CowPi Journal

About a month ago, I realized that I was saying one particular prayer wrong. When I enter a church or chapel, I kneel and pray, and start with, “Lord Jesus Christ, please forgive me because I am a sinner…” and go from there.

What is wrong in my prayer is the word because. It is not needed in the sentence. I am a sinner. I know that. God knows that. I need to emphasize asking for forgiveness of my sins, not because I am a sinner. To ask to be forgiven because I am a sinner is the same as asking to be forgiven for being human, or male, or having brown eyes. I have no control over my nature, my being, my essence. It is what I am. (Ontological is the 14-point Scrabble word that describes this.)

To really twist my mind around this, God made me that way. So how can I be sorry for something God made a part of my nature? At times, I am repulsed by the darkness in my heart, those tendencies to capital sins hidden within my false self, my manufactured ego, that are the root causes of my petty venial sins and threaten mortal sin. How I wish I would not sin and turn away from God, to stop being selfish and preoccupied with my self, to wither the pride away. I wish I could pluck out the weeds among the wheat in my heart. Ah, but many weeds will remain until the end (Parable of the Weeds) and God will use them as He wants.

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Here’s the paradox. God made me. He continues to make me. I am a sinner. And despite my sin nature, God loves me. God loves all of me. “Love the sinner, not the sins.” How do I love my dark side too? How do I accept all of the gift of me? Thank you Lord for creating me. Everything belongs in you. Help me to receive all of me so that I can give all of me back to you.

God loves me, just because.

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a trouble guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

— David Whyte

I found this question near the end of an interesting post:

What if prayer is just a way of talking to yourself that is acceptable?

My comment:

Maybe at the core of who you are, hidden behind all the layers of your false self, the facade and masks and illusionary persona of nothingness that your pride defensively constructs and desparately wants you to be, is your true self, the simple and honest and open part of you that is connected to God and all of creation?

Maybe when you pray, it “is just a way of talking to yourself” if you’re honestly talking to the real, true self?

We just ended a twelve-day streak of 90+ days here in central Oklahoma. We normally don’t start those until late June, early July. The rain has finally come too. It has been skirting the area for a couple days. Not much, but enough.
I reckon it’s going to be a long, hot summer. (Reminds me of a Faulkner novel or Williams play. (Which reminds me of a line from a Pam Tillis song. (Which is about a town where I fell in love with my wife.)))