October 25, 2009
Rev. Rick Haverly
Huge Developments
The Dean of Duke Divinity School is Greg Jones. In an interview series entitled, “Living Lives of Significance”, he noted his interest in learning across disciplines and seeing the insights gained from the combination of medicine and religion or law and religion. That has resulted in the formation of the Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life with combined resources of the Hospital and the Divinity School. Dean Jones was mentioning in a class the benefit of reading in other disciplines to see what insight it brought to faith. He talked about two of his favorite books written by Atul Gawande, Complications, and Better. They are compilations of this surgeons articles written for the New Yorker magazine.
In Better: A Surgeons Notes on Performance, the first article dealt with this surgeon’s opinion of perhaps the greatest advance in medicine. So many to choose from: the development of penicillin and other antibiotics; advances in anesthesia. But Gawande advocated that the greatest advance was washing hands. The realization that care givers could spread infection from one patient to another if sanitation was ignored. And you can see how engineers started to work on making hand washing stations more accessible to encourage staff to wash their hands.
If you have been in a hospital recently you may have noticed this, with Purell or hand sanitizer stations mounted on the wall outside every other room. Or you’ve heard the warnings lately with all the concern over H1N1, the swine flu. And the advice is that the first thing that you can do to protect yourself is to wash your hands frequently. Well Dean Jones was sharing this with a class when one student asked, “Well what’s the equivalent for faith?” Another student answered, “Prayer.”
Prayer as the great fundamental of faith. It’s the number one development to shape our lives as disciples of Christ. Dean Jones said that ever since then his prayer life has taken on more significance and he has taken greater care with it. So how do we keep prayer primary in our lives? How do we encourage it to happen as often as a medical worker washes hands? I think we each have to work that out and keep developing it. For me one of the significant teachings for my life was the use of the Jesus Prayer. It originated around the beginning of the 6th century and is very basic. The words are simply, “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
Very basic and short. Easy to repeat. And as I learned it, it is a breath prayer, a prayer that is incorporated into your breathing. So you break it into phrases and breath as you pray. You begin by exhaling and use the first line, Lord, Jesus Christ. Then you inhale with the second line, Son of God. You are starting to get the pattern now, right? Next you exhale while saying, Have mercy on me. And complete it by inhaling as you say, A sinner. It’s a prayer that is so simple and then is tied into our breathing. But you don’t rush through it and make yourself hyperventilate. You breath deeply, exhaling and inhaling slowly and deeply and you match your prayer to it.
This is one pattern of prayer that allows you to pray often and frequently. You can do it anywhere. You can do it at moments of panic like when the teacher lays that test on your desk or while you are in the doctors waiting room. You can do it while you drive either stuck in traffic or cruising along. You can do it while you are taking a walk or jogging and may be aware of your breathing anyway. It is a prayer that can be done as often as you breathe. And that is the point to make it as natural to you as breathing. So that prayer can undergird everything we do.
It is following the teaching of Jesus in Luke 18 where Jesus tells us to pray always and not lose heart. He uses the example of a widow pleading her case before an unjust judge who will not grant her justice. But she goes back again and again, everyday until the judge gives her what she wants just to keep her from bothering him. In the same way our prayers to God are supposed to be just as consistent and persistent
What are the ways that you can incorporate prayer frequently into your day. Some repeat the Lord’s Prayer frequently during the day because they know it so well and it comes easily to mind. Some traditions have used the Rosary as a way of building prayer into the midst of life. Are there ways that we can increase our use of prayer throughout our lives. Some might like a physical reminder to carry in their pocket, something to touch and remind them to pray before they meet the next person or head off to the next event.
As we grow in our faith we become the engineers who are building effective ways to make prayer more frequent and more integral to our lives. And these quick repetitive prayers are not the entirety. They create a habit for us that can lead us into our intercessory prayers as we pray for the needs of others. Or they can be the ending to our devotional time that may include reading scripture or reviewing the day in God’s presence as we give thanks for the gifts and wonders we have received that day.
The words spoken by blind Bartimaeus in today’s scripture reminded me of the Jesus prayer. The basic entreaty to Christ. And the event reminds us of the great possibilities as we encounter Jesus in the midst of our life. He calls out to Jesus in his need. Jesus responds by declaring that his faith has made him well. Bartimaeus’ response is great though. He regains his sight but then he joins Jesus on his way. Our prayer life needs to incorporate this example. We seek Jesus’ presence in our lives for the change and wholeness that it can bring to us. After we experience that presence though, we seek to follow him. Once we know the joy of encountering Christ, we seek to deepen it and repeat it. So we begin in prayer and we are led to pray again and to pray often.