Tag Archives: prayer

MY DISTURBING THOUGHTS ABOUT PRAYER

April 24, 2026 – 1:37 pm

MY DISTURBING THOUGHTS ABOUT PRAYER

  1. FAITH In Prayer

Even as my faith in God remains as strong as it has ever been, I am realizing that my faith in prayer to God is another matter.

I know that many prayers do not seem to be answered (or at least the answer is all too often “NO”.)  When this happens, we fall back upon the secure truth that God knows our needs (and the needs of others) much better than we do. 

And I believe that God is the God of Love, that He wills what is best for us.  I have faith in God’s love, even where that seems least likely.  God knows His business better than I do.   

And He knows our needs and wants before we bring them to Him in prayer.

So why do I pray?

You might as well ask why I breathe. If I stop breathing, I die. (That line is a slightly adapted borrowing from Victor Lazlo in the movie Casablanca.)  Prayer is a natural human response to any problem or need that we feel powerless to satisfy. 

Everybody prays.  After all, what does it mean when we say “I hope…that this medicine works for me.” Or “I wish that…..  The subjunctive mood is often used to express such prayers without an address: “May you live long and prosper,” or “May this house be safe from tigers” (google author Alexander King.)

But this type of prayer is not addressed to anyone; it is simply tossed out into the universe like a note “To Whom It May Concern…”, stuck in a bottle and dropped into the sea.

With faith in a loving God, we know who to address and even how to pray properly.  That is a large part of what I get from the Church.

But I am also aware of conflicting guidance about the prayer process.  On one hand, Jesus tells us that our prayers, even extreme ones like uprooting trees or mountains, will be answered IF our faith is strong enough. On the other hand, when He prays in Gethsemane, He asks for release from His destiny on the cross. But in His next breath He qualifies it, with “but nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”  And in His model of prayer, He tells us to pray “Thy will be done” just before “Give us this day our daily bread.” Beg and qualify.  Ask and prepare to not receive.

My conclusion(such as it is)?  Never resist the urge to pray, but always be prepared to accept an answer other than an obvious “Yes”. 

2. PRAYERS OF PRAISE

I have been taught that there are three types of prayer: thanking God; asking for God’s intercession; and praising God.  

I feel deeply and always and everywhere the need to thank God for the many blessings He has given me. 

And I certainly have a long list of things I ask Him to intercede for, leading with the healing of so many loved ones. Those suffering from physical or mental illness or persecution or other ills inflicted by other people.

But I have long felt ambivalent about the “praise” component.  Praising the God who created and rules the universe, well that has always struck me as odd: like telling Jascha Heifitz or Itzhak Perlman “You are a very good violinist.”   I may have been influenced by the Monty Python sketch in “The Meaning of Life” in which a priest makes a groveling, obsequious prayer beginning with “Oh Lord, Oooh, you are so big!  All of us down here are really impressed with you…”

So why do we make a big deal about praising God?  To please Him? Possibly.   Or to demonstrate our humility?  That sounds closer.  Then I realized: it is to build and maintain the foundation of true humility in us.   

The Psalms make this clear.  Amidst all these hymns of praise, we read:

“Know ye that the Lord He is God.  It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves.  We are His people and the sheep of his pasture.” (100:3)

“Be still, and know that I am God.”(46:10)

That is why we praise Him.  To remind ourselves that He is God and we are not.

(And that is why I gave up looking to Monty Python for religious instruction. Though they were early leaders about the insanity of “transgenderism”.)

By davidsmith4002 | Posted in God, prayer | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Sacred Second

April 17, 2018 – 1:00 pm

We measure things.  It is one of the things humans do. Mostly because we plan to use them.  

Measurements are of two kinds: natural/intuitive and artificial/synthetic.  Natural ones came first.  Feet based on an average foot (mine, I say without bragging, are exactly one foot long – including the shoe. This makes for a useful way to walk off distances.)  Cubits based on an average forearm of about a foot and a half.  An inch is about the length of a thumb knuckle.

The metric system, on the other hand, is artificial/synthetic, based on…something. (I don’t know what.)  Built on our numbering system, it is more easily used in science and math.

The only area where a natural/intuitive system still prevails in its traditional un-metricized form is our measurement of time.  Natural constants still govern here. A year is one revolution in earth’s orbit around the sun: one cycle of seasons.  A day is one rotation on the earth’s axis: one cycle of light and darkness.  In between a year and a day we have more artificial measures: months and weeks.  And below the day, we have sub-divisions of hour, minute, and second.

Our awareness of the passage of time is a difficulty for us. In late afternoon we ask “where has the day gone?”  Our clocks tell us, but we are still surprised. 

Years are even more so.  On our birthdays and New Year’s Day, we celebrate or mourn the elusive passing of another year; we ponder, for a day, the mysterious year ahead, before moving on into uncharted daily existence.

Even at the much smaller scale, it is hard to track time without mechanical assistance.  Try to concentrate on a single subject or thought for a full minute, without looking at a clock. For me, distractions invariably arise, especially the distraction of wondering how much of the minute has elapsed.  To some extent, this is the problem of reverse concentration: try not to think of an elephant. 

But the crux of the problem is the difficulty of measuring time with our mind alone.  The only way I can make myself aware of the passage of a minute is to count to 60. In other words, to count seconds.

Why are seconds so much easier for us to embrace than any larger measure of time?  Check your pulse. If you are healthy and resting, your heartbeat should be right around 60 beats per minute: a natural standard.

Tiny, fragile, elusive, the second is nonetheless the most tangible form in which we can consciously confront time. It cannot be an accident that it is also the measure of our life blood nourishing our very existence.  The last second-long heartbeat is the end of our earthly life. And long before our birth, the second-long beats of our hearts mark what we are and will become.

The passage of time is thus the passage of life.  Prisoners are said to count the days of their sentences by chalk marks on the cell wall.  If they didn’t do so, they might lose track of the passage of time and their sentences would become infinite.  

Every second is a gift from God.  This can be said of day, week, month and year, of course.  But they slip past us.   Such gifts deserve thanks.  It is appropriate to try to insert a prayer of thanksgiving into every second.  But is it possible?

I am trying.  I find that simply thinking “Thank you, Lord” can be done in about a second.  I can’t do it every second, of course.  But I can do it often.

And I can try to live my life in such a way that I feel grateful for every second.  Some days this is easier than others.  But I can try.

I can try.

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When I Consider thy Heavens: APOD and the Psalms

January 19, 2018 – 9:06 am

ngc1398_eso_3416I want to alert everyone to an amazing website that should be visited every day.  I turn to it each morning before or after my morning prayer (from the monthly magazine Magnificat, which I heartily endorse).

It is “Astronomy Picture of the Day“, a NASA production featuring astonishing photos of stars, galaxies, planets, nebulas, and other celestial phenomena.  Find it at apod.nasa.gov.  Bookmark it in your Favorites or wherever. It has photos from telescopes around the world and in orbit, from Hubble and other satellites, and from simple earthbound cameras.  Not only distant galaxies but beautiful auroras and eclipses, and everything in between.  There is an archive arrow-button on the left side at the bottom, so you can click through a nearly endless gallery of their past pictures.

I cannot imagine how APOD would fail to trigger a spiritual sense of awe at some level; at least a tingle.

Arp243_Hubble_3978

This is two galaxies colliding and merging, 250 million light years away from us. The top photo shows a galaxy 65 million light years away.  When the light from these galaxies began the trip to us, dinosaurs walked the earth!

 

Some time ago I was corresponding with a friend and confided that I was beginning to think about God.  His response was that he thought the universe was too big, too grand to include something as small and local as a deity, especially a man-centered one.  I didn’t know how to respond.

I thought of Psalm 8, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;  What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”

It cut no ice;  my friend thought the grandeur of the stars was wholly natural and self-explaining, and way too big for a tribal bronze-age god.

I wish I had thought to point out that the entire universe, unimaginably immense, was once so small that we could hold it in our hands; that the proto-Big Bang creation moment is completely inexplicable to science; that the universe is only comprehensible as part of an expansion process that stretches outward from the infinitesimal.

And I should have pointed out the mysterious human ability to appreciate the beauty of the skies; no evolutionary theory explains our sense of awe when we gaze at the night sky.

And I wish I had known about APOD back then.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.”

In saner times, Psalm 19:1 would be the motto of NASA.

 

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