petitioninggod.com Blog

I hope no one minds when I use an email as a blog post, but when I write something while inspired, I want to share it. The following message was sent in response to someone who grew up in a fundamentalist church in Atlanta and who had written me about her inability to “feel God” the way she wishes she could because she needs help with her relationships and her worries about the health of her aunt. She had said she had attended a liberal church once with her friend but had not felt anything so had not returned, and had decided that she just was not able to experience God. She said she was more apt to relate to Native American belief systems, since she can sometimes feel “the Great Spirit” in nature. Here was my reply:

>>>I’m not surprised that nothing happened when you went to church, because God not found in church, even liberal churches! And I totally get why you don’t go; none of my close friends do, and I didn’t myself from age 24 to 44. And even presently, although I’m amazed at how much I enjoy it, church is not essential to my religion/spirituality! I had suggested your going with your friend because you had said you’d do anything in your power to make the relationship work.

The “great spirit” you feel in nature IS one and the same “God”—the God of Love & creativity! People who get Jesus right (i.e., _not_ your mother’s Southern Baptists, whom you said you couldn’t stand!) understand that his message was that simple: God is Love and God loves us! And all we have to do is accept our acceptance!

You might find it interesting that most progressive Christians do not think Christianity is the only valid religion. The Native American stuff is fine. Whatever works to help a person make sense of life.

My point in all of this is that you are more of a believer than you think—especially when you consider your compassionate nature and respect for all other creatures. And you don’t have to “pray” at all, that’s your business entirely! But when you’ve asked for advice with all these problems, including your concerns about aging & death, I’ve responded in religious terms because i think that’s the only way for people in what Jung called “the second half of life” to find genuine peace and happiness.

You seem to be on the verge of some kind of spiritual transformation, yet you also seem pretty hostile toward the whole idea of religion, especially organized religion. Maybe God is trying to lead you to see that you can become closer to him/her/it without doing it through organized religion. Meditation & yoga are super, especially if practitioners view them as ways to get in touch with the God within themselves, and to be at peace with the universe. What you need to do is simply start trying to get truly into sync with this huge power that is way bigger than you and way more effective than you. It’s there, it’s good, and it’s on your side! Since we, left to our own devices, are alone and powerless against pretty much everything, it’s to our great advantage to learn to let go of our attempts to control things and to relax into the flow of the universe. I think high achievers like you often have more trouble doing this because they’re not used to admitting their powerlessness. But once you experience enough of that powerlessness—whether in your work or your relationships or your health or the health of your loved ones—you may finally get to a point where you’re ready to admit it and to let go like Buddha did, and accept the love & assistance of the God of Love, however you understand him or her to be.

As far as your failure to “feel” God’s presence, I admire your honesty about it, and all I can say is that nobody feels it much of the time, especially not if they don’t do things to make it likely they’ll feel it. But from the brief glimpses and glimmers of joy that do seem to be present in everyone’s life, we can reason that that joy is evidence of a good Creator, and that we will someday know it in adundance. I think music is a main avenue for this, and it does not have to be church music, for God’s sake! God made all music, and if you’ve ever felt deep joy from listening to or singing yourself (perhaps especially with others), then maybe you can learn to count that as “feeling God.” Very few people feel God in church, but many make the mistake of looking for him there. That’s not where he is; he is within you and within others and within your relationships with others. And also, of course, within nature.

Re your friend’s church attendance, it sounds to me as though you’re jealous of it, and I would be too if I were in your position. But that probably adds to your hostility toward religion in general. And since it’s all bound up with the whole idea of God, then as long as you feel that hostility toward her going to church, then it’s keeping you from finding your own peace & happiness. I watched the movie “The Bucket List” last night, and it was said that Jack Nicholson’s crusty character died peacefully because he had opened his heart. It’s that simple; you asked me for advice and I tried to give the best advice I knew of, which was that you need to learn to let go of everything you’re prone to cling to and to open your heart to the reality of the universe. Many people never do this—that’s why it’s called The Road Less Traveled—but you asked for advice and I gave it!<<<

God’s peace to all who read this!

Sara

Jesus’s strongest passage about the power of petitonary prayer is in Mark 11, where he talks about the faith that can move a mountain (v. 23). After that image comes one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible, where Jesus says, “All things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they shall be granted you (11:24). (Neat!) In the next verse, Jesus offers one, and only one, bit of advice for getting right with God so he will indeed grant these petitions of ours: “And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your transgressions.”

Interestingly enough, this is precisely what I’ve discovered in my years of trying to improve my ability to get prayers answered. The main thing I always have to do is to first rid my mind of “anything against anyone”—any negative feelings whatsoever, from anger at someone in public who somehow got in my way to annoyance at people who happen to annoy me to irritation with friends and relatives whose attitudes happen to irritate me. There’s a passage somewhere in the Episcopal liturgy (& probably in many other liturgies as well) that says, “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” and this seems to be what it’s getting at.

Once we do this forgiving, this turning over of our negative feelings toward others to God and asking him to take them away, we find that our “hotline to heaven” suddenly works. We can actually ask for things that are in line with Love and God will give them to us. That’s because by submitting our angry or irritated wills to God’s will, we prepare ourselves to collaborate with the God of Love!