Amen...

I came upon a web site a while back...World Prayers.  Self described below:

The objective of this website is to gather the great prayers written by the spiritual visionaries of our planet into an online database representing all life affirming traditions. Many of these prayers have been used for hundreds if not thousands of years. Others are from spiritual contemporaries in today's intricate global fabric. Though these sacred verses arise from divergent paths, voices, languages, cultures and heritages, they all carry within them the same burning flame - the same impassioned love for life and the divine mysteries.

There are hundreds of prayers on this site "representative of all life affirming faiths and spiritual practices." They are divided into the following categories:

 ADORATIONS
Prayers of devotion, surrender, love, praise and offering.
CELEBRATIONS
Prayers of thanksgiving, initiation, affirmation and blessing.
INVOCATIONS
Prayers of petition, supplication, calling forth and healing.
MEDITATIONS
Prayers of reflection, contemplation, being and teaching.

The site is searchable by author, tradition, source, type, keyword and quote.  There are more than a dozen traditions listed...

• African Traditional
• Asatru
• Baha'i Faith
• Buddhism
• Celtic
• Children
• Christianity
• Confucianism
• Gaian
• Hinduism
• Islam
• Jainism
• Judaism
• Native American
• Sikhism
• Sufism
• Taoism
• Zoroastrian

Many of the prayers were more poemlike than prayerlike. Many (most) expressed my own thoughts and beliefs, worded a bit different than I might put it...but still expressing a viewpoint, an understanding of God that I share.  Prayers that I can wrap up in my own heart and mind with "Amen."

I've heard Keith say many times that Amen is the equivalent of "Those are my words."  Meaning that the prayer so reflects the  heart and beliefs of the listener that to add anything would be redundant. 

I like that.  I've experienced that many times with prayers...and with quotes, which are snippets of encapsulated truths...broken down to their lowest integer.  My favorite quotes are those which take profound truths and express them in a bare bones fashion...not all dressed up and wordy.

Tomorrow I am going to look a little more closely at the word "Amen" and pepper the post with some quotes (a few a bit wordy) and interesting facts that I found in the "virtually" unending resource library available on...the World Wide Web.