A couple summers ago, I went with a group of UCGers to Plum Village Meditation Center in France. I was excited to hear one of my personal saints, Thich Nhat Hanh, in the flesh. But I also had an ulterior motive: birds. Europe was an entire new continent full of birds I had not seen. I was lucky that my friend, and one of the great UCG birders, Karen Johnson, was on the trip as well. We had been figuring out our birding plan for months, and as we made our way to Plum, she asked me what bird I was hoping to see most. I had flipped through Birds of Europe several times, and had gotten excited about one bird in particular: the hoopoe. It looks like this. Who wouldn’t want to see that bird?
Karen had seen hoopoes in Africa, where they live year round, but never in Europe. She suggested it might be a long shot and not to get my hopes up. But then, a few days into our stay, I slept through my alarm and woke up too late for the 6am meditation. With time to kill before breakfast, I decided to bird a little around the farmhouse where our group was staying. I found a flock of European goldfinches, and saw a few of the magpies who seemed to always be around. And then I saw a large bird fly across the street into a pine tree. It looked distinctly like a hoopoe.

I have preached before on my unreliability when it comes to bird identification, so I figured I was just seeing what I wanted to see. But then it flew across the street again, and I couldn’t imagine what else it could be. As part of the retreat, we had to keep silent until midway through lunch. By the time the bell rang to allow us to talk, I was bursting with my news. But Karen beat me to the punch. “I think a saw a hoopoe,” she said. “Me too!” I replied. Later in the week, we were able to find the bird again and get great looks at it, beautiful and so strange.
It felt incredible to me to pick a bird out of the book, and have it appear in the front yard like an answered prayer. The miraculous coincidence of that hoopoe has somehow linked the bird in my mind to the question of prayer. Or, the questions of prayer. Questions like: “Why do I pray?” “What do I think I am doing?” and “What do I think God is doing?” “What does it mean when my prayers aren’t answered?” and the even harder one, “What does it mean when they are?”
“Does Prayer Matter?” I’ll spoil the suspense, and confess that for me it does. But trying to explain why and how and to whom is a lot more difficult. I’ve had many different ideas about prayer in my life. I still do, and rather than try to offer a simple answer to these complicated questions, I want to take you through the evolution of my thinking on prayer…with a little help from my hoopoe. So this is a sermon on prayer in five hoopoes.

The first is the bird that showed up miraculously in the pine tree across the street just days after I wished to see it. That’s how I originally understood prayer. Prayer as magic. You ask for the hoopoe and the hoopoe appears. And it’s all over scripture: ask, and it will be given; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. It’s a compelling idea, both for its simplicity and for the power it gives to the one praying. All I have to do is ask and believe and whatever I want will be given.

The problem, of course, is that it often isn’t. Maybe usually isn’t. Instead, you ask for a hoopoe, and most mornings you get magpies. You ask for something more important, like healing for someone you dearly love or hope in the midst of deep depression, and it never shows. And the deeper problem with this understanding of prayer is that when your prayer goes unanswered, it becomes your fault. If only you had prayed harder or more frequently. If only you were a holier, more faithful, better person then your prayers would have been answered. But if even once you have prayed, heartbroken, with tears in your eyes for something that truly matter, something that is good and right and beautiful and it doesn’t happen you can never see prayer this way again.

But there are other ways of understanding what it means to pray, like the way Gandhi seems to view it when he says, “Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness.” In the Christian tradition, the prayer of not asking is summarized by the words: “Thy will be done.” In the Buddhist tradition it is the concept of not striving, of accepting what is and releasing desire. This is prayer as listening or letting go.

In birding terms, this way of praying means never picking the hoopoe out of the book but appreciating whatever birds arrive each morning. The prayer, “Thy will be done,” reorients me away from my selfish concerns, from my focus on personal desires, from my consumption of the world around me and brings me back to the gift of the present moment. It focuses not on my emptiness, not on what I’m lacking, but on the fullness that is with me even now if I will open myself to it. When I hope to see the hoopoe, it creates suffering. I have set an expectation to be disappointed. But if, instead, I practice prayer as letting go, I am open to the beauty and the strangeness of the more familiar finches.
There is great truth in this way of praying. It is probably the form of prayer I use most often, a silent emptying of myself, waiting in the stillness for God’s voice to speak from within me. But this prayer also seems incomplete to me. There are times when I must speak, times when I cannot rest quietly in the present moment because the pain and fear of the future demand to be addressed, times when it seems monstrous to simply pray “thy will be done.” When someone we love is in a terrible accident, or our marriage seems to be unraveling, or we fear for our lives; perhaps a more enlightened person would be able to simply let go and let be, but I need to say something, to ask for what I truly want instead of pretending it is all the same to me. Even Jesus, who, as he faces death, ends his prayer “not what I will, but what you will,” still begins it, “Let this cup pass away from me.”

So perhaps prayer is both asking and letting go, both speaking and listening. This is the idea of prayer as relationship, captured in the words of Saint Teresa of Avila, “Prayer is nothing else than being on terms of friendship with God.” This way of seeing prayer means that when we pray to God and we pray with others, it is not so much the content of our prayers that is important as it is the fact of our praying, the relationship that is built in regular contact with our higher power and with other members of our spiritual community.

The third hoopoe is incidental. Karen and I could have seen it or not seen it. What really mattered was that we were looking together. What mattered was that we shared about the birds that we most wanted to see, we opened our hearts to one another and spent time together, forming memories and strengthening our friendship.

There is great wisdom in this way of understanding prayer, too. I come to God in prayer, not to grant my wishes, nor simply to listen and receive guidance, but because I desire connection with something greater. I want to learn to love with my whole heart, mind, soul, and strength. Likewise, I pray for and with the people I love, for and with you, not because I believe I have a special power to make you healthy or happy, but because I want you to know that if I did, I would use that power every day on your behalf. I want the people I pray for to know I love them and care for them, and I feel that love and care when I am prayed for. Prayer as relationship matters because it knits our lives together with the love that we share.

But, as you may expect me to say three hoopoes into a five-hoopoe sermon, prayer as relationship, too, feels incomplete. Because ultimately, I kind of do want to see the hoopoe, and I kind of do want you to be healthy and happy. Even if I believe that relationship is the most important part of prayer, there are lots of ways to build relationship, lots of ways for you and I to show we love one another. The prayer itself has to matter.

And in my experience it is true that it is not just my relationships that are strengthened by regular prayer, but my prayers themselves become deeper and more powerful. I find myself with a greater sense of peace and hope and gratitude as I pray day by day. I am changed because I have prayed. This is prayer as practice.

The fourth hoopoe is the one I only see because I have trained my eyes to find it. All those Mondays out on the prairie, the time I spend looking at bird books or listening to bird calls, they have built capacity in me. I’ve learned to use my binoculars more effectively, learned to distinguish the characteristics of different species, learned to describe to my fellow birders where a bird is in a tree so that they can tell me what it is. Had I been walking down that road in France never having birded before, I could not have identified the hoopoe. More than likely, I would not even have seen it. The practice of birding has changed the way I see the world, probably the same way your practice of painting, or teaching, or jogging, or parenting has.

Prayer, too, is like that. It teaches me to see and hear differently. The more I pray and meditate, the more I learn, the more I notice. I am able to pray with more clarity, to discern God’s voice with more regularity, to sink into that listening place more easily. There are whole worlds of prayer I could not see until I practiced, and I know there is much more still to learn, more change coming if I stick with the practice.
Many days I will still go out and not see the hoopoe. Perhaps it is not there, and perhaps I have not yet learned to see it so well. But if I keep going out week after week, year after year; if I learn where to go and when; if I sharpen my skills, then finally, I will see it. Perhaps my prayers are the same way; answers are always arriving in ways I cannot yet discern. But the real gift of prayer as practice is not any individual answer, but the growth and transformation that is happening in me as I practice. As Kierkegaard says, “Prayer does not change God, but changes [the one] who prays.”

But even this is incomplete. Because sometimes the hoopoe shows up. And it is unexpected and breathtakingly beautiful. And you’re really not that prepared, or skillful, and you really hadn’t practiced near enough. But there it is as if you had conjured it with your words.
Sometimes we get just what we prayed for. Sometimes our family member is healed, our relationship is saved, and we discover a sliver of hope at the last moment. And it is magical. It is miraculous. And it has to matter, because it floods our hearts with joy, and brings tears to our eyes. It breaks us open and gives us something to hold on to in all the other moments when the hoopoe doesn’t show. At least, that’s how it’s been for me.

When I talked with Sandy Reimer about this sermon, I said, “I thinks it’s circular. It ultimately goes back to prayer as magic, but from a different angle.” And she wisely offered another option. “It’s prayer as mystery.” Yes. Prayer is all of the other things: a chance to say what is most important to me, a time to listen for a voice wiser than my own, a knitting together of lives in love, a transformative practice that changes the way I see the world. And it is also something more. Something beyond. Something unexplainable even by analogy to birds. As Marian Anderson has it, “Prayer begins where human capacity ends.”
What more can I say?