Prayer Breakfast? Old Boys Club For Sure

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Peace.

Peace.

Terra and Wiccans

forgive me Terra
but I just read your longer post more carefully

and in truth i am right with you.

i feel very close to you Wiccans in your spiritual attitude towards nature and intuition and your conception of the greater force.

i truly do love everything you said.

forgive me for my awkward parody of Anonymous, and for inserting the ugly anti gay attitude that I often see people of A's persuasion promulgating.

Terra
To preserve my reputation

I was trying to write a parody of A's odious position, which in itself is a parody of itself.

You will see from my previous posts that I am really a Gay loving godless type.

"Right on Anonymous. Bring on these SF people. they are probably all gay anyway. to heck with em"

James, how Christian of you.

I'm with you Anonymous. Useless too.

Religious groups would never say that they were better than other religious groups.

They would never go to war for religious reasons.

They would never think God wa on their side in a war, and pray that God helped their side versus the other side, which is clearly made up of Evil doers.

Right on Anonymous. Bring on these SF people. they are probably all gay anyway. to heck with em

in the bay area this passes for profundity

but 4 everybody else

bbblllleeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Rev. Artress,
In this I agree with you. Prayer can be many things to everyone...but first you need to make connection to the Being you are wanting to reach. To do that you need to be silent and listen.

How can you gain anything from the Divine, if you are chattering? You are so busy with your own ego, you can not hear God. That is why some where in the bible it says it is better to go into a closet alone, then to pray on a street corner (or something like that). It is a difference of praying to God or for others.

The Quakers sit in silence, waiting for the small still voice of God.

From what I see on Tv about those Christian Prayer services, they are not praying, they are demanding and they are raiseing power. And those people are likeing that feeling...What am I talking about?

I am Wiccan... to bring healing, to use power, we first have to raise it..and we use dance, chant, music, and a great big helping of emotion. We know what we are doiing, and why. I see the Christians do it, I can almost feel it over the TV...but they call it prayer. There are in some of those services, thousands of people...all of them with heightened emotions...a sense of being in another place...almost trance like.LOL....they are raising power just like us Witches do. Only we do not call it prayer. And we know how to deal with it, raising spiritual power and sending it out to heal or protect is not prayer. But it is a heightened feeling.

Prayer is a personal thing of communication between you and Deity/Creative Energy/God/The Force/or what ever you call it. It is being mindful...not loseing your self in the sound of your own voice.

Mama make me an open window...even a broken one, that a bit of air and sunlight comes.

ok let the dissing begin.
Blessed Be...

Dave,

You're projecting Christian forms of thought and practice on to your imagined Buddhist scene.

You wrote:

"I have never been to a Buddhist temple, but I can imagine what it is like, lots of people thinking that some fat chinese statue is actually going to help them achieve nirvana or heaven after they die. Yea, like that is some kind of assurance. Has Buddha ever come back and told people what the after life is like to prove that the incantations will really work?"

The Buddha was Indian, not Chinese.

The statue won't help the attendees achieve enlightenment, but following the Buddha's teachings will.

Buddhists don't utter Christian or Satanic style incantations.

The Buddha is not in the business of having a Christian-style Second Coming.

Buddhists don't believe in a Christian-style Heaven. The Buddha is/was not a God.

The Buddha taught compassion and an end to suffering. His teachings are very practical and down-to-earth and have helped millions.

Except for the foregoing, I'd say you have a pretty complete grasp of Buddhism.

Regards.

earth.

Why is Lauren writing here? OK, she founded her own prayer institute in San Fran, but she is able create a straw man about what the prayer breakfast is or isn't. I don't know why I bother visiting this Washington Post website because they have writers like Lauren who have their own agenda but don't really address the topic which seems to be the presidential prayer breakfast, of which she has never been to it. OK let's carry out that logic. I have never been to a Buddhist temple, but I can imagine what it is like, lots of people thinking that some fat chinese statue is actually going to help them achieve nirvana or heaven after they die. Yea, like that is some kind of assurance. Has Buddha ever come back and told people what the after life is like to prove that the incantations will really work? It must be very boring too to go to a budhist temple.
OK, see my point, I have no right to write about worship at a budhist temple, I only have conjecture, and that is unfair to the Budhists. Therefore, the Post needs to be more responsible in their selection of writer for this website. Cause all Lauren has to write on the prayer breakfast is conjecture.

Interesting. . . Ms. Artress never uses the word "God". . . what's up with this? . . . She says,

"Prayer is a way to open your heart to Something Greater Than Yourself. It is an effort to quiet the mind, and allow yourself to be nourished by the flow of your breath meeting the Breath that supports the world."

The word "heart" doesn't mean anything in this context, and the word "Breath" is given reverance for no apparent reason, (why not Water, Oxygen?) and the idea of something "supporting" the world doesn't have any meaning; but the rest of it is OK. No need for a God, a religion, or "Something Greater Than Yourself", just little more accuracy in language in completeing the thought and we might have something!

A-

Thank you.

Lauren Artress,

You think like a Buddhist, you write like a Buddhist, you are a Buddhist.

Why do you maintain an affiliation with Christianity? Certainly not to avoid belonging to a minority. There are, I believe, more Buddhists than Christians in San Francisco.

Come, cross over, join the majority!

Reverand Lauren your version of prayer is the correct one in my estimation. There doesn't need to be a supernatural being listening for it to do good. I watched my grandmother pray away the last 10 to 15 years of her life and can't see how it did anything but help he cope. Coping is the minimum requirement to have any life at all.

Women must cope with many things that men can't imagine. I agree, it's an old boy's club and I'll add a club up side their heads, the prescription for getting a mules attention is recommended.

Lauren, you have a lot of rules about what a prayer can be. It's okay to vent to God; to say how or who or why you are frustrated or hurt. God will use whatever you give him, perhaps not with the results you asked for if you speak from hurt or malice, but he can use your prayer just the same.

Prayer has the power to cleanse the heart and mind all by itself, there is no need to sterilize your thoughts beforehand.

As for the National Prayer Breakfast, I have not been to one either, but why don't you go to one so you can speak out of experience instead of closing your mind. Prayer can be a deeply personal event, but prayer in fellowship can have a power all its own.

"my sense is that these kinds of events have simply co-opted Christianity and made it part of the old boys club."

I suspect the the co-opting runs in the opposite direction, to make it appear that the government legitimizes Christianity at the expense of other religions.

"Prayer is a way to open your heart to Something Greater Than Yourself. It is an effort to quiet the mind, and allow yourself to be nourished by the flow of your breath meeting the Breath that supports the world."

My idea of "something greater than myself" is the nature and the universe as opposed to a conscious deity. Is Artress open to the idea of prayer in that context?

"The biggest obstacle for me and many other people I work with is simply that: to quiet the mind."

I'm glad to hear that, because I thought I was the only one with that problem. I have earworms all the time from songs that I've heard in the previous 24 hours or so.