This story from Ambrose Worrall’s The Gift of Healing[*] illustrates that not all prayer, however well-intentioned, will necessarily bring about the desired results. Some prayer may even interfere with obtaining the desired results.
Ambrose Worrall had been asked to intercede for a six-year old girl named Kay, who had developed encephalitis following measles. At the time he began, she was completely paralysed.
At least, not for people like me.[*]
 Ashley Olsen |
 Grace Park |
 Ciara |
Decisions, decisions.
Continue reading * Choosing what to want isn’t a no-brainer, either.
From my diary for Friday 2015-05-01:
Ta-Nehisi Coates has had two “provocative” HuffPost columns in two days. Wednesday she decried calls for calm in Baltimore. Yesterday she used the incident of Toya Graham’s confrontation of her son, to blame white people for every incident of violence among blacks. [P.S. 12:00. Correction: The latter was by Stacey Patton.] I may yet respond to the latter, but it’s best I not do so today. I need to direct my thoughts and choose my feelings, and I feel immeasurably better when I focus on my own affairs than when I allow myself to get engaged with her turmoil. Today’s task is to prepare materials for the prayer course; and it will be no excuse if I tell my students I came unprepared because she distracted me.
Reblogged 2021-08-12.
“Embracing what is,” a four-part series:
• As seen on TV: The new, improved hubris
• Belief: The unforgivable sin
• Rationalism cannot save us.
• Hell has an exit.
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Connect the dots however you like. Can you connect them all?
The Serenity Prayer does not depend on belief in God, but rather expresses basic principles of life:
God, grant me
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
This pertains to where one directs one’s attention, how one chooses to feel, and where one focuses one’s desires. These are acts not of the mind, but of the will.
Jeffrey Tayler says, “Given the possibility that terrorists may acquire weapons of mass destruction and nuclear states with faith-based conflicts may let fly their missiles, religion may be said to endanger humanity as a whole. No one who cares about our future can quietly abide the continuing propagation and influence of apocalyptic fables that large numbers of people take seriously and not raise a loud, persistent, even strident cry of alarm.”[15]
Fact: those who direct Iran’s nuclear program aren’t likely to listen to an atheist American Islamophobe.
In a blog post of July 19, 2014, I declared my ambition to become the “Nemesis of the morning glories” in the garden out behind my church. My plan was to spend four hours per week specifically weeding the morning glories in that garden.
On Monday, October 20, 2014, I wrote, “The morning glories are vanquished. As of today, they are under control throughout the entire garden.”
(Originally published July 5, 2013 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reblogged 2019-12-19.)
There is a song from The Sound of Music that relates; it concludes, “… I simply remember my favorite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.”
Wednesday morning I stood outside McDonald’s having my last smoke before leaving. I considered that as soon as I got to the library, I’d need to count my pennies and plan spending for the rest of the week. I pondered whether or not to buy a soda on my way there. I’d had some unusual spending earlier in the week, and faced some more unusual spending in connection with the 4th of July (The library’s closed.). The wisdom of having bought or not bought a soda at this time would depend on the outcome of that planning.
(Originally published 09/15/12 at Trojan Horse Productions. Reblogged 03/28/19.)
Teddy is an old man. He wears a rosary around his neck, and never fails to “testify” in chapel. “I talk to the Father, Son and Holy Ghost every day,” he says. Every time there’s an altar call, he runs right up there to get born-again — again. Five times a week, he’ll do that.
He got barred out a year ago for selling someone oxycontin.
Friday night 09/07/12, he came back. He insists to everyone that he’s never been here before, and said he wants to get into the program.
Aside from those things, he hasn’t changed at all. Still all the same empty religious talk.
Sunday night he said he changed his mind about the program. They require you to sign over all your benefits, and he’s not willing to do that. That tells me you don’t want to get well.
I get bad feelings every time I see him.
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Sitting outside waiting to be let in, Wednesday 08/29/12 Fallon and a couple other guys I don’t like too much got into reminiscing about how this shelter used to be, years ago, before the renovation. This upset me.
Here is the third chapter of The Way of Peace. The first two chapters appeared Friday and yesterday.
APPLICATION
We are considering the human being as having, so to speak, three intimately interconnected “bodies:” (a) a material, physical body of flesh, that engages in behavior and acts on other material objects; (b) a body that thinks, is composed of and acts on ideas (ideation), which we may call the “mind;” and (c) a body of emotions, or feelings or “affects” (all the same thing), which we may call the “soul”.
Our thesis is that a single set of disciplines, involving all three “bodies,” can yield a state of being I have called “peace of mind,” which is tantamount to what Jesus called “the Kingdom;” and, in short, maximize one’s opportunities for tranquility and happiness in life.
Continue reading o Here – Now – Can
Here is the second portion of the book The Way of Peace, the first portion of which appeared yesterday.
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MEDITATION
Meditation is not the whole of the Way, any more than flour is the whole of cookies. If you want cookies, you must also have butter, sugar, and perhaps eggs, in addition to flour. Flour is essential, however. Likewise as to the Way, meditation is so essential, as to move me to say this: if you have any interest in learning the Way, and do not now have a discipline of meditation, you should start one now — right now — before even reading the rest of this book.
Continue reading o About silence
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