Untitled On Prayer - Rilegato

Burnham, Sophy

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670894648 ISBN 13: 9780670894642

Casa editrice: Viking, 2002

Riassunto

The author of the best-selling A Book of Angels interweaves her personal experiences with true-life stories to reveal the meaning of prayer in our lives, examine its practice, and show the benefits of prayer to physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual health. 22,500 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Sophy Burnham, an award-winning author best known for her classic bestselling work, A Book of Angels, is currently completing a two-year course in spiritual direction at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. A prolific speaker and writer on angels, faith, and the spiritual path, her work has been translated into twenty languages.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Beginnings

I have a friend, Charlie, who was sent on assignment to the island of Bikini. The island is about 2500 miles southwest of Hawaii, and standing there you'd think there is absolutely nothing around it whatsoever, except eternal and unending ocean swells. The island is deserted. Charlie found himself walking on the glistening white sands of an empty and achingly beautiful beach, the sea unfurling itself ceaselessly at his feet. As he walked along, he saw two seashells, each the perfect mirror image of the other, sister shells, lying side by side on the sand. He gave them a nod of passing interest and walked on. A little later he saw two other seashells lying side by side, this pair different from the first but again each one the mirror of the other. He went on and saw a third set of twins, and then a fourth, and by now he was feeling uneasy with this mysterious duplication, and wishing for some signs of untidy civilization when he spotted...two Coke bottles lying side by side on the empty, glittering white beach.

Charlie is a spiritual man. He decided that the pairs came as a sign that we are not supposed to live alone. We are supposed to have a partner in our lives. So he got married.

Some years have passed, and now he believes that the message of the seashells was not about marriage. He thinks it meant...that we are not alone. There is something out there watching us, watching over us. We link up with it through prayer.

All over the world people are praying-billions of people praying. They walk down the street praying silently, or they kneel in churches, bow in mosques and temples, bathe themselves in sacred rivers. They make prostrations, walk on pilgrimages, circumambulate their holy sites. They ring bells, light candles, turn prayer wheels, chant songs, sing mantras, fly flags, float prayers down rivers on lotus blossoms or drop their folded written prayers into a God Box or push them into the cracks of a sacred wall. They burn incense sticks that send their prayers up with the smoke (prayers in almost every culture go "up").

If you were born without knowing anything at all about prayer, do you think that you would pray? I say yes. I think it's integral to the human heart; we cannot help ourselves. We think. We pray.

According to one study by the Princeton Religious Research Center, nine out of ten Americans pray.

Ninety-five percent of Americans believe that their prayers are answered, according to a Life magazine Gallup Poll.

A 1996 Time/CNN poll of 1,004 Americans found that 82 percent believed in the healing power of prayer and 64 percent thought doctors should pray with those patients who request it-and some do!

"To exclude God from psychiatric consultation," Dr. Arthur Kornhaber of Lake Placid, New York, told Newsweek, "is a form of malpractice."

Indeed, so many studies indicate that people deprived of spiritual meaning live shorter, more unhealthy lives than those who follow some religious path-any path-that you'd think the health insurance companies would ask applicants about their spiritual practices as well as about their histories of smoking, drinking, and disease.

Dozens of hospitals are studying the effects of prayer on epilepsy, leukemia, strokes, cancer, headaches, heart disease, substance abuse, and a host of other ailments. The National Institutes of Health are funding no fewer than ten studies on prayer. Meanwhile, hundreds (perhaps thousands) of studies have been performed regarding the effect of prayer on everything from bacteria and yeast to shrimp, mice, seeds, and red blood cells.

They show that prayer provides statistically significant results.

Nonetheless, we have an ambivalent relationship to prayer.

Both the Senate and House of Representatives, as well as the Supreme Court, open their sessions with prayer. Yet allowing children to engage in prayer in the public schools is controversial (strange inconsistency)-and this despite one British study that demonstrates that schoolchildren who prayed did better on tests and in school overall than those who did not!

You would think it sheer hubris, therefore, for me to tackle the subject of prayer, when there is already so much written on the subject. Even to speak of it as a "path" is both true and, paradoxically, a misnomer, because in a certain sense there is no path! A path implies a well-marked starting point, a journey that passes through various landscapes, with maps and landmarks-this apple tree, that stone wall, this cliff or cleft of rock-and always with the tracks of those who've gone before bending down the grass. A path implies a finish line, the attainment of which brings a thrill of triumphant satisfaction. You have arrived!

But in the case of prayer there is no fixed starting point, no apple tree, no cliff, and not even the same common end point. Each person finds his or her own way. You set off wherever you are, in your own authenticity, and usually (certainly in the beginning) that means with suffering, confusion, tears, fear, doubt. You pray, you stop, you go about your daily life, then remember once again to pray....Sometimes you have one experience while praying, the next time another, and although you may be treading in the footsteps of others, there is no beaten grass to indicate it. Is any activity less understood than prayer?

I pray all the time. Yet still I question it. What is prayer, and why do we do it? Is praying fixed into our DNA? Are prayers answered-and what of those petitions that are not? Are there good and better ways to pray? Or places or rituals or times? And to what are we praying, anyway? Or to whom? What sort of god do we address?

I pray, and yet I find myself, at times and against my will, a skeptic-dismayed and amused that my mind can hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and swing easily between the poles of faith and doubt. Then I remember John Donne's saying that "to come to a doubt and to a debatement of any religious duty is a Voice of God in our conscience. Would you know the Truth? Doubt, and then you will inquire."

Or I think of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult I put an end to childish ways...."

In recent years I have taken courses at Wesley Theological Seminary. I have studied at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation to become a one-on-one spiritual director or guide. Therefore, I've been exposed to considerable discussion about prayer. I don't remember anyone talking about prayer when I was a child, while almost everyone seems to do so now.

I write this book for several reasons: first for others, because several people have recently asked me to teach them about prayer, and secondly for myself, in order to put down and somehow make sense of what I've learned so far. I write for all those who wonder about prayer, and how and why we do it, and whether we are praying to an outside deity or to our own thoughts, and why those rudimentary prayers of petition would be answered anyway, and what is best to pray for. I write for those who, like myself, have wondered what we are doing in our lives, what it's all about. I write for those who are afraid of what happens when we die.

Oh, there are lots of questions! If anyone can learn from these reflections, or take comfort when he is suffering, or be reminded in troubled moments that she is not alone, then this book will be counted a success. I write for those who, like me, feel themselves always a beginner in the practice, always starting over, always learning the same lessons again and again, always struggling to make connection more firmly to the divine.

These stories are offered shyly, recognizing how little we understand of the Great Mystery, but they are offered in love, in joy, in hope that they will give encouragement to others who may have some of the same doubts and questions that have consumed me in my life. I wish the very rhythms of the sentences themselves, the music of the words, will soothe a hurt, caress a soul, and feed an unnamed need. But I think for that I'd have to be someone like the 19th-century Indian poet Hafiz, who wrote some 693 songs of joy to God and who described a poet as "someone who can pour light into a spoon, then raise it to nourish your beautiful, parched, holy mouth."

In the book that follows, at the end of each chapter is a prayer from one of the major traditions. Read these prayers. Let their words sink into your soul, and remember that au fond the prayers of each religion are the same. Why would that be? I think it is because all of us humans are the same, no matter our culture or our religious differences. We all have the same needs and wants and longing, all set in us by God.

Chapter 1
Confessions, Confusions

When I was a child, I suppose no more than three or four, I knelt beside my bed each night, hands folded sweetly. On one side of me knelt my sister and on the other my mother. She led us through our prayers:

There are four corners on my bed,
There are four angels at my head.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed I sleep on.

And then:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take

. In addition, we recited the Lord's Prayer, rattling it off without either thought or understanding, and then we began our litany of "God bless Mummy and Daddy and-"

Now came the fun, as we named everyone and everything we could remember-our aunts and grandparents, the part-time baby-sitter, the ducks (each one by name) and the two horses and the chickens (not by name) and the squirrel or a flight of birds we might have seen that day, and the oak trees and the fallen log we played on in the woods. We went on and on, while our mother prodded us, "Come on."

Finally she would interrupt-"All right, that's enough!"-and toss our giggling little bodies into bed and kiss us on the forehead, turn out the light, and be done with the d...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0670894648
• ISBN 13: 9780670894642
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 272