LINK to prayer
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| This link is an essay by Emmet Fox. It is his
intepretation. I tried to clean up
all the typos in the original someone put on the Web, but there might
be a couple I missed. He starts out by expanding upon the first two words of the
Lord's Prayer as a foundational truth for existence, the meaning and
and the purpose of forgiveness and everything else.
Like, why forgive?
Two words "Our Father" says
a) God is our Creator, and is like an all-loving,
all-knowing father, kind, benevolent, protective. (unlike
some earthly fathers ... for that era, Fox insists that most
fathers are kind, benevolent, protective and mean, hurtful, and
negligent fathers are a such rarity that they make the newspaper as a
scandal ... which I think was idealistic and naive, but anyhow ...)
b) WE are all God's Children and are humbled by such
Knowledge, as we literally require His love and protection due to the
basic nature of our being, as a plant requires sunlight, and we should
follow his guidance just as children should follow the guidance of
their parents who seek to protect them from harm and help them grow up.
c) WE are all brothers and sisters, literally, every
single one of us has a common spiritual Father or common spiritual
root, regardless of our separate parents and unique
circumstances. People with whom we disagree, people who are
jackasses, remain our brothers and sisters, first and foremost.
d) Refusing to acknowledge (c) by continuing to seek revenge
or simply by refusing to forgive, means that we are also denying
ourselves the experience and reality and realness of (b) and (c),
and thus banishing ourselves from experiencing the Kingdom of Heaven
... right now! We
are denying ourselves deep happiness and joy and peace. The
Big Book says that resentment "shuts out the Sunlight of the Spirit".
Resentment, when it is not processed and resolved
via the steps and prayer, blocks us from fully experiencing God, which
is Love. Taking that resentment --- and taking a moment or a week
or however long is necessary to analyze and re-analyze WHAT within our
being was hurt --- and then taking that hurt to God,
this allows us to simultaneously ask God to forgive
and bless the other person, help us to forgive the other person by healing
our hurt, and to receive forgiveness for ourselves, which is
another spiritual healing function beyond the healing of the original
harm done to us.
Refusing to forgive, means refusing to accept forgiveness,
which means being stuck with unresolved guilt for our own
mistakes. We make mistakes, we harbor mistaken and imperfect
understandings which lead us to mistakes, or errors, or sins if you
will, we therefore have guilt whether we consciously acknowledge it or
not, and this needs to be resolved, spiritually, daily.
Unresolved blame also means holding ourselves
to a standard of perfectionism, the same level of
mistakelessness and confusion we demand of others.
Oooh, I just re-tranlated Emmet Fox's translation of the
Bible. I think it is helpful to retranslate spiritual things into
common language -- we do this mentally anyhow -- so long as we don't
re-translate the meaning out of it, or retranslate incompatible and
false meanings into it. Just as every intelligent person has the
means to mentally interpret any spiritual text --- and we all DO interpret words and meanings whether we
know it or not, we have to, especially words which are more conceptual
than concrete --- we have the ability to check out
other interpretations, and to ask God if these interpretations are
acceptable, to ask for guidance on understanding them and applying them
with intelligence and wisdom.
One-size-fits-all spiritual interpretations are clumsy, and
render us as robots rather than intelligent spirtual creations capable
of receiving wisdom.
Emmet Fox writes with some of the language and prejudices of the 1930's at times, BUT the main points are pretty solid. I don't take the part 100% literally about EVERY problem solveable by prayer alone, but almost, since our lives and our reactions and our reality is a reflection of our internal selves ... which prayer heals. We see our own reality, and we project much of our selves onto the world around us, and it responds to both who we are Being at a given moment, and who we are Being inside overall. I say "who we are Being" rather than "who we are" because the former highlights our fluidity and our ability to allow God to change us at root, while the latter implies a fixed permanent state. I found I had layers and more hidden layers of ugliness (hurt, fear) inside, and I reacted to that, and my "world" was a reflection of that. I'm not talking about "Sin" or "evil", except to the degree we consider fear and it's cousins to be actual evil, or as the AA Big Book says, "worse than stealing". I also found I had to simultaneously accept my
shortcomings in the present moment, since that is something I cannot
change Now, and yet refuse to
passively accept my shortcomings as a permanent
state. Sometimes, however, God merely showing me what I believe to
be my shortcomings in a different light, renders them actually very
OK. Short people can't be tall, tall people can't be
short,
obsessive people have a natural gift for obsession [think Albert
Einstein], while non-obsessive people have a natural gift of being
easygoing, which some call "irresponsible". Sometimes it's just
relative.
Fox is talking about Intelligent or Scientific Prayer, which would be prayer with an understanding of the underlaying spiritual principles. To him, prayers are special high precision tools for the spirit, like a lathe or a drill press, which produce specific spiritual outcomes. They are more than "sayings", they are tools in the sense that they produce internal and thus external results which may be unfathomable. But the internal results are more important and more substantial than the external manifestations of spiritual change. |
