The American Unitarian John Buehrens said: “Tell me the God you don’t believe in and I probably wont believe in him either.”

The arguments against the existence of God almost all rely on a play-ground caricature of religious belief. And this caricature almost always extends into the area of prayer. The image of prayer suggested by the joke I told at the beginning of the service is a very stubborn archetype, and we somehow don’t seem able to shift out of a medieval way of thinking. As we heard in the first reading (Jacques Derrida on prayer): “As if prayer is an order, the way I order a pizza”.

Well unfortunately we cant dismiss this quite so quickly because in many ways we are medieval in our thinking and the habits of the playground don’t disappear so quickly – if I’m careful to be honest with myself I can see that sometimes that sort of prayer does come as a reflex: “Oh God” we say throwing our head back “please let me find my key.” As if God, being above us, would be able to see that the key is on top of the fridge behind the spiderplant- and tell us.

Or we genuinely pray hard for a little life in the balance in an incubator. And then we wonder who we were with this sudden deity to pray to.

The medieval theologian St Augustine had a very different view of prayer as a matter of fact; he believed that we pray not to intercede with God, not to ask for something in particular but to allow ourselves to cultivate a habit of mind more in tune with the mind of God.

Now when I refer to the mind of God I remember that the English philosopher of enlightenment rationalism John Locke understood God as the sum of Human rational and moral qualities projected to infinity. And that the Jewish rationalist and mystic Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics around ten years after Locke proposed that mind is projected infinitely to an “eternal and infinite mind of God” (Ethics 5, prop 35-42). More recently Paul Tilllich found it useful to refer to God as ‘the ground of all being’ – and many today conceive of god as Ultimate Good and that is fine with me.

Judaism is wonderfully clear that all our attempts to name, define, quantify or rationalize God are hopelessly doomed. The Rabbi Abraham Heshel would teach that the reason that it was forbidden to make the image of God in any form is not that God has no image but that the only image it is acceptable to form is one made in the medium of your entire life. Amen to that.

If I view prayer as an attempt to bring myself into better alignment, to allow myself to be more in tune with the mind of God, with something outside of myself, something bigger and better than myself, some certain other things cant help but happen too. For a start I ‘ve acknowledged that I’m not at the centre of the universe and in our particular culture and time thats a deeply counter cultural and subversive thing to do -and Abram Heshel would also affirm ‘that prayer is nothing if it is not subversive’.

To acknowledge that I am not at the centre is the beginning of humility, and humility can be said to be the most important of all spiritual practices.

“If in your life time you can pray only one prayer and it is thank you – it will be sufficient”. Meister Eckhardt. Eckhardt was another medieval theologian as a matter of fact, late medieval, and he is articulating a thought here that has a very modern traction: the power of gratitude to transform our experience of everyday life. Again it is not important to have a clear sense of who we are offering thanks to and I dont say that to be politically correct or to be inclusive of atheist sensibilities – I say it because I dont think its possible to be clear about this.

I say it because its more important to give thanks than to know exactly what it is that your doing or why. You can think of it a little in the way that a yoga teacher recently put it to me: “if you turn up the corners of the mouth you become a little more happy”. Maybe the action of doing has to come first before the certain knowledge of why.

So one definition of prayer might be “allowing ourselves to come into alignment with the way of the infinite and feel gratitude for the good”. Note that neither of these requires us to go to any special place, neither church nor cathedral, nor do we need to be baptised or confirmed or sworn in or signed-up and we dont have to be faithful, we don’t have to be sure.

When I spoke earlier of prayer I used the metaphor of two birds the bird that pecks and the bird that soars, (see section -words on entering silence on this blog) the metaphor is from the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski and it is one I find useful. Grotowski was very clear that failure to nurture and sustain this part of our self would lead to our becoming estranged from it, as he put it the soaring bird can perish. I believe that this is what we have done as a culture, as a society we have lost touch with our soaring bird.

I love the stories of those mystics and sages who people say “all their lives were prayer” or “every breath was prayer.” This brings prayer into contact with what the Buddhist tradition calls mindfulness and what we might call “prayerfulness”.

There is a lovely story of Rumi where a man has prayed faithfully every day of his life and towards the end of his life he is angry and says: “all this time I’ve prayed to God and never once God have you answered” And the answer comes to him; but your praying is the answer.”

I began this service with a quote from the bronze age prophet Jeremiah I’ll conclude with a prophet of the plutonium age, Mahatma Gandhi:

“I started with disbelief in God and prayer, and, until at a late stage in life, I did not feel anything like a void in life. But at that stage I felt that, as food was indispensable for the body, so was prayer indispensable for the soul. In fact, food for the body is not so necessary as prayer for the soul. I have found people who envy my peace. That peace, I tell you, comes from prayer; I am not a man of learning, but I humbly claim to be a man of prayer. I am indifferent as to the form. Every one is a law into himself in that respect. But there are some well-marked roads, and it is safe to walk along the beaten tracks, trod by the ancient teachers.”