Closing Words of New Book -- The Many Faces of Prayer

SNEAK PEAK...

The following is the closing passage of my new book, The Many faces of Prayer:  How the Human Family Meets Its Spiritual Needs. 

Just completed the first draft. I'm told the Unity Books  target publication date is Spring 2013.

To Boldly Go…

Looking back over the concepts presented in this study, I am struck by how much more we could have explored, from simple ideas like prayer partners to more complex configurations like Unity’s annual World Day of Prayer. We never touched on efficacy studies, some of which support the power of prayer to affect outcomes in healing, others which show no positive correlation whatsoever. This brings up the greater issue of science and religion, and an honest discussion of the subject must concur with Carl Sagan, who famously said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The role of grace and the providence of God could be stand-alone volumes, and whether the goal of prayer is to comfort or to cure is a longstanding controversy in religious thought. The crowds did not come to Jesus to hear philosophy; they brought  their sick and blind and physically handicapped to his traveling spiritual healing clinic, to the point of disassembling the roof on one occasion to lower an invalid through the ceiling.

What can prayer do? Are we praying into the thunderstorm to ward off its effect, or to bolster our courage? Buddhists do not attempt to shape results; they shape their responses to whatever results. Christians, Muslims, Jews and people of many other traditions want hands-on divinity that can spring open the prison doors, heal the sick, and bring relief in the tangible world. Answers to the questions raised by the challenges of life are neither simple nor dispensable, and if they seem otherwise it is probably because you have not looked into the depths of human suffering.

In the Genesis legends, God hovers over the face of the waters, does His Creation thing, and pronounces it good. Surely a Creator so powerful must have known future Adams will eat the fruit, and future Cains will kill their brothers. Yet the beneficial progression of life—the long, deep, natural history of the Cosmos, which began billions of years before humans brought forth their multiple families of gods and goddesses, which eventually would include the desolate Yahweh of Sinai—continues an evolutionary process which produced the dance of roses and honeybees, prey and predator, lover and betrayer, child and rejected parent, sinners and spiritual teachers. Life’s lessons, studied well, teach us how to find peace of mind when the systems we embrace crash around us. Better still, reflection upon the great teachers of humanity can clarify ways to fix the damage before catastrophic collapse occurs, by offering alternative paths to reconciliation and a more peaceful world.

What will humans do for spiritual nourishment when they set foot on other worlds? Doubtless our descendants, as they look up at new constellations and perhaps multiple moons hanging in the night sky, will feel a sense of awe, not unlike our ancient ancestors as they looked skyward. As long as humanity retains that impulse to raise its vision to higher possibilities, the inward spiritual journey will continue no matter where we go.