You Cannot Petition the Lord With Prayer

"You Cannot Petition the Lord With Prayer" ~ from The Soft Parade, by Jim Morrison

Check out this message from the fixed-wing Christians at the American Family Association (A.K.A American Fascist Association). Their most recent Action Alert is titled Pray for the Supreme Court and the Nation.

"This weekend America is poised at the edge of a moral cliff. On Monday the United States Supreme Court will decide two cases that ask it to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples. We do not know whether the Court will declare homosexual marriage to be a constitutionally guaranteed right or will leave the definition of marriage to be decided state by state. Neither of those options are a clear victory for the institution of marriage as God created it."

 

I call this American Brand of Fascism the "fixed-wing" rather than the right or left wing because our American Brand of Fascism is composed of the fixed views of human life, rather than the flexible views necessary for the balance of good political health.

While I personally choose to "meditate" in the context of the archetypal image of awakening, which is the meaning of the word "Buddha", I'm a great supporter of "prayer" for those who orient their spiritual lives with the archetypal God image, but like meditation, prayer is not an activity of wanting something and asking an outside or external God-person to deliver it.  True prayer is about asking "God" (who is not an external being and whom we can only contact within the deepest essence of our own true being) to deliver us from our own folly, not to deliver to us the things we want.  Any conception of what we "want" is a presumption that we know what is best for us. In fact, we usually don't have much of a clue what is "best" for us. When we create a check list of things that are "best" for us as if it is a Christmas wish list and then we pray to God to deliver those things to us as if God is Santa Claus, then we are well off the track of knowing what is really best for us as well as knowing the nature of true prayer.   

These American Fascists want us to pray to God and ask "that next week the Court would not impose a false definition of marriage on our nation."  That simple sentence is okay, no one wants a "false definition" of anything.  If that were all that was being asked for, then great.  But instead, these Fascists claim to know what is God's real definition of marriage What hubris!   They substitute their own personal judgments for the true spirit of God.

"Specifically, we pray for the pending Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage. We pray that next week the Court would not impose a false definition of marriage on our nation. Father, we confess that we in the Church have already sinned against You and have not been good stewards of the gift of marriage through our own issues with unfaithfulness, selfishness, pornography, homosexuality and divorce. Forgive us, Lord. Now our nation is following our imperfect example and seeks to redefine and pervert the gift of marriage in order to satisfy its own lusts."

By lumping "issues with unfaithfulness, selfishness, pornography, homosexuality and divorce" all together as if they are equally devaluations or abuse of "the gift of marriage" is just what I mean by "fixed-wing" thinking. 

The activity of God is something that they do not know even in a dream. Instead of praying for the Supreme Court to decide a lawsuit according to their preconceived notions, I recommend that they just pray that God's rain and snow falls on the mountains and valleys of everyone's mind, so that the true peace and love will flow like waters quenching the thirst for all.

If you can't let go of the desire to petition the Lord with prayer, then the only good petition is to ask to see the Lord face to face. Why? Because only then will our separate identity be burned away to know the truth seen in God's eye.