Love is a prayer

When you pray, if you pray, how do you pray?

Do you close your eyes and think thoughts upwards to God, intentions such as peace in Afghanistan, a meaningful job, peace in your home, healing of a physical problem?  Do you talk to God as if you were on the phone or sending an email?  I guess the question I'm asking is, looking back at how you pray, how would you describe what is actually happening in you when you pray?  

How effective are your prayers?  

Given the enormous number of miracles being reported everywhere: the end of the war, the healing of the environment, the end of fossil fuel usage and the propagation of a new means of energy that doesn't rely on earth's resources, the end of poverty and disease around the world, fair and equitable jobs for everyone, the end of cruel animal slaughter in the factory farms across the world, the end of pollution, the end of domestic violence, the implementation of new schools that focus on the whole child with a soul development aspect that teaches meditation and peaceful conflict resolution, it seems our prayers have been effective,  just the way they are.  Or not!

Since we've been praying for all these years, in all the churches (temples, mosques and ashrams) across the country (and world) I know we must not be praying effectively because all these things have not been granted to us. I wonder why not?

I'm no expert at this because I still don't have that job I'm waiting for or my house by the water, but things could be a lot worse.  Yet, I've come to realize that if the heart is five times more powerful electro-magnetically than the brain, wouldn't it make sense to use our heart rather than our brain to send prayers out to God/the universe/creator/Divine Mother?  (Many, many of you have been truly dedicated and devoted to doing that so this post is more for those of us who don't know, were never taught how to pray from the heart.)

We've been listening to our brain, feeding our brain all kinds of good technological information, science, math, etc. for several hundred years and especially in the last 100 years, the scales have tipped in favor of brain usage over heart.  We've slipped into the habit of using our brain, rather than our hearts most of the time. We've been training ourselves to enter the job market, to step up to the socio/economic bat to make a living, buy that house, marry that person,  raise a family, and when we have time, maybe go to a place of worship on Sunday (or Friday or Saturday) and do get down on our knees and seek the divine.

If we are making the time to pray, I am wondering when we reach out to connect to the divine, do we send up words formed in the brain or do we tap into our heart, access the love frequency and combined with the thoughts from the brain, send that prayer to heaven on a double rocket booster?

I remember when I was working as a chaplain last year at one of Portland's hospitals, I felt a great deal of love for many of the patients.  I would literally go home, get into that sense of love for them, even sometimes end up in tears, and pray fervently, passionately out of that love, and soon I started to discover that some of those patients for whom I prayed got better. 

One was a tiny premie in the neonatal intensive care unit who was so tiny you could see his little heart beating through his paper thin skin and he wasn't expected to make it. I sat with his mother and heard her hope, her faith, her doubt, her fears and tears. As I listened to her heart, my own was filled with love for the baby and compassion for the mother.  I went home and prayed,  holding both my crystals and a lighted candle. I earnestly prayed until tears streamed down my face.  Two months later, I celebrated with the family as I said the going home prayers for the baby who was healthy, miraculously without any damage to his brain. He was going home to his life and a long and potentially healthy and happy future. (By the way, the baby's name was/is Benjamin and even now I still hold him in a corner of my heart.)

Another was was a young man, about 26, who had been in a very serious car accident and was in the trauma unit's intensive care unit.  I don't even want to tell you how seriously wounded he was.  His mother had flown in from Idaho that night before.  He was in an intentional hypothermic coma to prevent brain swelling, to "give his brain a rest," the nurse told us.

"You can't believe the severity of the head trauma from when he went through that windshield," she said to me, sparing the young man's mother.  

The patient had returned from Iraq recently and had broken up with his girlfiend that night. He was so drunk, he never knew what happened to him. His problems went beyond the physical. The ICU nurse gave me that kind look of, "well, do a miracle if you can, this one's really not going to make it and if he does, we're talking vegetable." For the next hour or so, I listened to the mom through her tears, and felt my own tears stinging behind my eyes.  I have a son the same age.  My heart was just wrenched in compassion.  

That night, I did the same thing as I did with the premie. I lit a candle, held onto my two crystals (just to add some energy to my prayers) and prayed in deep earnest for the young man.  The next morning, before devotions, I rushed up to his room on the second floor, and he wasn't there.  I asked the head nurse where he was and she said he had been transferred down to the trauma unit because he was stable after they brought him out of the coma. He was responding so well, that they moved him out of ICU. I tried to catch up with the mom later, but couldn't find her.  I didn't need to.  It was then, and there, somewhere on the elevator between floors, or maybe down one of the long hallways of the hospital, that I learned a very important lesson about prayer. Those tears that come from our heart, streaming liquid compassion, are prayers offered by the heart and from the heart, the most powerful command center we have, are heard and often answered.

I am NOT saying here that all prayers are answered and I don't know if my prayers really made the difference in these cases or if it was just the great medical care alone the people received.  I don't know why some prayers are answered and some aren't, but I believe that my prayers may have helped in those situations and that if we truly love, allow ourselves to feel love, empathy and compassion, and enter into a true state of devotion and love and sincerely ask heaven to heal a situation, we just might find our prayers answered.  

So, the invitation to us, if we do want to start healing our world, is for all of us to ask our brilliant brains to take a back seat while we enter into our hearts and open them to another person, a wounded piece of the Earth, the water, the animals. 

I am also a believer that if we genuinely want to open our hearts, still our overactive brains, and be more love-filled, God is happy to help with that request.  The only thing we need really, is a will to move into the heart.  First we need will, then dedication to seeking the kingdom of heaven within our heart, and then allowing God's love to flow into that amazing tank in the center of our being.  

If we seek and center our will, breathe in the love that's everywhere, invisibly present in the air, we may be able to make a difference in our world, for all the hungry impoverished children and people throughout the world, all who are suffering from floods, fires,  joblessness, homelessness, lovelessness.  

My prayer is that we would all reach out from our open hearts spiritually holding hands, and send our love from our hearts around the world. Imagine it like a huge, global laser light of love from our huge collective heart going into the wounded places, the floods in Pakistan, the starving children in Haiti.  We can do this in our mind's eye, in our imagination. First we feel the love for these precious children of God, our own children and brothers and sisters, then imagine what it would be like for you if this happened to you, feel your own pain, and then feel theirs. Then, send your prayer on the wings of your own love and compassion, joined with their need.  Those are strong wings.  They will make it through heaven's gate.