Many of you know that my call to ministry came mid-life and I was not religious as a young person. I was adamant in my atheism and found it unbearably embarrassing when my grandparents would make us pray before a meal in a restaurant. It felt, as the kids say these days, extremely cringe. We all have our own brand of religious baggage and associations depending on where we grew up and I grew up in the south in the 90s, in the age of What Would Jesus Do bracelets, brightly colored Teen Bibles, and christian clubs with hip sounding names that met in the cafeteria before school. Those were the people I know who talked openly about their faith, wondered about how they could get closer to Jesus and who would offer to pray for me (always with a hunt of judgement in the offer). And teenage Danielle wanted nothing to do with that.

Even as my faith evolved and I discovered Unitarian Universalism, it was easy to avoid extemporaneous prayer or overtly public displays of faith. Sure, I was happy to go to a protest and talk about how my values called me to act in the world. But no one asked me who or what I thought God was and if I talked to God or what I thought happened when I did. Community, social justice, putting faith in action all felt fine but talking about religious belief, or prayer, or my relationship to the divine still felt embarrassing at best and offensive at worst.

So it was unexpected when I found myself as a chaplain in a hospital room, holding the hands of a woman I had just met and praying “Lord Jesus we ask that you lower gas prices.” She was the only visitor for a friend of hers who was dying. She was not especially well off and lived quite a ways away and the regular drives there were a financial burden. I did not believe, in the literal post-enlightenment sense of that word, that Jesus is sitting up in the sky at some kind of cosmic control board regulating the international oil market. But I knew this was not the time to say to this person in pain, “ I believe in praying with our feet. Here are the most politically effective ways to impact economic policy.” She had both deep faith and deep need, so I prayed with surprising earnestness, for Jesus to ease her burden. I can’t say if it actually did anything. I honestly can’t remember what happened to gas prices that summer. But I saw how her request was one borne of deep love for a dying friend,I saw her love for her God and the truth the Christian story held in her life, and I wanted to hold and honor all of that with her in the most sacred space we could possibly create in that hospital room. Prayer was the scaffolding for that space.

The chaplaincy work all ministers are required to do is ostensibly to sharpen our pastoral care skills, but I think one of the great gifts that it gave me was that it forced me to take other people’s faith seriously. Not to pick it apart academically or poke holes in the theology but to sit with them in the depths of it, the strength it gave them, the language it provided when words were hard to find, and the questions and doubts that are its regular companions. So often it took the form of prayer. I came to see prayer as a kind of sacred vessel for holding all of that. A way of saying, these questions and hopes and longings, this relationship you have with the divine, these things are so very precious, let us place them here in this place of safety and reverence. I realized that what made prayer so powerful wasn’t its utility but the way it honored that part of a person’s life. The way it made space for the questions the doctor’s didn’t have an answer for, the hopes that were too fragile to speak aloud, the truths that can’t be proven scientifically. To pray with someone was to let them know their soul deserved care in the same way their mind and body did. I begin to understand “Can I pray for you,” not as a condescending judgement but as a tender offer to help someone hold something very precious. UU minister of worship arts, Erika Hewitt writes. “Prayer is a way to connect and reconnect to ourselves and to that which is life-giving; the mechanics don’t matter as much as the intention: remembering ourselves as magnificent, fragile vessels of love, sometimes with intimates and sometimes with strangers, and affirming our choice to remain connected so that we’re not lost in the vastness of space and time.”

Two years after I prayed for Jesus to lower gas prices, I let down my guard enough to pray for myself. Not meditate or contemplate a poem or read a devotional, but pray in a child-like, petitionary, ask God for something kind of way. I had just returned, exhausted from a cross country trip for a family member’s funeral. And I was on the way to church to preach what I knew would be a difficult sermon in the life of that congregation. As I drove over the drawbridge crossing the Willamette River, I prayed simply, “God, give me a steady voice today.” It was a small ask and spontaneous. The prayer over before I even reached the other side of the river. But it was a vulnerable moment, an admission that I needed support from something greater than myself, a recognition of my own human limitations, and a way of honoring that what I was carrying that morning was precious enough to hold in sacred space. It was, as a recovering atheist, still, deeply embarrassing. But beautifully, powerfully effective.

Now, I am not just trying to convince you to start praying—for yourself or others. Not exactly. Although I wouldn’t be sad if that was the outcome. What I am trying to do is convince you to treat that piece of yourself and others, that we honor in prayer, with care and attention. To recognize that just like our bodies and minds, our souls also deserve tending. I want to normalize prioritizing our spiritual lives and spiritual growth, normalize supporting each other on that journey, and normalize talking about it with one another. Because our faith matters. What we believe matters. And how we stay in touch with and nurture those things matters. Always, but especially right now.

It’s only been two months since ICE agents murdered two unarmed American citizens in Minneapolis. It probably seems like longer because since then the news cycle keeps bringing us increasingly upsetting, major stories like the release of some of the Epstein Files, and a war with Iran that some conservative leaders are framing in Biblical and apocalyptic language. Meanwhile, we’re grappling with things like the ethics of emerging technology and AI, having conversations that make us question our definition of truth and reality and what it means to be human. We live in times that ask with new urgency old questions about who we are and whose we are, where we come from and where we’re going, and what moral obligations we have while we’re here. And we live in times that weigh heavily on some deep part of our souls, times that threaten to disconnect and isolate us from one another and our inner voice. Wrestling with those questions while staying tethered to both our humanity and to what’s transcendent is spiritual work. It’s soul work. And it needs space separate from the other facets of our lives. Prayer, silence, reading sacred texts, deep discussions like soul matters or the anti-fascist theology reading group here at the church.

So often when I counsel people, and ask them about their spiritual lives, they will admit to letting their spiritual practices be one of the first things that slips when life gets busy. And when I say people, I mean me. Or they’ll double or triple up for maximum efficiency. Well, I’ve heard meditation is good for your productivity and health so that’s my spiritual practice. I was in a recent training with other Unitarian ministers where the leaders shared that families consistently rank church low in their list of obligations, skipping church before they skip sports, school clubs, and music lessons. I once taught an adult class at church on building your own theology and one of the participants was stationed there in the military. They were supposed to be on duty the night of one of our classes and asked for a religious exemption. You should have seen the rest of the classes faces when they heard that. It had never occurred to them that anything related to Unitarian Universalism would carry that kind of religious or spiritual weight!

Raise your hand if, in the past let’s say 6 months, you’ve asked someone else in the congregation how they are feeling physically maybe after an illness or surgery? Have you asked someone in the congregation how they’re job is going? In the last six months have you asked anyone, “how’s your spiritual life?” Even in church we don’t do a great job of prioritizing prioritizing the spiritual life.

For those of you who are a bit more utilitarian, who maybe have a harder time justifying tending to the spiritual life for it’s own sake, I’ll close with an interesting conversation between journalist and comedian Trevor Noah and NY mayor Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani was talking giving his diagnosis for the failure of the political left in America, which he ascribes to a lack of imagination, saying, “we are robbing ourselves of ambition and imagination, and we’re telling people that their choice is between settling or sacrifice. And neither of these are enough. You have to have an affirmative vision of how life can be better than this, because this life already is suffocating people.”

Trever Noah responded, “I sometimes think it’s because of the decline of religion on the left.” He continues, “One of the things that faith requires of you is the ability to believe that this current state that you are in is not the end. There is a possibility that something can be greater. And even though you cannot see it, you believe that it can happen.”

Viewed in this light, someone asking me to pray for lower gas prices isn’t just an amusing or touching anecdote about my faith evolution. That prayer was her affirmative vision of a better life. It represents the possibility that something can be greater. It was a powerful vision of equity and ease and the ability to care for one another. A vision of a society that values being present with the dying and doesn’t erect barriers that would prevent such an act of love. For Noah and Mamdani, faith is necessary to the political work of sustaining a vibrant democracy, of building the beloved community, of imagining a world centered on love and liberation.

Our spiritual lives are worth tending to. Our faith is worth being taken seriously. So lean into your role as spiritual companions to one another. Be accountability partners and help one another stick to spiritual practices or show up to church events that are important to you. Talk about what you believe and what you aren’t sure about. Talk about who or what God or goddess is for you. Read sacred texts together. Talk about why you pray or don’t and what it means to you. Ask each other to pray with you and for you. Ask me. I know you’re New Englanders and I know it might feel awkward or embarrassing but this is how we tend our soil so the sowers’ seeds take root. There’s no short cut.

This is how we deepen our faith and we live in times that require a deep faith: a faith that helps us hold one another’s pain and tender hopes, a faith that buoys us in trying times, a faith that brings us moral clarity in the face of injustice, and a faith that allows us to imagine a better world.

May we never consider time spent tending to our souls, to one another’s souls, time wasted.

May it be so. Amen.