Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 21, 2023 • 34 Comments
Jesus, The Source, Understanding Reality
When the twilight is gone, and no songbirds are singing.
When the twilight is gone, you come into my heart.
And here in my heart you will stay while I pray.
My prayer is to linger with you,
At the end of the day, in a dream that’s divine.
My prayer is a rapture in blue,
With the world far away, and your lips close to mine.
Tonight, while our hearts are aglow,
Oh, tell me the words that I’m longing to know!
My prayer, and the answer you give,
May they still be the same for as long as we live!
That you’ll always be there at the end of my prayer.
– Georges Boulanger (1837-1891) Jimmy Kennedy (1902-1984) “My Prayer” (1954)
I have never been very good at praying. The problem is that God feels internal to me, so formally praying to God feels almost like talking to myself. Or when I was younger, and God seemed to be both external and infinitely powerful, formally praying felt presumptuous, as if I had interrupted God’s extremely important day with my selfish trivialities. And then there is the problem of what to say to God. Because, here is the thing: God can read your mind. You don’t even have to form the words! God knows what you want, and what you need. And you, in particular, are God’s best-beloved child, so you don’t even have to say, “Dear God, please give to me …” your dream job, or your perfect spouse, or the home on which you have just made an offer, because God is already on it. And God loves you to pieces, so God is falling all over Godself right now to give you whatever will make you happiest! If you don’t get the job, or if your dating life is rocky or your offer on the house falls through, it will only be because your spirit guide feels that you needed that little setback in your life as part of your larger spiritual growth process. Or because there is something even better in the offing for you.
My comfort has been that other people seem to be having these same problems with prayer. Have you ever really listened to public praying? Even most clergymen, who should have some facility with prayer by now, will either read written prayers, or else they will stumble around, adding filler words and thinking as they speak, saying things like, “… and God, we surely do thank you so very much that we’ve got this nice day today to open up our new Civic Center…” while they are thinking fast, trying to make sure there is no one else they should be mentioning, and no remaining detail left to say. And of course, God doesn’t mind that at all.
My alternative, as I have said elsewhere, has long been to clean up my mental act, and then to live with the top of my head wide open and just to keep an open prayerline to God. Because since God can easily read your mind, you are always unavoidably in prayer mode, anyway.
The problem is, though, that if you never really pray, then you are taking God for granted. So as over time I have figured out more and more of what actually is going on, I have gotten into the habit of saying some little rote prayers. Like grace, for example. One day when my oldest was maybe five, she found a grace somewhere that we could say before dinner. Her choice was so good that even forty years later, my family still holds hands and says her grace before dinner every night. It goes like this: “Be present at our table, Lord. Be here and everywhere adored. These morsels bless, and grant that we will feast in Paradise with Thee.” The fact that people don’t eat in heaven is a mere technicality. And while we are talking about family prayers, I ought to mention our frame-verse. Perhaps a pop song is a tad unusual as a frame-verse when our topic is prayer, but I have always especially liked this one. Edward and I have lately celebrated our fifty-first wedding anniversary, and it occurs to me that in a Western world in which almost fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, if more couples had a little ritual of reciting this beautiful ditty together, perhaps that might help to keep their marriages strong. It can’t hurt.
Many people seem to have my same confusion about what the best way might be to talk to God. When people ask me about prayer – and they often do – I tell them that now I only ever recite the Lord’s Prayer. And I do it several times a day. I think of the Lord’s Prayer as ideal because it encapsulates in so few words everything that we need to ask of God. And since the Lord’s Prayer was given to us by God in the person of Jesus, for us to pray it to God in return makes of this prayer a sweet, divine circular sharing.
Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer at a place in the Gospel of Matthew where He is first beginning to build in His followers a genuine spiritual life. As I was repeatedly reading the Gospels as a teenager and a young adult, I was coming to see that perhaps there wasn’t a whole lot going on in most people’s minds before Jesus came. They seemed not to have, or really even to feel much need for a spiritual life or a personal relationship with God before they first began to listen to Jesus. So in the passage that precedes the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus first sets the scene for us by telling us that as we are beginning now to mature as spiritual beings, it is time for us to withdraw altogether from the presence of other people in order to better begin our spiritual relationship with God. And because Jesus is speaking to what amounts to spiritual children, notice that He couches this in terms of their wanting to have some tangible reward from their Father (i.e. their heavenly Daddy) for their better spiritual behavior:
6 “Take care not to practice your righteousness in the sight of people, to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.
2 “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, so that they will be praised by people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your charitable giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
5 “And when you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they will be seen by people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 But as for you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
7 “And when you are praying, do not use thoughtless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8 So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.
9 “Pray, then, in this way:
‘Our Father, who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen’” (MT 6 1-13).
And then it is appropriate to add your own personal prayer to God, if you like. Whenever I pray individually, I do it in gratitude affirmations, so ever since I gave the rest of my life to God fifteen years ago, I have added to the end of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it.”
Now let’s consider the simple perfection of the Lord’s Prayer, which was given two thousand years ago to spiritual children, but it still works as beautifully for you and me today:
‘Our Father, who is in heaven,
The Hebrew people of Jesus’s day had long been taught to fear an often angry and vengeful Jehovah God, whom they imagined to be a very much oversized and powerful human-like Being. Fear is the literal opposite of love, so before Jesus could teach His followers anything at all, He had first to reset their whole image of God into loving Spirit. In the end, of course, we got three God-versions: Father, Holy Spirit, and Jesus Himself. But at this early stage, it was helpful for Jesus to transform their notion of Jehovah into something more like a loving Daddy-figure.
Hallowed be Your name.
God’s very name is holy. Jesus taught that all other sins are forgivable, but to take God’s name in vain is an eternal crime.
10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
Here is Jesus’s core teaching, which is the very essence of the reason why He was born on earth. As each of us learns to ever more perfectly love and forgive, and thereby raises his or her own consciousness vibration until we can graduate even beyond our need to be reborn again on earth, we will elevate the spiritual vibration of this entire planet sufficiently toward love to eventually bring the kingdom of God on earth. As above, so below. Jesus makes this longed-for happy result the first thing that we pray for, whenever we pray.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
After we have first asked God to help us to make the earth a beautiful mimic of our love-filled heavenly home, we next ask God to give us what we will need to sustain our material bodies for this one day. But only for this one day! Not also for tomorrow. And certainly not also for next week. Jesus recognizes how dangerous an excess of wealth can be in distracting us from addressing what is really important in our brief earthly lives. And then He even will go on immediately after He recites this whole prayer for us to talk about why it is so extremely important that we not accumulate more in the way of worldly goods than what we will need for this one day. Jesus clearly intends His warning about the dangers of accumulating wealth to be a core part of His gift of this beautiful prayer, so you and I will talk about this problem and Jesus’s warning in more detail next week.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Jesus is mindful of the life review that we all will face when we first go home, during which we will experience how we made everyone else feel during our brief life just ended. He knows how important it is that we keep our focus on learning how to forgive everyone in preparation for that time when we will be asked to forgive ourselves, which is why He pairs our asking for God’s forgiveness with our promising God that we also are learning to ever better forgive others. We should note here that the word “debts” is often translated instead as “trespasses,” and our forgiveness is then of “those who trespass against us.” The Hebrew people of His day were big on forgiving both debts and trespasses. Every fiftieth year was for them a year of Jubilee, when debts and all else would be forgiven, the land would lie fallow for a year, and slaves would be set free.
13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Jesus to pair a request that God protect us from both temptations and also all evils, as if those two requests might be related, may not make sense to you and me at first, but it does make sense to Him. And it also makes sense to us as well, really, after we have given it some thought. The reason it makes sense is that material temptations, and most particularly temptations of the flesh, such as what Catholics call the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, are at the root of every evil. If we can avoid them all, then we are already halfway toward making a great spiritual success of this lifetime. But on the other hand, to allow even one of the seven deadly sins to tempt us risks setting us on a downward spiral into a weakness and evil so intense that it might before long have us enmired in even more, or even in all seven of the deadly sins at once, so evil will then become our whole way of life. And worst of all, if we allow even one of these deadly sins to claim us, then our making much further spiritual progress in this lifetime is likely to become impossible.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen’”
The earliest version of the Lord’s prayer may not have included this last line. But even if it is a later addition, it is very old, and I am sure that Jesus considers it to be a welcome addition!
For much of my life I have wondered why there is no explicit “thank you” for God’s many gifts to us included in the Lord’s Prayer. I have never had the nerve to ask Jesus that question. But as I was writing this post, I did ask Thomas what he thought. He really does consider me to be such a dunce. And with good reason! He said patiently from behind my left shoulder, “Jesus came to us as God on earth, and Jesus taught us to pray that prayer. For God to be asking for our thanks and praise would make God seem to be rather petty, don’t you think?” And then of course I slapped my forehead. Why Thomas still puts up with me is beyond my ability to fathom.
Our discussion of the Lord’s Prayer will continue next week with what may be for us affluent Westerners its most difficult lines for us to swallow hard and sincerely pray. They are that for me, at least. Now that I fully understand what Jesus actually means by them….
Hi Roberta!
What a beautiful explanation of the Lord’s prayer! Talking about the accumulation of worldly materials, how do we know what is too much? Sometimes I feel guilty for enjoying a tv show or wanting to get something for my cats. What draws the line? Also, how do you draw the line with the seven mortal sins as I’ve read in one of your blog posts that there is some truth in these as they lead to despair. I have been raised Catholic so I guess that’s why it’s hard for me to draw the line. Is it really bad for me to have sex with my boyfriend? Or is me deciding to lay down for the day bad too as that’s “sloth”, please help! A lot of what you say resonates a lot with me as growing up Catholic, I always have been drawn to Jesus Christ. I have also left a comment on your blog post about reincarnation. I really appreciate all the time and help you’re putting into this, you’re helping many people! Lastly, I ask that you pray for me to be healed from my anxiety and intrusive thoughts, I just want to enjoy life!
My dear Monica, please stop being afraid! Stop worrying about anything whatsoever. Throw every religious thought away, and simply do what God invites you to do:
“BE STILL, AND KNOW THAT I AM GOD.”
That is from Psalms 46:10, and it was first sung three thousand years ago, when Jerusalem was under siege by foreign armies. Before I was as certain as I am now of God’s constant love and care, whenever I felt rather as you are feeling, I would put all such thoughts aside and simply sit with those words….
Thank you so much Roberta, this verse is very nice to read!
Just curious, is reincarnation optional? Also, how do you find yourself not getting overwhelmed? I have recently had a sort of awakening but instead of reaching the “bliss” part I am stuck in a state of anxiety that I have to suddenly buy all these books and implement so many practices (such as chakra healing, womb healing, healing generational trauma, etc) in order to spiritually develop as I really would not want to come back to Earth. This is interfering with my life. I find that I cannot even enjoy time with my family and friends as my brain will tell me that I am wasting my time and should be meditating or something. I find that I cannot enjoy for example, going to the pumpkin patch because my brain is telling me everyone will die anyways and it’ll all be gone and I should be focused on my spiritual growth. I also am starting to feel extremely guilty for eating meat sometimes (I am still at home so my parents prepare the food) or not a vegan diet as I have heard many gurus say this is best because of animals and so I’ve been avoiding but sometimes it’s the only option and I do not want to get in trouble. I am also suffering from intrusive thoughts and now that I know that God reads my mind, Im terrified that He is disappointed and I am inhibiting my spiritual growth. Also, how can we talk to Jesus? I’ve been calling out to Him but I’ve gotten no response and it only pushes me more into despair and makes me feel more rejected and curious to know if maybe my spiritual path is not with Him although that would make me sad. Please help! Also, with my “awakening” I understand that I need to love but it’s hard to accept this in a way even though I really want to. For example, I see people and smile and offer to do favors but it seems superficial because deep down I know that although I seem happy, I am suffering inside with all of my thoughts and going to go back to crying in my room at night because I feel at loss with no answers. I have read that you need to love yourself first before being able to give love and I do think I love myself but I have never felt this warm Love feeling that takes over the body that so many enlightened people describe. I have cried out to the sky, asked my spirit guides for a sign, asked Jesus, and still nothing and it makes me feel so depressed and that maybe I am truly alone. I dont know if maybe it’s because I have limiting subconscious beliefs but at this point I have begged for mercy and for these beliefs to be ignored if they are inhibiting but still nothing. I have even had intense suicidal thoughts and I feel so terrible about this because I know that I have so much to be grateful for but my mind tortures me with “what’s the point” of anything and I am praying to find my purpose but still nothing. I think I am going through “dark night of the soul,” if you have heard about this but the concept is very dark and I dont wish this to be the case. I have so much love for my family, friends, and boyfriend and want to be present but my mind just tells me “This is an illusion, not real. Don’t get attached.” and that mindset makes me feel so detached like I cannot even be 100% me. Going to church can help but the relief is only temporary, I have even questioned maybe just going to the monastery so I can be at ease but my mom has said that that is me trying to escape my reality and I think that’s true. I have questioned even becoming a Buddhist nun so that I can be away from my family and boyfriend just so that I dont have to be anxious about any harm happening to them or suffer when my parents pass, in a way to force some peaceful reality because I am struggling to love my life how it is without being anxious if I am doing something wrong. I will appreciate any help or recommendations, thank you so much for reading all of this, I know it’s a lot!
Hi Monica,
Personally, I have to sometimes turn off my thoughts as they can become overwhelming.
That is why I like doing physical stuff like mowing the lawn or woodworking. Anything that I can do physically that doesn’t require much thought. I just throw in some earphones and move. I love it.
I also like to lay in bed and just listen to the world around me and try not to think. I try and connect with consciousness/spirit. Not successfully, mind you. I still try. I guess you could call it meditation. I don’t really know much about meditation.
Helping people in my neighborhood brings me a lot of joy. It feels simply awesome to work with someone towards a common goal. I’ve had people worry about others taking advantage of me. I don’t see how they can when it brings me so much enjoyment. I try to explain, but they look at me like they don’t understand. haha
It feels like working together brings out that connection we all share with each other. I try to be in the moment and only think about what we are trying to accomplish. The excitement we all have when finishing the goal is fantastic.
Just the other day I had a really bad day. I was just tired of life and struggling with some things that never seem to work out. No matter how hard I work at it.
As always, Roberta’s and Thomas’ post helped bring insight into what I am doing wrong and how I can fix it.
In my instance, I need to work on having more faith in God. I have been working on something for what feels like forever. I put all I have into it and it seems like it is never enough. Very frustrating! So I need to strengthen my faith. Something I have been working on anyway. I am so concentrated on specific things I am missing out on how God has been taking care of me throughout my life.
We are all one big family, so enjoy your time with others. I find the connections with each other to be the best thing to ever come from this place. Enjoy the experiences you share with others while visiting the pumpkin patch. Or the time with your family and friends. It helps make life easier and we get to take all of those experiences with us when we leave.
This is school for us. We are expected to make mistakes. I’ve made plenty. I just accept that to learn I will make mistakes and others around me will make mistakes. I mainly pray that everyone will be able to forgive when it is time for us to go home. In the end, we all love each other even if we don’t remember it while in our human forms.
Oh my dear beloved Thomas, how sweetly beautiful this is! Thank you for the way that you so often reach out and counsel and help people here, reaching and finding people where they are and taking them by the hand. You have so much love to give! 🙂
Thank you so much Thomas, it’s nice to be reminded that I am not alone!
My dear Monica, reincarnation is optional, just as while you are on earth, eating is optional. But of course, as I think that you can see, the Catch-22 is that until you have raised your personal consciousness vibration sufficiently not to need earth-based stressors any longer, you are going to want to keep coming back to earth! However, the good news is that you don’t need ANY of those parenthetical kinds of healings!! Growing past the need to keep reincarnating on earth is for all of us a simple matter of raising our personal consciousness vibrations away from the low and fear-based vibrations and toward the higher, love-based vibrations. It’s all so easy-peasy. To actually do this, no religion can be of any help at all, since every religion – including Christianity as it is now practiced – is fundamentally fear-based. But the teachings of Jesus are entirely love-based, and they are quite literally DESIGNED to raise your personal consciousness vibration very rapidly. In fact, the teachings of Jesus are the easiest and the most efficient method ever devised to enable you to achieve the end of your need ever to reincarnate in THIS generation! My book, The Fun of Growing Forever, shows you how to use them for that purpose.
Thank you, I will be buying this book soon!!!
In one tradition, Mahamudra practice, the awareness of futility you express is the very first “foundation of mindfulness” in a path to enlightenment, or being in a state of grace. In this tradition it is the start point for realizing that ONLY a spiritual path can ever satisfy, explain or justify suffering, similar to the Catholic exhortation ‘memento mori’, remember death. So you need not despair, but perhaps see this as the impetus to fully explore your understanding of and relationship with Jesus’ teachings, and maybe even with Him.
Thank you! I have heard this a lot that this stage is the beginning, I just don’t know how to get past it! Hopefully with time, thank you for the reply
My dear Monica, in the end, what makes the difference is raising our personal spiritual vibration. And I have concluded at length that is the only thing which really makes the difference. I am looking now into perhaps beginning a course in which we might teach each person how to actually raise his or her own vibration. I don’t see how else we really can do it!
Oh wow a course on that would be awesome!! Hopefully it will happen, thank you so much for all that you do Roberta
Monoca, In my life, I have felt like you in the past. A big help for me was reading Roberta’s books. They are simple to read and not long. Often when I am down, I have gone back to them. Best to you. Dave
Dear David, thank you, my dear one! If I have been able to do that for you, then you really make me very happy!
Dear Roberta,
Oh,today’s post is such a welcome “medicine” for me today! Thank you so much! I have not interacted in last three weeks, due to inner struggle which started with my sister issuing a very dogmatic, Catholic doctrinal, fearful email to all of family. I won’t go into it. The very next day, I see your post, “Trust” and it helped to calm me a bit, but I didn’t want to share the pain and anger I felt from the email and the resultant relief from your post with everyone. Two days ago, I was pondering “prayer” because the echo of her email to “pray the rosary” for the salvation of the world was still in my mind. I found myself asking God why a prayer to Mary and not Jesus “saves the world”, and also why all the “Marian” apparitions are fire and brimstone. In short order, as I put on Youtube, two videos were in the lineup, both about “Marian apparitions” and they had brief and perfectly thought out answers that put me at ease. Today, I saw your post title and I sighed with gratitude. I am one of those, like you, who found rote prayer very distracting. But, I was disciplined to be a good obedient Catholic, so yeah…
But as teachers such as you share in helping pull back the layers of ignorance, I began to be brave enough to really look and search my heart about the words I was saying. I just cannot find the old “comfort” I used to think I felt in reciting the rosary anymore. My son has never appreciated what he calls “creeds” in any prayer and shared that idea with me years ago. I didn’t get it then, but I do now.
I am grateful to you and Thomas and Jesus for saying “debts” instead of “sins”. It feels so right in my heart. Ironically, yesterday, or perhaps the day before, I almost felt a desperation about “prayer”. I silently reached out to Father and to Jesus begging for help, for I suddenly had the thought that praying would be helpful in my relationship with Father. The Lord’s prayer popped into my head! And here you are….walking us through it. Thank you so much! More than you know!
Oh my sweet beautiful Fran, when Jesus Himself tells us not to pray rote repetitive prayers, then I think that means it’s certainly time for us to stop praying the rosary! I loved Christianity. I had trouble myself giving it up, but Thomas kept reminding me that it wasn’t Jesus’s religion. It was Constantine’s. Jesus came to bring us not a religion at all, but just a simple and gentle and completely love-based way of life. I’m so glad to be able to help you, darling!
Today’s post was spiritual food for my soul! Thank you so much, Roberta. I enjoy reading about the Lord’s Prayer and how we can apply it to our daily life. I think God and Jesus long for heartfelt prayer and conversations with us. I, like you, also feel that God is always with me, so why pray a mindless recitation when one can have a true conversation? Gratitude is very important and I do try to express it not for just this lifetime but for any past and future lifetimes I might live. I also ask for forgiveness for mistakes I have made (MANY) in this lifetime and the past and future and I forgive anyone and anything, known or even unknown by them or me that was done to me in all my possible lifetimes.
I have an Aunt that that is now in hospice care in Florida and I pray that she will have some comfort as she goes through the process of dying. She is in much pain at times and is medicated so she can rest. She has stage 4 lung cancer and has fought a great fight for the past three and a half years.
Oh my dear Jennifer, I’m sorry for your Aunt! But so glad for her that she is now going home. Send her joy, my darling. Now the excitement begins!
1st to Roberta, thank so much for taking up “my prayer!”
It’s very early and I have only drunk half of my 1st cup of coffee so my clarity has not yet arrived
but Monica, I. hear your pain and must share with
you:
I have been where you are and visit there often even today
I wrote on an index card awhile back :
“I want being here to be fun.”
It’s standing up on my bookcase in full view.
About meditation and all those fears of not doing
it right:
Maharishi ‘s TM came through my town when I was in college. I had to begin. ( I stopped when menopause hit and was too anxious to do it.)
One phrase I remember Maharishi said is:
“It’s not you , it’s your stress.”
Those words were and are a gift to me.
I hope they relieve some self-blame for you.
Love, Erica
Oh yes, my dear Erica, we all want being here to be fun. But above all, we want being here to be a time when we can plumb the depths of learning and growing and coming to an ever deeper understanding of why we are here, who and what we truly are, so we can come to master our lives and thereby we can perhaps learn to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime!
Hi Roberta, thank you for today’s message.
I asked this question to educate people even a catholic priest and I still want to know the answer.
I know who the Father is and the Son, but I want to know what or who is the Holly Spirit.
Thank you!!
Chris B.
Dear Chris, this answer may surprise you, but the Holy Spirit simply is God-among-us. Jesus told His followers that God is Spirit, and we must worship God in spirit and in truth. Well, rather oddly, people then began to think of Spirit as something different from God in heaven, just as Jesus is God and yet different from God in heaven. But in truth, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit is all God. A distinction, perhaps, but no real difference.
Dearest Roberta,
Many years ago when I subscribed to the now defunct “Audio” magazine, I read a little explanation of the Holy Spirit. It taught that God was like a power amplifier, Jesus was like the speakers, and together they created sound that represented the Holy Spirit.
I’m sure that I have a lot of this wrong, but the point that the Holy Spirit was the joint product of God and Jesus may have gotten across to more than just one Audio fan –me.
Yours,
Cookie
That’s cute, my dear Cookie! I am not sure that it really is right, however, since the Holy Spirit is in fact the truest version of God made manifest that we have.
Thank you for the phrase “to live with the top of my head wide open”. I find that very helpful as a way to visualize what it is I do on a daily basis, and, as a result, find that formal prayer may or may not additionally be part of my daily practice.
Hello my dear! Yes, I think that many of us live this way, and perhaps unavoidably. Matter can’t be allowed to come between us and God, so we simply imagine the matter to be gone.
Hi Roberta,
Wow, what a GREAT, GREAT, GREAT, post! I am going to cut and paste your meaning of the Lord’s Prayer in Word to print out and re read every night. This will help me memorize the meaning. As embarrassed as I am to admit this, I never understood what the Lord’s Prayer was about.
For a while I stopped reciting it because I would say it fast with no meaning or sometimes, I would recite just before bedtime and as I was lying in bed I would doze off.
Recently, I have begun to recite it SLOW and put feelings into it. I recite it just before my Moring meditation and night meditations. After I recite it, I give thanks to God for all my blessing. I realized no matter what was going on in my life, good times and bad times, I needed to give gratitude to God, EVERYDAY!
I very much enjoy reading everyone’s comments on the blog…I read Monica’s post reply and if there is one thing, I have learned I gave up all the New Age stuff. Such as chakra healing, healing Anstey trauma, etc.
I found out that New Age for me was another TRAP of magical thinking and FEAR based just like any other religion.
Since, I have followed your blogs, and thanks to You, Thomas, and Jesus, I can honestly say that I have found Jesus’s message to be TRUTH in making the highest spiritual growth.
I am not perfect like Jesus, but I am inspired to truly LEARN to LOVE and FORGIVE more perfectly. It’s not always easy, but, yet his message was so simple.
Oh my sweet friend Litsa, I think that a lot of us have rushed through saying the Lord’s Prayer at various points in our lives! But in doing so, of course, we have missed so much of the richness of it. And of course, God always does understand!
Roberta, thanks for your comment about the Holy Spirit being God among us. It matches my thinking after many years of contemplation on the subject. It seems the notion of a Trinity originated with Jesus but that it could pertain to any of us as well. Would you agree the idea of three persons in God is a misguided and that there is really nothing that mysterious about the traditional concept of a Trinity? It seems that religions often create mysteries to attract and retain believers.
Actually, my dear Thomas, I think that Jesus didn’t originate the idea of the Trinity, bur rather He simply wanted us to understand that God is non-material and deeply loving Fatherly Spirit. Then much later the clergy – and Paul – came up with the Trinity idea, and made Jesus the third person of the Trinity. I have wondered just how Jesus wanted to be remembered, and frankly I think He would be astounded by His present position. I don’t think that is what He ever intended. But since for God to have Him as an intermediary, as He now is, clearly is useful to God, clearly He doesn’t mind it.
Dearest Roberta,
Love this post and the opening up of the Lord’s Prayer. Again, just like Our Jesus, it is profoundly deep and yet simple. He makes it short and to the point to meet people where they are at. To help us grow, Jesus designed this prayer out of His love;
I will always remember that.
Gone is the emphasis placed on complicated Jewish ritual observances. Gone is fear and trembling. Jesus gives us a God we can talk to intimately and approach closely and lovingly.
And Judaism was and is full of prayers of gratitude for every little thing. Jesus didn’t need to emphasize this. However I did not consider what Thomas said to you – that for God to ask for thanks for every little thing would sound rather petty. That certainly makes sense. Especially for a God one can approach in a deeply personal way. I had not considered this point before.
Also, I do see God as Spirit; both father and mother and beyond both. It feels as if you can breathe Spirit in and out like air. Or swim like a fish in a sea made of Spirit.
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Ah yes, my dear beloved Efrem, Jesus certainly wants our praying to God to be simple! And I had never considered either that perhaps for God to be asking for us to be grateful to God might be a bit immodest. Thomas is always and forever surprising me!
This is a beautifully honest exploration of the challenges of prayer! You articulate the internal conflict many experience – feeling God’s presence internally while also acknowledging an external, powerful entity. The humor in questioning what to say to an omniscient being is relatable. Even the slightly sarcastic tone regarding assumed favoritism and preordained plans is thoughtful. Overall, this is a thought-provoking piece that will resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the concept of prayer.