2024-09-03 A Meditation on Being Prayed For

“12 In these days he went out to the mountain to pray, and all night he continued in prayer to God. 13 And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles: 14 Simon, whom he named Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James and John, and Philip, and Bartholomew, 15 and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon who was called the Zealot, 16 and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. Jesus Ministers to a Great Multitude 17 And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, 18 who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases. And those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. 19 And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came out from him and healed them all.” (Luke 6:12-19 ESV)

To receive prayer, to be prayed for, is to receive an Invisible Host of Heaven. It is a silent Spirit that moves into the neighborhood. It is a locus to gestate within, however, our missteps, our Petrine doubts (who began to sink walking on water), our sins, these the Spirit personally adopts: our prayed-up Spirit is marred and takes the blame. We can do injury to that Realm called Mystical, called Received, called Ingested. We can this time around, however, have the full Intention of any who do for us pray, together to take the hit and adapt around the Blame. We are mystically hoped up for, and prayed calmly down unto, the Heavens meeting the pedantic plebeian, the unseen Influencer who nonetheless is Vulnerable, and at once who we cannot quite predict or anticipate or even lean on properly, until it is understood the trust fall and the silent Witness Borne: this one is indeed prayed for, pursued with meaning, invested with Hopeful Thought.

Then the slip-ups, particularly insofar as whole new hosts of wandering thoughts begin to knock at the door. What we reject, we need do so for in light of our Strongman not being as strong as we wish, or as we try to assure, or as we boast. Yet too this Strongman wants to reassure so many souls or would-be prayer makers, or sympathetic peace-passers, that he, she, “Got this”. Still, in the presence of Jesus Himself, and the Holy Angels, he or she needs upbuilt prayerful Life Received, Highlights Met Out, Revision and Return to Childhood Innocence. In strange fashion, to “Die” is to turn our humiliation and weaker set of things, to Benevolent Purpose.

All the while our focal energies as those soldiers tempered and told to be the first and one front line, do call on us to marry our inner personal war with righteous discernment of what is “Out there”. In some fashion we become the Judgment Call. Our own inhibitions, peace-passed, or violent affront talked down, match the spirit of the community and of the nation as understood. We are on a strange personal quest even as we are on a communal and even ultimately (yes, it is not a given!) in tune with the headlines and the word passed around the peoples of the tribe and nation, as it were.

We were running well, what hindered us? We were all the more tried but only in full metric knowledge, metered knowledge, that the End shall come with Trials and Tribulations. We meted out a Response disdainful, scornful, of any lazy submission “to the spirit generally understood,” the “Spirit of the air” (to a New Testament writer predating air travel); we were saying bosh and how could’ya? We were sassing right back and petitioning in lively form unto the Father and Parent in Heaven. Because we were no stranger to the excitement of a spiritual heightened state of alert. We were no stranger, as new believers, to the excitement of taking that hour of intentional prayer: we still then could “Do it”.

Though now, all seems repetitive or flawed. At times. At times, too, we resume praying with the silent gaze into space trademark of those either “special” or “Inspired”. We had a thousand-yard stare because the Entire Responsibility lay Reposed at our doorstep; any eventual extraction unto the proper life of an officer or soldier, is postponed. This, after all, is our final state and locus of being, when we—like Christ—were not extracted or “Rescued” from those He came to serve.