Last Sunday I was asked to present a small, portable Bible to a young parishioner about to leave for boot camp. That seems a simple enough task, and as part of that we prayed in front of the congregation for him to return safely. It is difficult to "bless" warriors of any kind. But it is necessary to hope that their "gifts" may be offered but never used or needed. We know that prayer—of some kind—is necessary at such moments. But this matter is part of something much larger. It has to do with what we might call nowadays "connectivity."
We do some things without understanding…or even seeming to need understanding. We pray for one another on a multitude of levels, for a multitude of things. We assume that somehow these messages get uploaded to God—or some angels—for processing. We assume that these heavenly recipients are reading their mail, but it's always been a puzzle as to why the answers are so inconsistent. The real core of this is, as it turns out, too obvious for us to recognize. It has to do with the real nature of our spiritual "connectivity"—the connections within us as individuals.
You see, there's a tendency to see ourselves as "complete" entities. The attitude is that it is me, this person, this fleshly being, that is all that there is, all there is to pray for, all that will survive—somehow. But we know better than that. Death—as we experience the death of another—is the event that emphasizes the fact that the body is merely one part of us, and the soul the other. We just don't think about this on a daily basis, perhaps because it reminds us of our own fear and mortality and that our great achievements are sometimes worth very little in the long run. But it's true. I co-exist with my soul. My soul can be young, or it can be very old. It might be trying to learn lessons through my life experiences, or it might be trying to reach me to guide my life experiences, perhaps even to provide something of value for others or to teach others something valuable. In other words, my prime connection is internal: it is between my life and my soul, between my temporary life and my eternal life, between that produced by human means and that produced by a true Creator.
So this brings me back to the "Prayers of the People" that started this entry. We pray not person-to God-to person (or something like that), we pray on a soul-to-soul basis, at the mercy of—or relying on the receptiveness of—the souls at both ends of this process. And assuming that this process does take place, it becomes vitally obvious how much worth our internal person-to-soul connections have.
But there's another issue, a semantic one. It gets thrown around so much that it's important to clear this up here. We talk about "Faith" in so many confused ways that the word has little meaning. It seems to mostly mean a kind of blind trust in forces greater than ourselves…or it can allude to one's "Faith" in an us-versus-them set of value judgments. From all I have said above, Faith is none of that. It is the connection—the kind of connection and the closeness of connection—that our lives have with our own souls, and how this gets expressed in all else we do. Anything else of a spiritual nature is frankly lame without that. Magic is often what try to invoke, the thing we are praying for, the sort of thing that we expect our "Faith" to influence. But NO, it is never about magic, but about what takes place between us as living beings in a world teeming with life, and between us as souls imbedded in a world that desperately hungers for that connection.
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