PeaceMakers

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God”

Time: 3.46 am
Place: Sleeping room
Condition: I’ve been trying to sleep for nearly 3 hours now, but I can’t get into it, I just keep on thinking and thinking about the praying issue.
I’ll try here to state down some kind of comprehensive view on the issue of praying and some the controversial questions related to it. Of course all what I’m going to write here expresses my own point of view and nothing.
I’m going to post my thoughts in the form of questions and answers.
Let’s start from the early beginning.
What is praying?
Praying is a conversation we have with god.
But what is the essence of this conversation?
It is this conversation that ascends from materialistic self-seeking conversation, to spiritual self-seeking conversation ending up with this gratis prayer in which we seek nothing but being with him, praising him… Of course this categorization doesn’t cover all the essences that the conversation with god can be based on. In addition these three categories mentioned formerly are not like steps being taken. It is more like a particularity that dominates on most of our prayers, but that doesn’t mean that even during being in a certain essence we don’t live any of the other 2 essences. We live all the three mutually, but with more dominance of one of them. Note: there are much higher levels of praying like ecstasy (aldahesh), the vision of god, and theiahenosis (unity with god).
And how should the prayers be practiced?
There are wide variety of options we are offered to practice praying in our personal life. We have the Agepea prayers, we have the personal prayer and that may be classified to both meditation (hazez) and contemplation (ta2mol), and we also have the spiritual chanting that is mostly practiced in the Anglican and Protestant churches.
So which is the superlative practice?
Herein I’ll try to analyze all these 3 categories out of my own very limited experience. The Agepea prayer is based on David’s psalms so it is very expressive words to talk to god with, it also arranged to cover main periods of the day (even if it is mostly practiced twice a day) and this makes not faulty in expressing our real commitment in offering daily time to good, it is not faulty on the intellectual level as it will be seen with contemplation, it covers a wide variety of levels of praying from thanking, asking forgiveness, praising… But I see it is some times turns out to be series of repeated words without getting personally and totally involved in it, and thus lived in a superficial way.
So what about the personal prayer, it is based on biblical text and thus it helps to dominate the word of god over us, it also helps us to understand ourselves in more deep way, and it is very effective when we want revise some period in out life and how we lived it. But it very faulty on the intellectual level as it may satisfy our intellectual desires without penetrating the word god tour hearts, in addition it may lead to some kind of heresy if we kept on living it on intellectual level.
And for the spiritual chanting it helps us being in state of readiness to accept god’s demands and obey his commandments. But it may be very faulty on the psychological level, because living in some kind of extra ordinary feelings stimulated by chanting may mislead us and put us in a kind of illusion that we have reached certain levels of high spirituality.
So what can we conclude from your thoughts ya 3am Tony?
I’ll tell you. What really matters in the prayer is the person who is praying and what is he trying to live and is he trying to be honest with himself in his spiritual practice or just fooling himself. God said “My son give me your heart and your eyes should be on my roads.” That is what god really wants from us our hearts. And this is what we should be giving him in our prayers. Because whatever the way we practice our prayers without heart it is nothing and without the daily effort in each prayer to deny ourselves and thoughts in front of god’s sound, then we are just fooling ourselves. By the way the previous point the advantages and disadvantages are not something wrong with the prayer itself, it is the wrong the person who prays and how honestly does he live it. Personally and again I say it is something personal for me, I feel I need all the previously mentioned practice of prayer in diverse levels, in addition to a lot of others like praying with the community of believers, the prayer of poor….
To Be Continued because, it is 5.18 now and I start falling asleep…

The answer is surprisingly yes!! Here is the statement:
” God is limited by His infinite attributes”
Let me give you an example! If I say that God can’t lie, it is a limitation. But does it degrade from Him, absolutely not. God can’t lie beacause His infinite attributes do not agree with this.
Let me take another biblical example: if you read the Gospel according to St. Mark chaper 6 from 1 to 6:
(Quoted in English then Arabic)

” 1And he went out from thence, and came into his own country; and his disciples follow him. 2And when the sabbath day was come, he began to teach in the synagogue: and many hearing him were astonished, saying, From whence hath this man these things? and what wisdom is this which is given unto him, that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands? 3Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him. 4But Jesus, said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. 5And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them. 6And he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went round about the villages, teaching. ”

1 وَغَادَرَ يَسُوعُ ذلِكَ الْمَكَانَ وَعَادَ إِلَى بَلْدَتِهِ، وَتَلاَمِيذُهُ يَتْبَعُونَهُ.
2 وَلَمَّا حَلَّ السَّبْتُ، أَخَذَ يُعَلِّمُ فِي الْمَجْمَعِ، فَدُهِشَ كَثِيرُونَ حِينَ سَمِعُوهُ، وَقَالُوا: «مِنْ أَيْنَ لَهُ هَذَا؟ وَمَا هَذِهِ الْحِكْمَةُ الْمَوْهُوبَةُ لَهُ، وَهَذِهِ الْمُعْجِزَاتُ الْجَارِيَةُ عَلَى يَدَيْهِ؟
3 أَلَيْسَ هَذَا هُوَ النَّجَّارَ ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ، وَأَخَا يَعْقُوبَ وَيُوسِي وَيَهُوذَا وَسِمْعَانَ؟ أَوَلَيْسَتْ أَخَوَاتُهُ عِنْدَنَا هُنَا؟» هكَذَا كَانُوا يَشُكُّونَ فِيهِ.
4 وَلكِنَّ يَسُوعَ قَالَ لَهُمْ: «لاَ يَكُونُ النَّبِيُّ بِلاَ كَرَامَةٍ إِلاَّ فِي بَلْدَتِهِ، وَبَيْنَ أَقْرِبَائِهِ، وَفِي بَيْتِهِ!»
5 وَلَمْ يَقْدِرْ أَنْ يَعْمَلَ هُنَاكَ أَيَّةَ مُعْجِزَةٍ، غَيْرَ أَنَّهُ لَمَسَ بِيَدَيْهِ عَدَداً قَلِيلاً مِنَ الْمَرْضَى فَشَفَاهُمْ.
6 وَتَعَجَّبَ مِنْ عَدَمِ إِيمَانِهِمْ. ثُمَّ أَخَذَ يَطُوفُ بِالْقُرَى الْمُجَاوِرَةِ وَهُوَ يُعَلِّمُ. >

I want you to focus on verses 5 and 6. Verse 5 said that He couldn’t do mighty works, it didn’t say He did not or He did not want to. It said literaly He couldn’t. How could not Jesus do a mircale??? Isn’t He God? Definitly He is. Then what is wrong?? The answer is, nothing is wrong. Verse 6 explains every thing right away: Jesus could not do a miracle because of their unbelieve… He is the one who set the rule… He can’t break it, not out of weakness, but, out of prefection… It is his infinite justice that limited Him…
God can’t do evil things not out of weakness but out of perfect righteousness.

I wanted to complete Tony’s idea about how we are limiting God by rules.. We will really limit God if you employ our own logic to make Him perfect.. BUT God revealed Himself to us in His Son. He showed us Himself in the bible. He told us about Himself… These things that He told us about are absolute facts.. They are not going to confine Him.. What will really confine HIM is our rejection to His clear statements that He repeated more than once…I d like to give another example here:
When He talked about Himself as the only way of salvation…. When He talked several times about the necessity of faith for our salvation….
But our self-righteousness does n’t accept it, our logic will start assuming postulates about different cases that doesn’t look fair if it were judged through Jesus words. Then what will do? We will act as Gods by twisting His words to others words that satisfy our sense of fairness.