PRAYER

The season is Lent and we have been discussing prayer.

My goodness, are there ever a lot of opinions as to the efficacy of prayer.

And a lot of opinions as to how it works.

And on if it works.

And on how to do it.

Reading the literature and discussing with friends does not really lead to any final conclusions.

As the song lyric says,

You’ve got to walk that lonesome highway,
You’ve got to walk it by yourself.

Don’t ask the name of the song.

And the ‘by yourself’, I suggest, does not mean God is not with you. It means that you and God walk the highway, the two of you, together, on your own together terms. Family and friends and neighbors don’t make our decisions for us. Or they shouldn’t.

Some of the issues/problems I have identified are:

The problem of evil/apparent injustice
The problem of suffering
The problem of finite trying to understand infinite
The problem of thinking we can talk God into anything
The importance of understanding the way prayer does really work, for I suggest it really does
The problem of appreciating/understanding the results we get from prayer
The problem of knowing the best way to pray, what to pray for


Regarding the problems of evil, injustice, and suffering, an interesting book on the subject is Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions.

To quote, paraphrase him:

If God is all, and in all…
A great problem is the corollary that attends God’s being all in all, which is that there is no evil.

Two other items which may be relevant are found in

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/evil

On a deeper level, in the view of the esoteric understanding of the Torah, evil and good are subjective perceptions of a single continuum (i.e. soul). That is, to the rectified mind which has transcended the dualities of perception, all phenomena are completely good (as is God). To the unrectified mind, the challenge is to find the good; once found, seeming evil turns out to be apparent good.

Or,

Some cultures or philosophies believe that evil can arise without meaning or reason (in neo-Platonic philosophy this is called absurd evil). Christianity in general does not adhere to this belief, but the prophet Isaiah implied that God is ultimately responsible for everything including evil (Isa.45:7 "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.")

Lots to think about.

As the well digger said as he started to dig, these are deep problems.