I am often asked to pray for public rallies and gatherings, but Austin is so wonderfully diverse I don’t think it is respectful to make assumptions about what people do or don’t believe.
Prayer is a form of intimacy, and like every other forms of intimacy, prayer requires consent. I have no right to walk through someone’s psyche uninvited.
I’ve sat through too many prayers by preachers who showed no recognition of other peoples’ boundaries. I experienced prayers that felt like the spiritual equivalent to a subway groping. I’m not going to do that to someone else. In fact, even at Saint Andrews I try to use language that will be just as meaningful to the Agnostic as to the believer.
What I can give is a invocation, not in the sense of a magical incantation given by a clergy person with magical connections to heaven. To me an invocation is simply one person rising to give voice to our common hopes that we might all feel the tie that binds us together as members of one human family, as threads in the web of life, and as fellow offspring of the mysterious cosmic process beyond the comprehension any of us, including clergy.