More about Prayer....

I was going through the list of prayer quotes I have stashed away in Evernote. I came upon a quote that I wanted to include in this series of posts. I hadn’t saved the source of the quote. A quick copy and paste into Google provided the answer right away. The source was Richard Rohr. He said:

The traditional and most universal word to describe a different access to truth was simply “to pray about something.” But that lovely word “prayer” has been so deadened by pious use and misuse that we now have to describe this different mental attitude with new words. I am going to introduce a different word here, so you can perceive in a fresh way, and perhaps appreciate what we mean by contemplation. The word is “resonance.”
Prayer is actually setting out a tuning fork. All you can really do in the spiritual life is get tuned to receive the always-present message. Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or the group you belong to, but only inner resonance and a capacity for mutuality (Matthew 7:7-11). The Sender is absolutely and always present and broadcasting; the only change is with the receiver station.

Or as Anne Lamott wrote in her book, “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

....when you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.

One of the sites that popped up in the Google search results led to a blog called “Progressive Redneck Preacher.” He published a post about a week ago entitled “Tuning into the Sacred Song: Our Week in the Living Word.” He included the tuning fork quote in that post.

He mainly wrote about a type of prayer called Breath Prayer. (and his experience with it over the course of a week) A breath prayer is a short phrase uttered soundlessly to the rhythm of our breathing….inhaling and exhaling. Examples that I particularly like…..

Inhale – “Peace”

Exhale – “Be still”

Or how about this one….that fits well with this type of prayer

Inhale – “Closer is He than breathing”

Exhale – “Nearer than hands and feet”

You get the idea. There were several links in the post that led to some websites that went into this prayer (and others) in more detail. I looked around a bit online and couldn’t find any sites better than two of the ones he listed;

Ten Ways to Pray

and

Soul Shepherding

The effectiveness of this prayer (in quieting our body and mind and in honing our listening to God skills) seems to be a blending of the physical and the spiritual. We all know that deep, slow rhythmic breathing calms the body. Take a deep breath. Calm down. Take ten deep breaths. Calm down even more. Sometimes when I am very, very stressed I realize I am barely breathing at all. Short, shallow, hardly there intakes of air. No wonder I feel anxious. I’m suffocating.

I have a thing about the dentist. Not a good thing either. It isn't really about the pain. It is more about the claustrophobic feeling that comes with tubes that suck and spray, grinding drills and all those hands in my face. Keith reminded me once to take deep, calming breaths. It was one of the methods he used to help his scared silly skydiving students stay calm enough to focus as they jumped out of the airplane.

The slow, steady breathing involved with this kind of prayer coupled with a calming phrase from or about scripture seems a perfect combination. On the site that talked about various ways to pray, they recommended using your ten fingers to count…yep…ten deep prayer breaths and then pausing to offer a praise or a petition or even just a moment of silent contemplation. 

And in one of the articles I read, they used Anne Lamott’s simple prayer from Traveling Mercies as an example of a Breath Prayer.

Here are the two best prayers I know:“Help me, help me, help me” and "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Turn that into a Breath Prayer....

Inhale – Help me, help me, help me

Exhale – Thank you, thank you thank you

More coming about different ways to help us pray....

Max and Anne - Views on Prayer

While scrolling down through my Facebook feed, I came upon a snippet of an interview on the 700 Club with Max Lucado. Max is my all-time favorite Christian author. His book, He Still Moves Stones, was one of the first Christian books I ever read. I love his writing style….I love how clearly he expresses the love of God for his children. 

They talked about two things in the interview:

His support of Husain Abdullah in a recent USA editorial where he said:

Which is why the sight of Abdullah, a Muslim who sat out the 2012 season to go on a pilgrimage, being penalized was hard to watch. Tim Tebow brought gridiron prayer to the forefront with his iconic kneeling in gratitude. And countless other professional football players have been seen kneeling in an end zone prayer. 

For decades competitors have bowed their heads, crossed their hearts, kissed their rosaries and lifted their eyes to heaven as they sought favor on the fields of competition. Is a little petition or gratitude so bad? If the act is sincere toward God as opposed to insincere, for show, what is the harm?

Indeed, what is the harm? And while so many evangelical Christians got themselves all worked up at Tebow’s critics, where was the outrage about Abdullah’s fifteen yard penalty? Oh yeah…..he was bowing to the “wrong” God.  I think it was quite gutsy of Max to come out in support of Abdullah.   
         

And anyway, the story had a happy ending because the NFL apologized and said the official was wrong and that players can, indeed, pray.

The other topic of the interview was his new book, Before Amen. Max admits to being a prayer wimp. He’s mentioned his difficulties with prayer in other books he's written. He said “doing something for God” comes more naturally to him that “praying to God.” (That is a paraphrase, by the way) Through the years he’s developed what he refers to as the pocket prayer. He studied all the prayers in the Bible and summed them up into six short sentences.

Father, You are good. I need help. So do they. Thank you. In Jesus' name, amen.

I love it. He succinctly sums it all up in those short sentences.

I rarely say a traditional prayer. I truly believe I always have God’s ear. I feel like he is paying attention as I go about my day….typing reports, checking my email, eating lunch, going to the bathroom.  Doesn’t “pray without ceasing” mean that I thank him for small blessings throughout the day, tell him I love him, ask his to watch over my children or let him know I am quite miffed at the way he is allowing some things to play out.

Anne Lamott (another of my favorites) also has a book out about prayer. In my next post (no, not an empty promise) I’ll talk about “Help, Thanks, Wow: The ThreeEssential Prayers” by Anne Lamott.  

The Three Categories of Universalists

Chan divides universalists into categories….

There are the pluralists.

these people believe that Jesus is one of many ways to salvation. Pluralists believe that all religions present equally valid ways of salvation—Christianity is simply one among many.

There are the “hopefuls”

They believe that Christ is the only way, but they hold out hope that God will end up saving everyone through Christ in the end. But they go beyond simply hoping this will happen (don’t we all?). They’re hopeful, and they see strong biblical support for this view, though their view is often tempered with caution.

And then there are those spiritual daredevils…the “dogmatics”….

The least cautious Christian Universalists call themselves dogmatic Universalists. Like the previous group, they believe that Christ is the only way, but they go a bit further and say that the Bible clearly teaches that all will be saved. They find the view not just possible, but the most probable: They believe that the Bible clearly teaches that all will be saved through Jesus in the end.

So I’m guessing that someone who writes an essay and calls it “I Am a Convinced Universalist” would fit in the dogmatic category?  The guy who wrote those words….in his autobiography… in a chapter entitled just that ….I Am a Convinced Universalist…was William Barclay.

Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at Glasgow University and the author of many Biblical commentaries and books, including a translation of the New Testament, "Barclay New Testament," and "The Daily Study Bible Series."

Very. Mainstream. When I typed his name into the search engine at Christianbook.com, about 90 or so results came up.  He was a prolific writer and his books line the book cases of many mainstream Christians worldwide.  Many (most?) aren’t aware of his pronouncement of a “dogmatic” belief in universalism since many of them….no way/no how would read the writings of a universalist. Universalism is one of the biggest, fattest heresies there is…

Brian McLaren said:

In my theological circles, universalism is one small step removed from atheism.  It is probably more feared than committing adultery, and to be labeled universalist ends one’s career.  Decisively. 

But William Barclay declared it…flat out.  He didn’t skirt the issue or talk around it….or make vague references to it.  He wasn’t coy about it.

I am a convinced universalist. I believe that in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God.

And he gave several reasons for his beliefs….

First, there is the fact that there are things in the New Testament which more than justify this belief.

Coming from a New Testament scholar/Bible translator/Professor of Divinity…that should carry some weight. 

Second, one of the key passages is Matthew 25:46 where it is said that the rejected go away to eternal punishment, and the righteous to eternal life. The Greek word for punishment is kolasis, which was not originally an ethical word at all. It originally meant the pruning of trees to make them grow better. I think it is true to say that in all Greek secular literature kolasis is never used of anything but remedial punishment.

And to be fair…Chan did include this quote in his book.  Okay…so it was in the footnotes….but it was there if one was inclined to dig a bit.  But he never mentioned Barclay’s popularity, or prolific writings…or the…you know…Convinced Universalist part. 

Third, I believe that it is impossible to set limits to the grace of God. I believe that not only in this world, but in any other world there may be, the grace of God is still effective, still operative, still at work. I do not believe that the operation of the grace of God is limited to this world. I believe that the grace of God is as wide as the universe.

There is of course the verse that (in my mind) definitively declares that death cannot separate us from God….

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And the fourth reason…

Fourth, I believe implicitly in the ultimate and complete triumph of God, the time when all things will be subject to him, and when God will be everything to everyone.

Then Barclay goes on to muse about God as Father…and how it might be considered a triumph to wipe out His enemies or to torture them in hell forever if God were simply a judge or a king but God is also a Father

..he is indeed Father more than anything else. No father could be happy while there were members of his family for ever in agony. No father would count it a triumph to obliterate the disobedient members of his family. The only triumph a father can know is to have all his family back home. The only victory love can enjoy is the day when its offer of love is answered by the return of love. The only possible final triumph is a universe loved by and in love with God.

So will God be able to pull this off? 

Chan describes this belief in his book:

At the heart of this perspective is the belief that, given enough time, everybody will turn to God and find themselves in the joy and peace of God’s presence. The love of God will melt every hard heart, and even the most “depraved sinners” will eventually give up their resistance and turn to God

So….will God be able to turn the hardest heart back to Himself?  To bend the stubbornest knee…and loosen the most reluctant tongue?  Will all mankind bow and joyously proclaim that Jesus Christ is Lord?  It says so….three times no less…in scripture.  (And…it is a joyous proclamation that is implied in the original language.  Not a grudging concession before being cast into hell or obliterated…but a joyous proclamation)

And surely God has ways that I cannot even begin to fathom. Is anything too hard for Him?  Is His arm to short to save?

"I am the LORD, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me? Jeremiah 32:27

Surely the arm of the LORD is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. Isaiah 59:1

I don’t know how he will accomplish it but as I ponder, I am reminded of a quote by Anne Lamott. I saved it in my files a few years ago when I read through all of her books, one right after the other.

The quote was in a book (name escapes me) that was written after 9-11.  She was very upset with the war and the political atmosphere.  She was very angry.

My Jesuit friend Tom once told me that this is a good exercise because in truth, everyone is loved and chosen, even Dick Cheney, even Saddam Hussein. That God loves them because God loves.

This-- more than anything does not make sense to me,” I said.

“Because you are a little angry,” Tom explained. “But when people die, they are forgiven and welcomed home. Then God will help them figure out how to clean up the disgusting messes they have made. God has skills and ideas on how to do this.”

So God has skills and ideas on how to do this. Is that just too simple?  Somehow it seems that there will be at least an era of ”weeping and gnashing of teeth” for some of us.. as God works on us and in us and makes us willing to clean up the disgusting messes we’ve made in this life. 

Or perhaps after we die and leave these fleshly bodies behind…when death has taken off the mask (William Penn) we will be able to see clearly.  It won’t be the same playing field we find ourselves in here, in this life. 

More on God as Father (not Judge) in an upcoming post.  And more thoughts on whether our last breath is indeed our last chance. 

Pituitary? Pineal?

In a recent post, I quoted from Anne Lamott's book, Traveling Mercies. In the excerpt, she talked about Jesus visiting her one night during a frightening, traumatic (self induced) situation. He was most definitely an unwanted guest because even though, at that point in her life, she believed in God, becoming a Christian was out of the question. Her view of being a Christian? What a totally hokey thing to do...perhaps THE hokiest thing one could ever do. So she willed him to leave and tightly "squinched" her eyes shut so she could not see him. BUT...that didn't help because her eyes were not "what she was seeing him with." That is the profound snippet I mentioned in a recent post in the assemblage of posts pertaining to conversion stories.

The snippet begs the question...So what do we "see" Jesus with anyway? For sure not our physical "jeepers, creepers, where'd you get those peepers." We "see" him with some kind of inner eye. An eye whose vision most of the time...for most of us... seems cloudy and unclear....out of focus? Following are the lyrics to one of Charlotte Torango's songs, which I happened upon while leafing through their song book at a conference at Galen Winebrener's church. My first reading of the lyrics produced the highly spiritual thought of...."huh?"

Hermetically sealed this people now be
The lid is shut tight so no carnality
Can ever again seep in to cause pain
This light I have sealed within your own brain
The pituitary gland is now harmless to thee
A spiritual eye is now open you'll see
If you can believe I'll leave you just light
Hermetically sealed away from night

The line about the pituitary gland stumped me. I pondered it quite a bit...mulled it over...talked to Keith about it...asked my buds on EU. The best answers came from Gary Sigler's Heart to Heart Message Board. Let me quote some of them below.

From shonda:

the pituitary gland is the seat of the ego.....
it hides/guards the pineal gland lying below over a gulf....

the pituitary is protected by a bony structure....
and is thought to control homeostasis....the control of everything human!
well being as well as poor being...while the pineal is the JUST BEING.

Hear that these words bear witness to the Awakening within US....
So we no longer walk in flesh...but walk after the Spirit...Christ Within US!
See the pituitary gland is where the voice of the deceiver dwells...speaking lies to ourselves....do we not know that we are the Sons of the LIVING GOD...and there IS NO OTHER

Cindi you can go to Wikipedia and look up the physical/scientific words for Pituitary Gland...but they are only a shadow or pattern in the wilderness...
It is a Holy Place to stand there.....
the last place that exist within before we leap ov'r the gulf...
inside the hidden gland called pineal...God was in THIS place (within us human thinking body) and I did NOT KNOW IT!

And from Barbara Symons:

Pituitary governs the physical body - Pineal governs the spiritual body

And from summerland

THE PINEAL GLAND THE PSYCHEDELIC SINGLE EYE

i retrieved the above addy from my bookmarks...it is a comprehensive study of the pineal gland and what Jesus himself said about it, along with other information that I found fascinating ever since I read Genesis 32:30 and my interest was sparked by Jacob's name for where he had his dream...peneul (pineal)...seeing God face to face...

So what Charlotte Torango was saying in the lyrics of her song was that we need not be weighted down to the pituitary gland...the lead anchor that docks us to the flesh nature (ego, carnal, adamic nature) but that we can live out of the pineal gland...the center of all things spiritual.

Come to think of it...I wrote about some of this stuff a while back, spurred on by a quote from Frank Laubach. I wrote several posts about Frank, an extraordinary missionary, visionary....child of God, mover and doer, maker and shaker, humanitarian. If you are interested you can heck out the whole slew of them...HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE (links not necessarily in chronological order. I wrote a lot about this guy!!! And I was quite taken by the fact that even though he was a modern day mystic, he was not the least bit airy fairy and accomplished great feats in this physical realm) The post about Laubach with the quote that intrigued me told about a vision in which the Lord came to him and invited him up to the next level of relationship. The name of the post was The Vision. (catchy title, eh?)

In the early 1950's, at age 70, Laubach had a vision of God and Christ together in a long room. Christ showed him how to deepen his minute by minute attunement by focusing deeply at the point between the eyebrows. Jesus spoke to him, saying it was time for him to take "a long stride toward becoming a full grown son of God"

"Your game with the minutes, " He said, was in the right direction, but tonight you are going beyond that game into the game with moments. To be fully grown means to spend your life, day and night, with the door wide open into the secret audience room with us."

"The audience room, " He explained, "is in front of your head. When you wish to consult us, lift up your eyes a little and there we are, not beyond the stars but just over your own eyes."

This post is getting a bit long so I feel compelled to say....more to follow.....

Religious Unity...1

Retrieving a post from the queue...somewhat unrelated by not exactly since it also quotes Anne Lamott....but about a bit of a different topic.....but that ties in sort of in a round about way that I will point out later.....in tomorrow's post.

As I try to sort out exactly what it is I believe (like that is ever going to happen) and how the "Christian World View" fits with an all inclusive God, I often remind myself of the little conversation Jesus had with Peter. You know...when Peter, upon hearing what would be required of him in his walk of faith, points to John and says..."hey...what about him?" And Jesus pretty much said...MYOB. "YOU follow me." Perhaps that is what I have been called to do...mind my own business. Ready to give an answer for the hope that lies within me....but not to push my calling on my brothers and sisters.

I, as in me, myself and I...have been called to follow Jesus. I read a Christianity Today interview with Anne Lamott not long ago. In the interview, when questioned about her universalist leanings, she said:

“Only Jesus has come to me, and I experience God's love in an immediate and personal way through his companionship."

(And by the way….she is a universalist. In the interview she says:

Some people have been too starving, attacked, hated, or full of hate to experience God's love," she says. "Sometimes I think God loves the ones who most desperately ache and are most desperately lost—his or her wildest, most messed-up children—the way you'd ache and love a screwed-up rebel daughter in juvenile hall. A 5-year-old girl or her mother in the mountains of Afghanistan, a junkie in L.A., Mother Teresa, you, me, children in Gaza—God created us all and loves us and brings us home, into what may be the first shalom we have ever had the chance to experience."

And

Those in other countries and cultures "feel Divine Love come to them through more local teachings, through other expressions of that love."

So anyway…Anne, me too. Only Jesus has come to me. I have not had any kind of personal experience with Buddha or Krishna or any of the other “faces of God” down through the ages. I have read stuff from other faiths and damn if I don’t hear the voice of God…yes…even the voice of Jesus in some of those texts…but not in the same way…to the same extent… that I hear his voice in the Gospels. But….

It is not my place to decide...dictate or debate the calling that has been placed on the heart of another. I know this does not fit with fundamentalist Christianity at all. Their view is that they have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is their duty of love...to push the truth as they know it on everyone...to look for opportunities, to make up opportunities....to cram their truth down the throat of any and all who do not know their Jesus. Forget this "taste and see if it is good" stuff. It is a fistfull down the throat.

Fortunately I am not a fundamentalist so I do not engage in their "duty of love", however I have been the recipient of that fistful of truth...crammed down my throat. I hate it. My grandparents (especially my grandmother) did it years ago...with forced Bible readings and forced prayer. I have also been cornered by other Christians down through the years with their attempts to make me believe their truths.

But the tricky thing about truths is that they change from one Christian denomination to another. The truth preached at a Pentcostal Church is way different than the truth preached at a Catholic church. Our beliefs become set in stone if we if we are convinced that our religion (and more myopic still…only our denomination) proclaims the whole truth and all of the truth...and the ONLY truth. Perhaps if we look at the bigger picture, we can see that there is a common thread running through most religions.

Via an article that annie posted on EU a while back, I found Stephen Knapp's website. There is quite a collection of writings on the site. E-books and a long list of interfaith articles with a focus on the Vedic path. Two articles, When Religions Create Divisions and How to Avoid It and Religious Unity: Why There Could be a One World Religion fit with the subject of this post. More on this to follow.....

“All right. You can come in.”

At the end of my last post, I quoted CS Lewis' as he told the tale of his conversion.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

**Warning** "F-bomb" alert!!!!

I recently read two of Anne Lamott's latest books. In Traveling Mercies, she tells the tale of her conversion. Like Lewis she was indeed reluctant...adamant, in fact, that it just wasn't happening. Like Lewis, her belief in God came first...then she met up with Jesus....

After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had felt over the years when I was frightened and alone. The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light to make sure no one was there—of course there wasn't. But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus. I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this. And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen. I turned to the wall and said out loud,”I would rather die.”

I felt Him just sitting there on His haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn't help because that's not what I was seeing Him with.

Uh-huh...sure...okay. Apparently, at that point, she hadn't heard of "irresistible grace" ala Calvin. She hadn't heard the parable of the good shepherd who leaves his 99 sheep to find the wayward one, or the widow who tore her house apart to find the one lost coin or that Jesus came to seek and save that which was lost. And at the time she was lost indeed. The story above happened after she had complications following an abortion. She was still a drunk (a word she uses throughout the book to describe herself ) and was using drugs...and she made some really poor choices with men. But Jesus hounded her (you know, as in "the hound of heaven")...only she doesn't use a canine analogy but rather the the analogy of a feline...a little cat...that relentlessly follows you around, rubbing up against your legs, trying to get in, being a total pest. But she knew that the total pest who wouldn't go away...was Jesus.

I began to cry and left before the benediction and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers under a sky as blue as one of God's own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said; “Fuck it, I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.”

Okay...so God did not knock her off her donkey...nor did he blind her for a few days....but he did get her attention. And now she is a unique and delightful part of the body of Christ...touching many with her down to earth, irreverent essays that reveal a heart in love with Jesus and offer the reader profound snippets of spiritual truths. At some point, I plan to write a series of posts about some of those snippets. In fact, there is a snippet in one of her quotes right in this post that I find profound. As I reread this post....with the intent of editing out redundant ramblings and unnecessary phrases, alas, I ended up ADDING TO rather SUBTRACTING FROM it. So much for succinct. BUT as I was "editing" I came up with a profound snippet of my own. Profound to me anyway. And so much for succinct!! More to come.....

Clean Slates and the Cloud of Forgetting....

In my last post, I (re)quoted Henri Nouwen’s thoughts on a nonjudgmental presence. A flurry of similar thoughts by Nouwen and Richard Rohr hit EU right about the same time...all posted by annie....They were all interrelated.  They almost seemed to play off of each other!

In one of Richard Rohr's daily devotionals he said....

The sin in the beginning of the Bible is “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). The moment I sit on my throne where I know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, then I’m capable of great evil—while not thinking of it as evil! I have eaten of the wrong tree, according to the Bible. Don’t judge, don’t label, don’t rush to judgment. You don’t usually know other people’s real motives or intentions. You hardly know your own.

Isn’t that the truth?

What the author of the classic Cloud of Unknowing says is that first you have to enter into “the cloud of forgetting.” Forget all your certitudes, all your labels, all your explanations, whereby you’ve put this person in this box; this group is going to heaven, this race is superior to that race. Just forget it. It’s largely a waste of time. It’s usually your ego projecting itself, announcing itself, and protecting itself. It has nothing to do with objective reality or real love of the truth.

I like that phrase…the cloud of forgetting.

And now to what Nouwen has to say...

One of the hardest things in life is to let go of old hurts.We often say, or at least think: "What you did to me and my family, my ancestors, or my friends I cannot forget or forgive. ... One day you will have to pay for it."

Sometimes our memories are decades, even centuries, old and keep asking for revenge. Holding people's faults against them often creates an impenetrable wall.

Perhaps, as well as with our preconceived notions about race, sex, age and socioeconomic position, we need to take a serious look at this cloud of forgetting stuff when it comes to old hurts and slights and estranged relationships. When we cling to the past, we sully the future. I know this is true…yet sometimes I hold on for dear life, even when I don’t want to. Forgiving is hard. Forgetting is even harder. And I'm not even sure forgetting is always the wise course of action. 

When Emily was small, she and I were like fire and water.  We butted heads all the time. Thankfully, she has grown into a perfectly delightful 16 year old.  She is one of my favorite people to spend time with.  Sometimes...back then when she was a total pain in the ass... when our dealings with each other had deteriorated to what seemed be a totally irreconcilable situation...and there was nowhere to go but up, one of us would suggest "starting again with a clean slate."  Perhaps that does not just work for headstrong, argumentative little girls and their exasperated mothers...but perhaps it can flow into other interpersonal relationships.  Starting each day with a clean slate?

                    

Anne Lamott said...in a snippet buried within an essay in one of her books I've been reading of late....

 if you want to change the way you feel about people, you have to change the way you treat them.

Which would obviously require at some point starting over with a clean slate.  Does that take agreement from both parties (like Em and I both agreed)?  If only one party starts anew, does that work?  And how many clean slates does one bestow on others?  In a recent e-mail from annie, she talked about the 7 times 70 thing in scripture....as in forgiving an unlimited number of times.  This directive came from the lips of Jesus no less! 

This clean slate pondering leads to a lot more questions than it answers....

Anne Lamott on Prayer

Tomorrow it's back to work after four days off for Christmas.  I would really like to know how four days can go by so fast. 

And alas...alas....while I did do some blog "research" and "organizing," I did not post as much as I had planned.  And the time is tick, tick, ticking away...so...I am going to post a few Anne Lamott quotes that deal with prayer (which was a recent, pre-Christmas topic here) The first two are from her book, "Plan B, Further Thoughts on Faith."  The last one is from her book "Traveling Mercies." 

I've been (very slowly) reading her three latest books...marking page after page with florescent green post its so I can come back later and find the "quoteworthy" quotes. The woman is brilliant.  I plan to write more about her in the future.  Her thoughts resonate.

But tonight, in lieu of a post that might require much writing on my part, I am going to post what she has to say about prayer...and perhaps a comment or two here or there. 

About answers to prayer:

The problem with God, or at least the top five annoying things about God is that He or She rarely answers right away.  It can take days,weeks. Some people seem to understand this--that life and change take time. I, on the other hand, am an instant message type. 

Uh huh...yep...I know just how she feels. 

....when you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress. 

Perhaps why Paul reminds us to "pray without ceasing?"

And from Traveling Mercies:

Here are the two best prayers I know:    
"Help me, help me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you."  A woman I know says for her morning prayer, "Whatever" and for the evening,"Oh, well,"

And now since it is definitely time for bed, my bedtime prayer might as well be...what else...

Oh well...

More About That Path

And a quote from Anne Lamott who is quoting E.L. Doctorow about "the path"

"E.L. Doctorow once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard." — Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)

Hmmm...just enough light to see a few feet in front of you. 

The other night I was going through some old AOL files on the geriatric computer that sits in the dining room. The computer is about 7 or 8 years old and the files date back to about 2004.  There were over 4800 emails. Many of them were written to yahoo email lists...the Wider Universalist Fellowship, Christian Universalism and others.  It is eye opening to go back and read emails you've written even just five years ago. 

There was one email I came across that was in reply to the following question:

Were you given a book of your entire existence from birth to death, opened of course to today's page, would you dare turn that page to know what "the morrow shall bring?"

       

                             Photo by TON70

My reply...

Hmmmmm....would I turn the page?  Ignoring the fact that it might all be predetermined whether I would turn the page or not....my first reaction is that I would not.  If tragedy looms ahead, I don't think I would want to know for sure. 

Matthew 6:34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. KJV

Would I want to know if tomorrow my health would fail....or one of my kids would be hurt....no.....I don't think I could cope with the certainty of it.  So, no, I don't think I would peek ahead to future pages and chapters to see what was going to happen.  If we are believers in UR, we know how it all ends anyway......

That reply was written during the period of my incessant, obsessive, relentless search for the answer to the free will/total determinism question.  You know like the old Miss Clairol commercials...Does she or doesn't she? (have "free will") Even though I wouldn't "bet the farm" on the conclusion I've come to, I do have more peace about the question. 

And my answer to the question about the book of my life.  Well, it is the same answer I gave five years ago.  I wouldn't turn the page.  I guess it is really God's mercy that he gives us just enough light to see a few feet in front of us....