Tag: Prayer

Prison Inmate’s Christmas Gift

“What can I send you as a gift for Christmas?” she asked in a letter that December.
Calvin had one request.
“Could you ask if an elder of your synagogue would say the kind of prayer for me that a father says while touching the head of his son? I’m told that if a father blesses his son in prayer, then everything the father has blessed the son with comes true in the life of the son. My father never got to bless me, and I’m quite sure his father never blessed him. My father once did time in this same penitentiary that I’m in. I hope that the curse that was on him—and now on me—will be the last curse to follow my family.”

Ora’s response was humbling.

“I passed your request on to my father,” she wrote. “And he gave you this blessing: Y’varekh’kha ADONAI v’yishmerekha. Ya’er ADONAI panav eleikha vichunekka. Yissa ADONAI panav eleikha v’yasem l’kha shalom.

May God bless you and keep you. May God cause the divine light to shine upon you and be gracious to you. May God turn his face toward you, and grant you peace.

As Calvin read the rabbi’s words, they flowed over him like water, seeping into the cracks of his despair and loosening its grip.

He sent Ora a reply. “Please, tell your father I said thank you.”

The Jailhouse Lawyer
Calvin Duncan, Sophie Cull

Gestalt Prayer

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
If not, it can’t be helped.

The “Gestalt prayer” is a 56-word statement by psychotherapist Fritz Perls that is taken as a classic expression of Gestalt therapy as a way of life model of which Dr. Perls was a founder.

The key idea of the statement is the focus on living in response to one’s own needs, without projecting onto or taking introjects from others. It also expresses the idea that it is by fulfilling their own needs that people can help others do the same and create space for genuine contact; that is, when they “find each other, it’s beautiful.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_prayer

Emerson on Prayer

“Prayer that craves a particular commodity, any thing less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.”

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self Reliance

Prayer of Saint Francis

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me bring love.
Where there is offense, let me bring pardon.
Where there is discord, let me bring union.
Where there is error, let me bring truth.
Where there is doubt, let me bring faith.
Where there is despair, let me bring hope.
Where there is darkness, let me bring your light.
Where there is sadness, let me bring joy.
O Master, let me not seek as much
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love,
for it is in giving that one receives,
it is in self-forgetting that one finds,
it is in pardoning that one is pardoned,
it is in dying that one is raised to eternal life.