I realize I’ve stopped praying – really praying. Oh, I pray by rote – with Scriptures, too, I ask for protection, for forgiveness, for blessings.
But the heart of prayer is gone and it’s been said better to pray without words, with a heart. Yet words I find aplenty, as always. Word are my home without walls, they are where I live, wrapped in words, sleeping on sentences, embraced by syntax and enamored of linguistics.
Yet, I no longer speak to God as I once did, as a Heavenly father who has the capacity to comfort, to heal, to administer mercy and grace. Of course, I am not delusional enough to imagine my own prayers, m individual heart posture, makes one difference. God’s power isn’t diminished nor is His ability to do anything. Maybe I feel I touched the hem of Jesus’ garment one too many times with no results, no answers, or replies that were tenuous, temporary, and only ended in more heartache.
Where is that woman I once was – the one who believed, who vetoed her own cynicism of decades gone by, who saw the possibility the impossibility, who believed in redemption- that it was real and lasting?
Was it the hypocrites who made me doubt in anything but what I see? Oh, yes, I still believe in God, in Jesus, in Jesus being the Son of God – all the tenets of the faith are lined up like so many spices in a spice cabinet- for safe keeping, naturally, and to show off in case I’m accused, which I will be.
The spirit of accusation is mankind’s modus operandi when interacting with fellow mortals. We accuse with spurious evidence , we condemn the person for the past forgotten or that should be. We play judge, jury, and executioner, for condemnation of others’ sins helps us forget our own, enables us to minimize what sinners we are. Whilst paying lip service to God’s grace and the shed blood of Jesus covering all things, we point, scoff, mock,ridicule the very transgressions that we are every bit as capable of committing, while assuring ourselves how righteous we are.
Oh what clowns, what charlatans we would see were we to gaze into a mirror and behold our true faces. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wasn’t writing a horror story depicting one man’s vanity, one mortal’s desire to have his sins engraved into a painting rather than etched into his being. Rather, he was holding up a looking glass to all of us, most especially those using religion to gild their image with fake piety and counterfeit respectability. Wilde lived a hedonistic life, but, at least, he was honest enough to put the truth in what he wrote. His life conveyed his authentic immoral beliefs, as opposed to professing Christians who don their Sunday best and croon their holy hymns in the church pews each week while privately living as devils, with spiteful, judgemental hearts and elitist spirits looking down at all who don’t fit their “Christian” molds. They are self-righteous cupcakes, iced in the arsenic of hypocrisy- pretty on the outside, lethal to consume, served up most prominently on Sunday mornings, amid Scripture, prayer and hyperbolic praise.
