the odds that Farrah Fawcett-Majors would divorce the Six Million Dollar Man for me, a rising second grader. I wondered If I would be missed if I took a nap under a shade tree at the end of the field.

But more than anything else, I prayed. I prayed that a great and terrible blight would befall our tobacco crop. I prayed the barns would all burn down. I prayed Pop would stand up from his cropper’s seat and announce that he was sick of this, and we were giving up farming forever. I prayed that the tractor would please, please, speed up.

Honest prayer can open us up and, when we are struck by our own honesty, it can make us vulnerable. Wonderfully so.

It can also makes us weak toward God. As the apostle Paul reflected once, in 2Cor. 12:9 But [God] said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

Like when your mother first helped you write your name, your hand was weak in hers. It had to be that way for you to be able to write, though it may have gone against your essential nature.

Like the weakness of a sail boat's sail in the wind. If a sail were made of plywood it wouldn’t take us anywhere at all.

So often when we want to pray, really want to pray, we don't know what to say: (we feel bad about that weakness; we shouldn't)

Apostle Paul:
the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes [for us] with sighs too deep for words. (Rom. 8:26-27)

Honesty and weakness shaking us up and opening our hearts – that is what God is after when it comes to prayer.

Here this account of many prayers prayed by a middle aged woman from Nashville –

“At age nine I prayed God would let me be his bride and become a nun.

At 14 I prayed the boy I liked would kiss me behind the columns in the school smoking lounge.

At 16 I prayed my boyfriend would be a gentle lover.

At 17 I prayed the test would be negative.?
At 30 I implored God whom I hadn’t prayed to in years to either help me quit drinking or die.

At 35 I prayed my thesis would be good enough to ensure my graduation.

At 43 I prayed my lover of twelve years would find happiness without me.

At 44 I prayed to pass the test to receive my master’s degree.

At 45 I prayed my new lover would never leave me.

At 48 I prayed my ex-lover would forget my address.

Today I pray for a new love. I pray again to quit drinking,. I pray my life can mean more than the circle I have traveled. I for my country, for the planet, I pray because the only prayer God hasn’t answered was my prayer top die.

Soren Kierkegaard says that real prayer begins, "not when God hears what we're saying, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears what God is saying."

Listen to this Denise Levertov poem

THE SPIRITS APPEASED

A wanderer comes at last
To the forest hut where it was promised
Someone wise would receive him.
And there’s no one there; birds and small animals
Flutter and vanish, then return to observe.
No human eyes meet his.
But in the hut there’s food,
Set to keep warm beside glowing logs,
And fragrant garments to fit him, replacing
The rags of his journey,
And a bed of heather from the hills.
He stays there waiting. Each day the fire
Is replenished, the pot refilled while he sleeps.
He draws up water from the well,
Writes of his travels, listens for footsteps.
Little by little he finds
The absent sage is speaking to him,
Is present
This is the way
You have spoken to me, the way – startled –
I find I have heard you. When I needed it,
A book or a slip of paper
Appears in my hand, inscribed by yours: messages
Waiting on cellar shelves, in forgotten boxes
Until I would listen.

So prayer is three things: it opens us like a flower opening itself to the sun, it is becoming weak toward God, and finally, it is the act of praying, honestly, in God's presence thoughtfully, quietly, until maybe we can hear.

Amen