PeaceMakers

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

I’m going to complete the rest of the points I wanted to mention about the Praying issue. But just before I go on, where are the rest of you guys, why aren’t you commenting, where are you Fadi, you didn’t show up for 2 days, and you used to write to daily before that.
Any way let’s get back to the topic.
Brain whashing, a word that Miena mentioned 2 days, is it related to praying?
Till you what yes it is related, and it should be related. Let’s define first what is brain washing, it is the process of removing certain concepts from someone and yielding new ones. And this kind of change should occur during praying, especially meditation (elhazez). Our old concepts which is based on greedy, lusts, arrogance, hatred…should die and new concepts of love, giving, humpleness…should be born and this change occurs only in praying. So that the new concepts are not just known by us mentally but also based in our hearts moving every action we do.
It seems that I made the whole issue look suspicious, so would you please make it more clear?
I’ll try making it clearer in this paragraph. First when does brain washing occurs, it occurs when I put myself under the clout of certain text or someone. This why we have to do all our prayers based on biblical text, because it the only text which should have clout upon us. I express this situation, that we place ourselves under something and we allow it to reshape us. This why some of the fathers insist on basing meditations on biblical scripts and not even scripts written by saints. This why we should be above all the kind of text and teaching given to us except for the bible. I even consider the same concept with spiritual guiding, we should examine and discern everything before we put ourselves under it. I will go further here and add that we should examine and discern the ideas and thoughts we acquire during praying. Because ideas and thoughts are sometimes illusive. This is why we always here this expression discerning whenever we talk with someone with good spiritual experience.
I’ll try to write something soon about some kinds of brain washing we may suffer from in our lives, because I’ve a lot to say about it.
I just want to add something at the end, inspite of this complications, and sophisticated post I’d written, god is much more simple than this. He is not just simple he never leaves us.

I’ll end this topic now, because I feel I cannot express what I want to say in the right way and this may lead to misunderstanding…On the hope of writing Part III.

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 first sin in the history of humanity started by the desire of man to be equal to god. So he decided to eat from the fruit of knowledge not for the sake of knowledge but to be equal to god, and here started the longest stroy of conflicts between humans. And then Adam got into a conflict with Eve, Kaeen killed his brother Habeel and the story went on….
Do we really still try to be Gods? I think yes we do. Everyone of us are always trying to put god in limited list of laws and judgements. Because the god we are trying to be is limited, while the almighty god is not limited. We are always trying to put rules for god to work on. But we always forget that god is above rules, he is not even limited by the holy laws, becasue he is the one who placed it and so he is the one who is over it.
You should be saying “Tony got crazy.” what is the relation between trying to understand gods way of judgement and ruling and our desire to be equal to god. I’ll till you what the is relation, when we develop all these rules giving answers to questions that have been always confusing the world about salvation, what is after death…what we are simply doing is that we are trying to put the alighty god with his unlimited love, absolute justice and generous mercy in our minds. We are trying to be gods. Out of lose in our faith in his Mercy and Justice, we try to find rules to justify our questions and worries that was originally born out of our lake of faith.
And the crisis really starts when we have already developed the complete figure about what is god going to do with every single human in this earth during his life and in the coming life. Now we are gods and we cannot listen to other gods, but we work on teaching the other gods the rules of our god. And we all together cannot allow the almighty god to do something out of the rules that we had developed for him to work on.

I hope that any of you could get a point of what I’m saying.

Dear Friends,
First I want to share you something I experience everyday with this blog thing. I nearly check the site 100 times a day for finding some kind of more comments or posts. When it is at night I just have this struggle, “I want to sleep.” VS “I want to write something on the blog.” and it usually ends up me not sleeping and writing something here, specially comments.
Now I’ll tell you about something I’m planning to write here. For me the unity of the church means a lot, means some kind of a dream, I’m not having the same background and the same point of view I used to have about the unity of church when we started such an activity. But I’ve this dream; having this dream doesn’t mean that I’m much better than others who don’t care about it, or any kind of a thing that makes ahead of them. I’ve this dream because I believe it is God’s will to be one. One more thing I want to add here, I’ve no kind of an imagination on how this dream can be on the earth of reality. I just dream that it will be done in the way God’s will is fulfilled.
You know what the word unity doesn’t mean any more for me just the unity between churches, it means the unity we should work on creating in our communities, starting from our families… But this doesn’t deminish any of my strong desire for the unity of church.
Before I start a series of posts I’m planing to write here. I just want to say some points on which I would like to build this whole thing.
“I’m sorry if one day I couldn’t understand the fears, the feelings of the churchs enough.”
“I’m sorry if one I was a kind of humilating by my words any of the churchs or the leaders of the churchs.”
“I love all the churchs and I believe that God is trying to tell something to every one of them.”
“I believe that every church have a lot of richness.”
“I believe that unity will not be a work of humans, it will be God’s work.”
“I believe that unity will change the face of earth.”
What I’m going to post is a series of post under the title “Why do we conflict?” this title is not just directed about the churchs, but it is rather more about our personal lives. Let’s pray for god’s will in fulfilling the unity of the church and let us work to unify the world around us.
Love
Antonius Armanious

“I am glad that you have shot this footage and that the world will see it, It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene.” Paul Rusesabagina.

“Yeah, and if no one intervenes, is it still a good thing to show?” British Reporter.

“How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities?” Paul Rusesabagina

“I think if people see this footage….they’ll say, “Oh, my God, that’s horrible.” and then go on eating their dinners” British Reporter.

 Watch this movie, but hope you don’t end up eating your dinner as I did.