The Thing You Know to Do

Do not forget how small you are. You are a tiny

bottle of perfume poured into the ocean. I want to talk a

little bit today about prayer. Now I know this is a dicey

subject to those of you who are not religious-- stay with me. I

was raised atheist and agnostic. And my theism is very peculiar.

When I learned to pray, I had no one to pray to. And so I had to

reconceive the entire idea of prayer. I had always thought of

it as asking a non-existent entity to do something for me.

But why would they? Why would they do something for me? Even

if they existed- which they didn't. Science and logic, every

everything that I had at my disposal? Said No. So why, why

would I even bother to ask? If there was no one to listen? And

no response to be had? The answer turned out to be because

it connected me to the larger network of humanity. And it got

me really clear about where I thought I needed help.

Initially, it wasn't really petitionary prayer petitionary

prayer is the kind where you ask for something. But it gets

complicated, because if you've ever seen Fiddler on the Roof,

where Tevye is kind of arguing with God, dialoguing with God,

in conversation with God all the time. That feeling felt really

familiar to me when I was eight and 10, and 12. And watching the

movie and the play, and learning all of the songs because I was

that kid. But there was no one to talk to. There was no one

there and yet, humans kept coming through for me, humans

from unexpected places kept coming through for me, it turned

out that humans, that the behavior of humans, was the

thing that most people attributed to God. And it didn't

matter that I was a young atheist. It was still useful to

think about talking to something bigger than me, even if the

bigger than me was the earth I stood on and the people around

me. Unitarian Universalist kids get really good really fast at

explaining complex religious concepts to their peers, and I

was no exception. And I started to tell people that I wasn't a

theist.... But. There were these things that I experienced in the

world where something would show up just when I needed it, where

I would get clear about what was next necessary and that next

necessary thing would happen, where I would just know what to

do. I got very accustomed to that "just knowing"; some people

call it intuition. I thought of it that way. I still think of it

that way. I don't think that humans are ourselves un-magical

or un-secret. I'm a Unitarian Universalist and I believe, many

of us, but not all of us believe this way, that human life and

life in general and the entire entity of the planet is sacred,

that all of these moving parts are part of one thing. That we

are simultaneously individual and interconnected.

So if we are simultaneously individual and interconnected,

then surely there must be some use in expressing need when we

are ourselves too small, to scent the ocean.

In the face of even more crises than we already had, I have been

deeply drawn to some kind of practice of prayer. I don't I

have a traditional prayer practice in the usual Christian

sense, because I'm not Christian, and I never was. And

that way of dialoguing with those kinds of entities isn't,

isn't part of how my bones and flesh are made. So I asked

myself, this morning, last night, in the middle of the

night, when I was awake and fretting over some of the things

that are much too big for me to effect on my own. I asked myself

why? Why did I think that I wanted to pray? I felt that I

wanted to pray. And to whom? And how is this going to work? Now,

I have developed a theism; there are entities, to which I could

pray for support, for help. But they tend to be a little like

tarot cards, they tend to talk back and say things like, "well,

that's a terrible idea." They tend to kind of tell me that I'm

being foolish, and that I already know what I'm doing. And

occasionally, they'll give me a pointer, a piece of advice, a

drop of wisdom. But mostly, it's "stop getting so stuck in your

own stuff. Get up, see the sun, move your body. Do the things

you know to do, for the people who are in front of you." And

that's where I wanted to come to today. Do the things you know to

do, for the people who are in front of you. It's not that you

don't care about people on the other side of the world. Or

even, let's be real, on the other side of your state, or

county. On the other side of your city, even. It's that

whatever is yours to do, needs to be done and it needs to be

done well, it needs to be done in this moment, very well, if

you can do it. Which means not doing the other stuff, right,

not, not expending your energy too much on things that are not

yours to do. And instead, being exquisitely yourself so that

your piece of the pie gets done. And it's not about productivity.

And it's not necessarily about direct service. It could be

those things, but it could be so much more. It could be, if you

are a praying sort of person, that what you need to do next is

pray. It could be, if you're a writing sort of person, that

what you need to do next is write. Maybe you need to journal

first, get all that flotsam and jetsam off the top of your head

and then write something for public consumption. It could be,

that what you need to do next is feed the birds on your

windowsill. Or take a picture of that exquisite flower with the

dew still on it.

It could be that you need to say hello to that person on the

corner.

To think that the small acts of human-ness that come naturally,

are somehow inadequate to the task, is to miss the fact that

we are, ultimately, being human together on the planet. And yes,

there are massive crises going on; crises at a scale that most

of us have not lived through. Yet. And also,

it may be that your work today, is to get clear about what you

need help on, and to speak that need into the world.