Enlightenment

Enlightenment is merely an impersonal happening. We give it the taint of personal achievement. Therefore the question arises, "What is an enlightened being like?" There is no such thing as an enlightened person. Enlightenment is merely another event. There is a flood, a fire, an earthquake; there is enlightenment, just as one happening in the whole process, all part of the phenomenal process.

- Ramesh Balsekar

Solitude

Wilderness memories are ballast in my life but, to find peace in the human world, something more is needed. Peace comes from knowing what you want out of life, paring down, simplifying, focusing on a few important things. Do works of beauty. Serve something bigger than yourself. Pour yourself into satisfying work. Then, deep relaxation. Make an art form of deep relaxation.

Nurture your friendship with yourself, with your inner world. Minimize the extraneous. Minimize the number of moving parts. Be careful of who and what you let into your life. Protect your time. Do creative work. Be gentle on yourself. Make room for love in your life. Build close friendships with good people. Read. Think. Spend time alone.

"The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone."

- James Baldwin

A peaceful life requires a center point, a place of balance. Everything unique and beautiful grows out of the still point, that place of quiet reflection, meditation or prayer.

No matter how extreme my experiments and adventures, everything is fine in my life if I make sacred room for a quiet center. It needs to be nurtured, paid attention to. If I do that, it will guide me through troubled waters. When I lose touch with it, my life spins out of control. To nurture a quiet center, we sometimes need to be hard on ourselves, hard on our attraction to trivial and insignificant things.

Whenever I’ve been alone for more than twenty-four hours, my mind has become preoccupied with my screw-ups, my embarrassments, the things I should have done differently. There are a lot of those things. I’ve bounced up against boundaries all my life. But others have told me that they experience the same. After three days, a deep peace takes over, but in the interim, I encounter anger towards myself and others — others in the broadest sense, including the systems of power in human world. My mind, operating in a vacuum, is simply looking for something to do, something to focus on. After three days, I’m fine. I’m free.

The human mind solves problems. That’s what it wants to do because that’s what it is good at. It is all about the world out there; it is uncomfortable turning inward. It doesn’t want to be alone with itself in a room or a forest. It wants activity, controversy. Conflict excites it. It is constantly searching for something to worry about, something to fear, something to get excited about. It likes human relationships. It craves distraction from the truths at the center of our lives.

Nothing is more controversial, nothing more avoided, nothing more threatening to our self-constructed narrative, than the truth. We certainly don’t want to be alone in a room or a forest with truth for any length of time.

But art and writing and all creativity, including creating a full, deep experience of life require a relationship with that quiet center. There’s always something more important to do. The house needs cleaning. Bills need to be paid. There’s a great show on television. No, no, sit there alone in a room. Confront that scary silence, that aloneness. Make friends with it. Your creative work requires that.Everything beautiful grows out of that.

Roderick W. MacIver

Sorrow

I asked David Stringer to let me post this poem of his created in the aftermath of last week's events. Beautiful and prescient.

What is the Reason for Sorrow?

This week, they crossed over to the realm
of the Unmanifest, where nothing
is lost. Here is the illusory, tempting
us into blindness. We are never allowed

to see through the illusion, that this vesture
as a garment of skin is only a semblance
of a lesser inviting us into a Greater.
Farrah, Michael, and Ed shed their garments

this week. Veiled as they were in beauty,
song, and humor, the lesser gave
way to the greater. Few will see
into this great crossing. There is a loss

of sight, and this a far greater death. Opaque
to the light, the culture stares strident
into an abyss of darkness. Fooled
by the iciness of death, the luminosity

of greater life is lost. Quickly, send for Father
Abraham, and have him touch our tongue
with his tears of joy that we may weep
a proper weeping, and stop this infernal charade.

David Stringer
30 June 2009
Norcross, GA

True Worship

It is in love that religion exists and not in ceremony-in the pure and sincere love in the heart. Unless a man is pure in body and mind, his coming into a temple and worshipping Shiva is useless. The prayers of those who are pure in mind and body will be answered by Shiva, and those who are impure and yet try to teach religion to others will fail in the end. External worship is only a symbol of internal worship, but internal worship and purity are the real things. Without them, external worship would be of no avail.

- Vivekananda

Two Weeks of Wisdom Academy

We have just completed two weeks of Wisdom Academy here at the Praxis Retreat and Learning Center. The first was focused on Theopoetics, the understanding that poetic symbol and metaphor are the convergence and coincidence of opposites--and where they meet is the creative new that is born from the tension between dualisms. Poetry is the major prophetic expression of that new coming into being. David and DaAnna Stringer led us conceptually and experientially through these fertile fields of thought and expression. The second week was devoted to the Keys to the Kingdom led by Ward Bauman. It was an in-depth exploration of the traditional "Sermon on the Mount" seen through the eyes of non-duality. Yeshua taught a profound experience of oneness which is a life beyond dogma into a Realm of consciousness that is unitive rather than separative. Our work was based on a new translation published by Praxis this year.

Below is my own poetic expression of the Lord's Prayer found in that "Sermon" based on the week's work:

O Beloved Source transcendent
your sacred Name we raise
and praise the One whose rule and realm
is home for us on earth as in the heavens.
You know our need
so let us feed today on heaven's bread,
and untie the knots and set us free from error's ways
as we release all who have wronged us.
Guide us from temptation's path
and free us from its evils,
for the Realm of strength and beauty
and all Reality is yours
both now and through the ages

Very ordinary actions

It is quite possible to perform very ordinary actions with so high
an intention as to serve God therein better than in far more
important things done with a less pure intention.


... Jean N. Grou

O Abyss

O abyss, O eternal Godhead, O sea profound, what more could you
give me than yourself? You are the fire that burns without being
consumed; you consume in your heat all the soul's self-love; you
are the fire which takes away cold; with your light you illuminate
me so that I may know all your truth. Clothe me, clothe me with
yourself, eternal truth, so that I may run this mortal life with
true obedience, and with the light of your most holy faith.


... Catherine of Siena

Passover Remembered

Recently Meg Grant from San Marcos sent me this excerpt which some of you may have received, but it is worth reading. A powerful re-telling of the Passover. -- LB

Pack nothing. Bring only your determination to serve and your willingness to be free. Don’t wait for the bread to rise. Take nourishment for the journey, but eat standing, be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind – fear, silence, submission. Only surrender to the need of the time – to love justice and walk humbly with your God.

Begin quickly, before you have time to sink back into old slavery. Set out in the dark. I will send fire to warm and encourage you. I will be with you in the fire and I will be with you in the cloud. I will give you dreams in the desert to guide you safely home to that place you have not yet seen…I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way and to learn my ways more deeply.

Some of you will be so changed by weathers and wanderings that even your closest friends will have to learn your features as though for the first time. Some of you will not change at all. Some will be abandoned by your dearest loves and misunderstood by those who have known you since birth and feel abandoned by you. Some will find new friendship in unlikely faces, and old friends as faithful and true as the pillar of God’s flame.

Sing songs as you go, and hold close together. you may at times grow confused and lose your way…Touch each other and keep telling the stories…Make maps as you go, remembering the way back from before you were born.

So you will be only the first of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas. It is the first of many beginnings – your Paschal-tide.
Remain true to this mystery. Pass on the whole story…Do not go back. I am with you now and I am waiting for you.

- Alla Renée Bozarth

Reality

"The possibility of stepping into a higher plane is quite real for everyone. It requires no force or effort or sacrifice. It involves little more than changing our ideas about what is normal."

Deepak Chopra

Fire and Light

I was meditating on Logion 10 of the Gospel of Thomas and working with one of its hermeneutical “twins.”

Yeshua says, “See, I have sown fire into the cosmos and I shall guard it carefully until it blazes."

One interpretation of this saying is that Yeshua is speaking of the fires of purification and burning, which is a legitimate understanding, it seems to me. But another “twin” that gets lost concerns the “Theology of Beauty and Glory.”

An ancient seeing is that fire is nothing less than the Glory of God, the divine Beauty blazing up and transforming the matter of earth into Light. The work of Yeshua as Cosmic Being (as the Logos of God), is to transform the creation until it blazes with “All Light.”

Notice the first word of the text, See. It could just as easily say Behold, or “Observe in wonder.” Only someone fully “in love” can see such a possibility. Perceiving such a thing is impossible without being caught up in love. Islamic iconography in the form of illuminated manuscripts and miniatures often depicts the heads of saints, sages, and prophets aflame with fire, instead of the Christian image of the nimbus of light. Logion 10 can therefore be seen as early verbal image of Semitic iconography that we can behold in wonder.

Brilliant Green Lizard of Being

Brilliant green, adventure spirit
moving, darting, twitching scarlet
round eye following, catching flys
whispering mysteries of darting purpose,
matching skins of brilliant green.

Tree your home and intent unknown,
brilliant instinct contained within
never knowing, thinking absent,
strains of fading purpose,
manifest as questions of being.

Sam Roberts

Summit

This great offering is submitted by Rosemary Shirley

To reach the summit, one must proceed from encampment to encampment. But before setting out for the next refuge, one must prepare those coming after to occupy the place one is leaving. Only after having prepared them, can one go up. That is why, before setting out for a new refuge, we had to go back down in order to pass knowledge to other seekers.

--Mount analogue Traces by Rene Daumal

Midnight Gift

This good poem from Mirabai is offered by Ed Clifford.

Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,
Kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night.

If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,
I would have asked to be born a fish in this life.
If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts,
Then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came from the womb!
If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves,
Then the goats would surely go to the Holy One before us!

If the worship of stone statues could bring us all the way,
I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.

Mirabai says: The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God.

Praise for Being

Praise for the Atman, the sinner, the guru, and the prisoner of the ego.

Praise for the poet, the essayist, the artist, the web designer and those
who express themselves in public.

Praise to those who ignore the news, live simply, live well and die unknown
by those who would be known.

Praise to those who benefit mankind, the healer, the scientist, the farmer
and those who perform that essential service that our civilization would
collapse without, like the plumber.

Praise those who do not get swayed by the crowd, who trust their own heart
and perceive that living in a small and comfortable home where hospitality
reigns has meaning, where mansions and cars list only your accumulation of
false paper and things.

Praise for the sun and moon, trees and animals.

Praise for grass and rocks and mountains reaching, crumbling toward the sky.

Praise for my being manifest, broken open.


Sam Roberts

Thoughts on God-Talk

This morning an interesting article on the Opinion page of New York Times came across my screen. Its a terrific article by Stanley Fish on the whole issue of religion in the modern world which attempts to answer the question, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” After an exploration of answers from many perspective, the conclusion is that modern men and women are suddenly awakening from their blind-faith in modern liberalism and science as a form of superstition just as real as is believed to be a part of religion.

Labyrinth

This beautiful images comes to us from artist and photographer, Diane Walker in Washington State.

Heresy or Self-Deception

This comes from Bill Woosley.

“…self deception is the chief source of corruption in religious thinking, more deadly than error. Hypocrisy rather than heresy is the cause of spiritual decay. ‘Thou desires truth in the inwardness’ of man (humanity).” (Psalm 51:8)

--Abraham Heschel

Christians are the Most Human People

Christians in their relationships should be the most human people
you will ever see. This speaks for God in an age of inhumanity and
impersonality and facelessness. When people look at us, their
reaction should be, "These are human people" -- human, because we
know that we differ from the animal, the plant, and the machine;
and that personality is native to what has always been [human]. If
they cannot look upon us and say, "They are real people", nothing
else is enough.
... Francis A. Schaeffer, "The God Who is There"

Practical Enlightenment

We often think of Enlightenment in passive terms, as a passive affair, a future event for which we must wait. God or Spirit or Divine Mind will enlighten us when we’re ready. Until then, we must be patient, that’s all that we can do. This approach to Enlightenment denies the deepest insights of the Abrahamic traditions.

The notion that we cannot do anything about becoming enlightened beings is, in fact, in opposition to everything that the Abrahamic faiths teach. The truth is, we are given the task of doing everything about it. The insights of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are: Enlightenment comes through embodiment. One must embody Light (incarnate Light) to become enlightened. Or to say it in the way that the Christian Scriptures state it: we must learn to “Walk in the Light” in the same way that God is in the light (I John 1:7).

Walking, of course, is not a passive act. It is a deliberate act of conscious will. We choose to get up and walk somewhere. We are not being carried into Light; we are walking into and by Light. To become Light one must “do” Light. To be God one must “do” God (who is Light). One must act like God to become God-like. As an example, to become a master of the violin one must play the violin, and playing is not a passive activity.

And what is the “play” of God and of Light? The answer is fairly direct: God is (Light is)—the primordial Source, the generosity that never stops giving, humility and the strength to yield, compassion, grace, patience, unconditional love, truth, loyalty, complete dependability, forgiveness, tolerance, restraint, kindness, releasing, letting go, and holding no grudges. These (and many other qualities) are the essence of God and of Light. To become them one must do them. By doing them one begins to embody them and embodying them one becomes them. This is called "Practical Enlightenment."

The Basis of Religion

It is in love that religion exists and not in ceremony-in the pure and sincere love in the heart. Unless a man is pure in body and mind, his coming into a temple and worshipping Shiva is useless. The prayers of those who are pure in mind and body will be answered by Shiva, and those who are impure and yet try to teach religion to others will fail in the end. External worship is only a symbol of internal worship, but internal worship and purity are the real things. Without them, external worship would be of no avail.

-Vivekananda

Convergence

We often hear that there is a perfume to Divinity -- that in fact, our hearts are attracted and we are pulled towards God as if by an irresistible fragrance. The evidence suggests that He is a master strategist, always seeking new ways to capture our attention. Well, those of you who found yourselves at Easter's altar rail with functioning olfactory senses may have noticed a certain something along the lines of "Holy Smoke, Kapowey and by-George-How's-About-Those-Lilies!"  Interestingly, we learn that in nature, the fragrance of flowers serves real purpose. At its simplest, it tells insects two things: that food is available nearby and, that there's a real possibility of snagging a mate at the same time. This is good news for the bee. Wonder if it works the same way for us. We enter a room and catch a whiff of something, our eyes instinctively looking for its source. When they make contact with, say, a potted lily, we go to it straightaway. If no one is looking, perhaps we thrust our noses deeply into its embrace and emerge betrayed by a telltale yellow dusting from its anthers. Perhaps as with the bee, perfumed flowers call out to us, "Come closer. There is Nourishment and Love nearby. Yes, God is. Here. Now."

Admit something: 

Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me." 

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise 

someone would call the cops. 

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. 

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye 

that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, 

what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?        - Hafiz

Wisdom's Practical Goals

- Transmission of wisdom outside dogma
- Independent of words and the rational mind
- Pointing directly to the heart
- Seeing one's True Self
- Attaining our Logocentric Nature

Reincarnation

Artist: Sharon Grimes

Gethsemane

The grass never sleeps.
Or the roses.
Nor does the lily have a secret eye that shuts until morning.
Jesus said, wait with me. But the disciples slept.
The cricket has such splendid fringe on its feet,
and it sings, have you noticed, with its whole body,
and heaven knows if it ever sleeps.
Jesus said, wait with me. And maybe the stars did, maybe
the wind wound itself into a silver tree, and didn't move,
maybe,
the lake far away, where once he walked as on a
blue pavement,
lay still and waited, wild awake.
Oh the dear bodies, slumped and eye-shut, that could not
keep that vigil, how they must have wept,
so utterly human, knowing this too
must be a part of the story.

~Mary Oliver, from her collection of poems, "Thirst"

Descent into Light

The statements, “The way up is the way down” (and its converse, “The way down is the way up.”), serve to illustrate the paradoxes and mysteries of travel and exchange along along the vertical axis. As practitioners of traditional wisdom we are invited to learn the mysteries of ascent into darkness and descent into light. It seems contrary, perhaps, but as we saw in the last contribution, darkness is only a word to describe the human mind’s inability to grasp the divine essence in its totality.

While the mind “goes black” in unknowing as one ascends beyond its capacities into God, the heart becomes light as one descends deeply to rest in the stillness of its own intimate spaces. There in communion one tastes the mystery of essence as Presence. As T.S. Eliot expressed this paradox in the Four Quartets “The darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing.”

The deep interiority that is the heart is (to borrow a word from modern physics) “non-local.” It does not exist in space-time as such, but participates in and is entangled with the Heart of Ultimate Reality. The two (the human heart and the divine heart) share the same “space”--they are expressions of the same reality.

It is in that space that one comes to know both “light” and “dancing” (light in the darkness and dancing in the rest). The Presence of God is hidden in that secret place that is invisible to the mind’s eye (the eye of reasonable and rational knowing) but experienced in the heart, and it is descent into this hidden chamber that a soul is introduced to the imaginal dimensions of Paradise and to the hierarchy of the presences that inhabit it in worlds that unfold as “light upon light.”

Ascent into Darkness

We must ask ourselves, where does a human being meet God? And the answer has to be, not ultimately in or with the human mind, but in the darkness. This is called “apophatic knowing,” knowing through darkness which is not the absence of God, but the experience of full Presence.

It is hard, perhaps, to imagine that the word darkness could mean anything other than annihilation and death. But in terms of the deepest sapiential teaching, it means something that is quite opposite. To ascend into the darkness is not a descent into disintegration, but to transcend the “lesser lights” of human reason and understanding, and to move into the mystery beyond our capacity to grasp God intellecutally but to experience the “dazzling darkness of God.”

One cannot grasp God (for God is, by definition, beyond the human mind), but one can experience God by moving into that Presence beyond the visible and reasonable into the invisible “Cloud of Unknowing” where human consciousness meets the divine Consciousness as one living Presence. It is there, beyond human forms of cognition, that we enter the invisible Cloud of Divine Consciousness to discover, as Gregory of Nyssa once said, “the dark obscurity where God is.” One cannot call this ascent into darkness anything else but communion with God, which is not some seizure of God by the mind, but the deepest of relationships between living persons. It is here, paradoxically, in the depths of the heart, that one ascends into the sanctuary of divine darkness which becomes the passageway, called resurrection, from death into life.

The Tzaddik

As we enter the “season” of Holy Week, it is hard sometimes to get past the trauma of Yeshua’s martyrdom and the subsequent theology of the atonement as it has been taught in the West to the heart of the matter understood in a different way.

Rabbi David Cooper in his Ecstatic Kabbalah makes the case that the defining principle of a Tzaddik (that is a Righteous One because he or she is inwardly aligned to the Divine and therefore in right-relationship) is

the choice and willingness to take on suffering in a way that will relieve others. Whenever anyone is able to bring clear awareness to one’s own pain in a situation and is able to say, “May my pain be such that it helps at leas one other person to be free of such pain,” we have achieved a level of consciousness that is identified with a tzaddik (63).

Although we honor martyrdom, the acts of a tzaddik, must be seen to occupy a higher level of conscious compassion because he or she is, as Cooper says, “the living representative of the heart of compassion. This state of being can only be accomplished when one has vanished into Presence and there is no longer a separation of oneself from all of humanity” (63), nor, perhaps it should also be said, from God.

Yeshua’s consciousness was clearly that of a tzaddik in its full meaning within this understanding of Judaism. And (as also understood within Judaism), his work must be seen to be one of restoration (tikkun) as a primary acts of conscious self-sacrifice for the good of all. As in the Buddhist tradition of the bodhisattva, the work of the tzaddik is to mend and restore the human self, the world, and ultimately the manifest “face of God” to the harmonic levels of completion and balance (78). This fundamental state of consciousness and its ultimate outcome, in solidarity with all who have brought compassionate self-service to the world, is what we remember as we enter Holy Week.

Water from the Stream

C. G. Jung tells this story:

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, "In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don't they any more?" The rabbi replied, "Because nowdays no one can stoop so low." One must stoop a little in order to fetch water from the stream.

Much afoot

It is with great interest that we read of Episcopal priest Kevin Thew Forrester, who has been elected bishop of the Diocese of Northern Michigan and describes himself as “walking the path of Christianity and Zen Buddhism together.” He must receive “consent” first from a majority of Episcopal bishops and may encounter obstacles.... He does all kinds of bad things like use liturgical texts not approved by the national Episcopal Church. (it’s funny.... there’s also a national AA authority that has been given the right to approve or disapprove spiritual texts as appropriate reading for people in recovery. Bill Wilson would have turned over in his grave as it’s just the sort of “secular authority” with whom he took umbrage and wrote the AA Traditions to counter....)

According to a statement from the Diocese, Forrester was “drawn into the Christian-Zen Buddhist dialogue through centering prayer and his desire to assist persons in their own transformation in Christ.” He has also voiced unorthodox views, once writing in a diocesan newsletter: "Sin has little, if anything, to do with being bad. It has everything to do, as far as I can tell, with being blind to our own goodness." Yup, looks like centering prayer is doing its heretical thing again....

And then we learn of the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding who, in 2007 in the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, Washington, “announced in the diocesan newspaper that she was both an Episcopalian and a Muslim. Redding is a former director of faith development at St. Mark's Cathedral.” Well they got rid of HER lickity split: “Redding was subsequently put on leave from her priestly duties by her ecclesiastical supervisor, the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island.”

Here at St. Luke’s in our town, Rev. David Anderson took up centering prayer fairly recently via Cynthia B. and then Richard Rohr and now HE’s starting to say what some will deem pretty darn controversial things from the pulpit. Last week it was, “What Jesus exposes is the tendency of religion to take mystery and turn it into mastery, where you perform some required action, and that “saves” you. Bad religion is always about control. The people who run the churches, temples and mosques of the world (and the hierarchy that controls them) have a big need to control people. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but it’s well known so we might as well name it. Institutional religion mostly dismisses the real message of its founders—Moses or Jesus, Mohammad or Buddha. They brought a message of radical transformation of consciousness that quite literally passes a human from death to life. But institutional religions mostly dismisses these radical messages of freedom and life because, well... you can’t control people and make them good, clean, law-abiding citizens with this kind of message.”

Then, we read in Brian McLaren’s new book (and mind you, he’s a former evangelical....) that “Jews, Christians and Muslims share this ancient way and these ancient practices. The ancient way is the way we must learn by heart, and we will learn it best by hearts that have been softened, if not broken, by suffering.” Further, “If we do not discover in our three religions the ancient way of spiritual practice... then we will contribute to the destruction of the world.” He doesn’t go as far as using terms like “perennial wisdom” or “mystical streams” cause his book's reach is quite broad...but he alludes to them. Brian's good buddy Phyllis Tickle is another heart and mind on fire. Wouldn’t be surprised if they show up on the OOOW radar someday. Heck, Richard Rohr might even drift our way....

The Abrahamic Agenda

May you go out in joy,
And be led forth in peace.

Isaiah 55:12

Thanks to Thee, Oh God

Thanks to Thee, O God, that I have risen today, To the rising of
this life itself; may it be to Thine own glory, O God of every
gift, and to the glory, aid Thou my soul. With the aiding of Thine
own mercy, even as I clothe my body with wool, cover Thou my soul
with the shadow of Thy wing. Help me to avoid every sin, and the
source of every sin to forsake, and as the mist scatters on the
crest of the hills, may each ill haze clear from my soul, O God.
- Gaelic Prayer

Divine Lightning

This excellent verse from Rumi comes as a gift from Ed Clifford.

When the kernel swells the walnut shell,
or the pistachio, or the almond, the husk diminishes.
As the kernel of knowledge grows,
the husk thins and disappears,
because the lover is consumed by the Beloved.
Since the quality of being sought is the opposite of seeking,
Revelation and Divine Lightning consume the prophet with fire.
When the attributes of the Eternal shine forth,
the cloak of temporality is burned away.

Beauty

This wonderful quote was sent by Rosemary Shirley to be posted to the blog.

That, beautiful-beyond-being, is said to be Beauty
for it gives beauty from itself in a manner appropriate to each.
It causes the consonance and splendor of all,
it flashes forth upon all, after the manner of light--
producing gifts of its flowing ray,
It calls to itself, when it is called beauty.

from
The Divine Names
Pseudo-Dionysius

What me Pray?

We can do nothing, we say sometimes, we can only pray. That, we feel, is a terribly precarious second-best. So long as we can fuss and work and rush about, so long as we can lend a hand, we have some hope; but if we have to fall back upon God -- ah, then things must be critical indeed!

Well, to begin with, you can pray. Pray!, you say scornfully, pray! I knew it would all fizzle out, and come to nothing. I could pray! Yes, you could pray, and, whatever you may think about it -- using it as a poor makeshift of a thing much lower than a second-best, not really a best at all, on which men fall back only when they can do nothing effectively, and are too fidgety to be able to do nothing at all -- Christ holds that prayer is a tremendous power which achieves what, without it, was a sheer impossibility. And this amazing thing you can set into operation. And the fact that you are not so using it, and simply don't believe in it and its efficiency and efficacy as our fathers did, and that so many nowadays agree with you, is certainly a major reason why the churches are so cold, and the promises seem so tardy of fulfillment.

A. J. Gossip (worldofquotes.com)