lizzytysh wrote:
Interesting timing, eh 8) ?
~ Lizzy
Thanks for the Canadian touch eh. The timing is interesting to me in a number of ways including confirming my intuition that I spoke about early in this thread about the importance of having this thread be a comfortable place for women.
That has a touch of boasting to it a little like my comments about Johnny Clegg. I do that sometimes
but that is not the way I pray
When I pray my attitude changes very dramatically. I approach it knowing that only integrity is going to count.
I learned prayers as a Catholic child and would repeat them over and over and so many got memorized. The emphasis was usually on quanity rather than quality as we were given lists as children that told us how many days we got out of having to stay in purgetory per prayer. Also when we went to confession the priests usually gave us prayers to say as penence for our sins. Stealing would cost ten "Our Fathers" and five "Hail Marys" These were the names of prayers for those who do not know. It seemed that the more sins I committed the more that I would have to pray. So I got to thinking that prayer was a punishment.
All of this was part of experiencing a secondhand God.
One day I learned that there is no secondhand God and that whatever is to be experienced is to be experienced directly.
After having left off of saying prayers I became interested in learning how to pray. The central experience in my life is Christ and pretty well almost everything I know about how to approach prayer I learned from Jews. For some reason it worked out that way.
The first was Jesus who has given us what is known as the Lord's Prayer. It was the only prayer He gave and he said "when you pray, pray like this" and then he said the prayer.
I thought that would be a good place to start. I wanted to do it properly and their were some Jewish people who I felt very drawn to and so I considered their point of view. Mainly I got that by reading books by Martin Buber and reading tales about the Hasidim.
Martin Buber is said by many to have been one of the paramount spirtual leaders of the twentieth century and is best known for his book "I and Thou" which is the basic formulation of his philosophy of dialogue. In it he takes the position that men have a twofold nature where they are always in relation to reality as a you or an it. We all do both. When asked if he believes in God he would reply that if the questioner meant a God that can be talked about then the answer is no, if the questioner meant a God that can be talked to then the answer is yes. I liked that very much and it confirmed my experience. About prayer, Buber talked about the sum total of your life being a prayer, that prayer can be appraoched as an ongoing dialogue between you and God. It could also radically change the way you talked to other people. Buber was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the head of the United Nations for a life of being fervently devoted to the authentic dialogue between Jews and Arabs.
Because of Buber I got interested in reading tales told about the Hasidim. The Hasidim were and are a Jewish movement and one of the most vital aspects of the movement is that they tell one another stories about their leaders, their "zaddikim". The stories are mostly about what a teacher said or did with either one person or with a small group. I have read thousands of these stories over and over and I always seem to get something from them. What was most striking to me was the power that prayer had in their lives. I was attracted to that. They seemed to speak of prayer as something that was either so big or that we weree so small that one could climb completely into a prayer and come to experience the prayer as praying us. That interested me.
So along the way I got the idea that I had a prayer and I had an idea about how to pray it and so I decided that I would try it for myself.
The "Lord's Prayer" begins with the words "Our Father"
I ran into trouble with the first word "our". I wanted to be able to pray with all my heart, soul, mind and might and so i wanted to say the word "our" with all that I am. In hearing myself say it I immediately felt that I was leaving something out and so I said it over and over trying to get it right, trying to understand how big a word it could be. I wanted to make sure that I was being inclusive and so I tried to imagine myself as part of all of humanity saying it but then I felt that it wasn't personal enough. I didn't know all of humanity and so i would take very long walks saying "Our Father" over and over again each time with a different person who i knew personally and continuing until i was including even persons who I knew of most casually. I was struck by how exclusive my thinking can be and so I tried all the possible ways that I could think of and eventually I came to realize I failed. I had spent years at this. The words "only integrity is going to count" took on new meaning, my failures were not going to be held against me. Isn't that what we all want from relationships? a knowing that you can try for as long as it takes to get it right?
When I slowly began acknowledging my failure I learned that I never had an "our" that came from me to bring to the prayer but rather it is given to me to say and it's meaning is in who I am saying it to and who I am saying it to is in the present and so having said it before counts for nothing.
So if 1.15 were my prayer and I started with "This is the way we summond each other" That is all I would be saying with those words. The use of the word we would allow me no particulars. I have no way of knowing the particulars of what other people are doing to summond one another. I can say "this is the way" and all that acknowledges is that I am in the present and in the presents of one who can see the particulars.
That is what leads me to think that this prayer that begins with "This is the way we summond one another" is a prayer.
Also the fact that Leonard said that these were prayers helped.
, I want to clarify that even though it may appear that I was laughing at Doron, I was actually laughing at all that Greg had written, ending with Doron's comments, and used those final comments to represent that whole segment.
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