Rev. Joseph Boyd
Prayer is a distressing topic. It is no accident that the most common time when prayers are uttered or requested are in times of great distress. For some it is a comfort, for some it is superstitious, for some it is a distraction from the harsh and fragile experience of being alive. A liberal approach to prayer has not been very helpful for many who grew up praying, but have no way to make sense of it in their present. . My memories of prayer are mixed – some were good experiences, others feel arcane and odd to me now, and many of my memories of prayer leave me with no feeling other than a recognition that it was a habit, just what we did as part of a religious community.
I’ll start with the good. My first positive experiences of prayer involve both my grandmother and my father. I grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness because my grandmother converted when she was in her late teens in rural Arkansas. A tornado had destroyed her family’s home and they were left with nothing. Her response to this was to turn toward religion, a way of living life in community with others that could help her get through tragedy and the fear of being homeless, unable to support her family.
Even as an older woman she would tell me about the sounds of the wind as she witnessed the tornado rip apart her home…even in her 80’s her body would shake when she told me how the tornado was deafening and she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was faced with the dramatic change of having her childhood home gone forever, and she responded. Her creative response to this change was to become a Jehovah’s Witness. My memory of praying with my grandmother has little to do with the actual time of prayer, but the smells and tastes that surrounded the time we would pray, right before bed. My grandmother was diabetic, and she needed to eat food with sugar in it to stabilize her blood. We would sit together at a wooden table made by grandfather, and I would sit in the same place so I could see her china behind glass in a cabinet. I would lose myself staring into her cups and plates which we would rarely eat on, and she would serve me my choice of vanilla yogurt or chocolate ice cream. I’d usually choose vanilla yogurt, and we would eat together. Afterwards I’d bathe and brush my teeth, then sit down in my grandmother’s guest room which had the comforting smell of my grandmother’s perfume mixed with dust.
I would sit up and wait for my grandmother to come pray before we said goodnight. The only prayer I actually remembered was the night after we experienced an earthquake, a rare occurrence in Oregon. I remember hearing my grandmother in prayer saying that she was grateful that we still had a home, that it was not destroyed, and that nobody had died, that everybody was safe.
My father would also pray with me before bedtime. He was the one who actually first introduced me to prayer and gave me some direction about how to do it. As I look back now, his direction sounds quite sane to be now. He told me that if I didn’t know what to say in prayer, to think back on my day, and say what I was grateful to have experienced, and then to think of anybody I knew or heard of who was having a hard time, and ask how I may be of some help or support to them. My father like my grandmother didn’t pray for very long…even as a kid it felt brief and to the point.
Prayer became more complicated for me as I grew older. It especially became complicated and turned into something beyond my understanding as I witnessed both my grandmother and my father die, a few years apart from each other.
My grandmother died when I was twelve in our home, lying in a bed. Her passing was swift and all of her children were there to surround her, everyone except my father who was at work. After she passed, all of my aunts looked both relieved and bewildered. They all had this expression on their face that said loudly – “What just happened here?” They were all Jehovah’s Witnesses, all taught to believe in an afterlife. I’m not saying they lost that belief, but it did not seem to stop them from feeling confused, out of their element. Their response to this bewilderment felt strange to me at the time, and still feels somewhat strange to me now, something I can’t quite get my head around. They asked me to come into the room where my grandmother passed, and offer a prayer. I was just as bewildered trying to process what had just happened, but they must have sensed that I could still speak words, words they could not speak. I went into the room, and the words came out. I don’t remember what they were, I doubt they were profound, but they were words. And after I said Amen, everyone in the room began to wail, the watershed was opened.
I don’t think the words I said mattered, but they needed for someone to say something, to offer some kind of response to what had just happened, no matter how pitiful the words were…they needed to hear something to bridge the experience and begin to feel.
After my father’s death, I was again put in the position of offering prayer. This felt very different for me. It felt like a burden…I felt resentment at being asked to pray for a loss that I had no idea how to process. I hated that prayer with every fiber of my being. The externals were the same as when my grandmother passed. I prayed, and then the watershed opened up, and everyone began to sob out loud. Everyone except me. I felt numb inside. I wasn’t sure what was happening, and prayer didn’t help me, at least not in the way I expected. It just made me angry. I made a silent vow that I would never pray again. And I didn’t, not for a long time. I left the faith of my youth, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and immersed myself in the debate team and theatre. I moved to New York to be an actor, and never once thought of praying. Not once. I didn’t see the point.
When there was a clergy call at Standing Rock last winter, I went to a training onsite in nonviolent resistance – how to protect your eyes from tear gas, how to respond if you’re beaten with batons, how to lie limp to make yourself heavier, in case you are being dragged to your arrest. This all seemed very practical to me. But then our guide, a Native American and Chicano woman from Northern California paused. Then she said this is the most important part of the training – all of the actions we are covering in this training will be meaningless, she said, unless you understand one important point – Our life here at camp, including our acts of resistance are founded in one simple yet powerful statement – Our life is a prayer. This camp is a place of prayer. Our resistance is our prayer. When I heard this I was sitting next to two young college students from the Northwest, where I grew up. These guys were familiar to me in their outlook, I had great affection for them. They were extremely bright students from Reed, liberal in outlook, open to alternative government and economic structures, and a firm believer that religion was the enemy of progress. These were my people who I grew up with – I got it. So I got a secret thrill when I caught their expressions of utter disbelief.
They had traveled from Oregon to North Dakota in a rickety van prepared to be beaten and tear gassed, but they were completely unprepared for one thing – prayer. I saw the expression on their faces, but to their credit, they didn’t make a fuss. They took it in – this camp is a place of prayer. What is the relationship between the reality of everyday struggle including very real blood, sweat, and tears and prayer, a word that often has an otherworldly connotation.
Clergy were asked by the Standing Rock Sioux to come dressed in attire that made it obvious to others that you were a minister. I didn’t own a collar, which I thought would be the simplest clothing piece to wear. And I didn’t have much time to think about it, so I just brought my long black clergy robe which I wore to conduct traditional services. The black clergy robe as we wear it dates back to the Protestant Reformation in Europe, kind of an odd piece I thought, to wear in the fields of North Dakota, but it’s all I had. One of the members, a Cherokee woman in my congregation at the time, heard that I was going to Standing Rock and that I packed my clergy robe.
She called me, and said you need a stole, a garment traditionally worn over the clergy robe, a symbolic garment that represents the towel Jesus wore around his neck as he washed his disciples feet before his execution. She told me emphatically: “You need to look the part, Joseph!”
A day later I’m standing in a field in North Dakota wearing my clergy robe and stole, and a reporter and photographer from a local paper in Tulsa approach me, and ask if they can interview me. The reporter asks me how I interpret Standing Rock as a place of prayer, and can I explain it to the outside world. I gave it my best shot, and what I said was basically prayer in it’s purest form is a life of intention, a response to our experience, knowing that though we can’t control experience, we can have a say in how we respond. Standing Rock is such a response, a lived prayer of dignity and respect for the earth.
It’s amazing what can come out of your mouth when you don’t have much time to think about it. This statement does not solve the problem of prayer, however. I think it’s natural that we often approach prayer in a way that we expect it will do us and others some kind of good. Or we react against this idea as a fantasy, some kind of pretty fable, that is ultimately impossible and a waste of our time.
I have great respect for this problem, and I hope I never forget it. Prayer as a concept and practice does not always make us feel inspired and rejuvenated. It can feel useless, humiliating, even harmful.
Standing Rock’s moment did not end in victory, at least not in the way we hoped for. The energy company responsible for oil drilling was given permission federally to build a pipeline under the Sioux tribe’s land and water supply. Our president, a major investor in the energy company was vocally supportive of this move, and in a brief time all of the camps were disbanded by state police. So was prayer a waste of time in this instance? It’s a good question. If I prayed, to someone or something that I believed pulled the strings, and if I believed my prayers would pull the strings in my favor, I would be sorely disappointed. But I don’t pray this way, not anymore.
Prayer for me now is no longer bound to traditional theology and practice. I don’t pray to something that can pull life in the direction of my hopes and expectations, and yet I still value hope and vision connected to the expectation of dignity and justice. I pray now simply to feel more human.
This is why when people asked me if I felt like I wasted my time offering presence at Standing Rock, I always reply if I had to do it all over again, I would do it again, and again. Prayer does not give us superhuman powers, or any kind of advantage over those that don’t pray consciously. But with an attitude of humility, prayer can remind us what makes us most human, and reminds us to do everything in our power to live more fully into our lives, especially if we are hit with tragedy and things don’t go our way. I appreciate the way the poet Carl Dennis bridges the gap between imagining what kind of life would be awaiting us if we made different choices, to learning to settle into the life we’re actually living, and learning to speak to ourselves and close friends with a sense of authority of the life we’ve lived, which for all we know is the life we’ve chosen.
Prayer did not protect my grandmother’s house. Prayer did not protect me from grieving my father’s death. Prayer did not stop an oil company from desecrating sacred tribal land and our water supply. But I don’t believe prayer is meant to protect us from feeling bad, even devastated. It’s the opposite actually…prayer is meant to open us up, help us feel, and affirm our humanity even as we struggle.
I’ve learned to pray again, and I appreciate it in a different way now. I pray for the life I’m living, a life which I’m learning not to regret or take for granted. I pray to bridge the gap, not between the world I’m living and the world I wish I was living, but between the world I witness and the world I wish to experience more fully. Prayer for me is an act of intimacy, and I leave space for something to break through, to break me open, call it insight, clarity, or God. I pray for our shared world and shared experiences, not because it alters destiny, but because I feel compelled to honor this life, on this day, whatever comes our way.