Prayer
and Attitude
The Proper
Tools
Six-year-old Amy goes to her mother with a problem and
says, “Mommy, I'm fixing my book case, ‘cause the screw is
loose, but this screwdriver won't work. Do you have a new
screwdriver?" She hands her mother the "screwdriver," and
immediately Mother sees why it doesn’t work; it is not a
screwdriver, it is an ice pick.
Five-year-old Stevie hears Elaine’s ice cream wagon coming
down the street; he runs to his mother's purse, borrows a coin,
runs out to the street to wait for the ice cream wagon to stop.
Elaine asks him what he wants, he says, "I want an ice cream
sandwich, the one with strawberry." She hands him the ice cream
sandwich, and he hands her the nickel." “ Oops, Stevie, this
in only a nickel; you need three quarters to go with this.” “
But that's all I got," says Stevie. "Then, I'm afraid I'll have
to take back the ice cream." Handing Stevie back the nickel,
she says, "I'm awfully sorry, Stevie, maybe next time you'll
have enough money."
From their experiences with an ice pick and insufficient
funds, these children learn a valuable lesson: that in order to
accomplish a task, we have to have the proper tools, and in
order to purchase a product, we have to have the price of the
product. Of course, everyone knows this, everyone who has
attained a certain birthday and number of experiences. Any
adult knows that you cannot use an ice pick to do the work of a
screwdriver, and you cannot buy an article that costs 80 cents,
if you have only 5 cents.
The Proper
Tools of Prayer
So what is wrong with the wide-spread assumption
that prayer doesn't work? I suggest that anyone who accepts
this claim has tried to use an ice pick of prayer instead of the
screwdriver of prayer. Prayer is not just begging for something
that you probably do not need anyway from a source that is
incomprehensible and probably does not exist anyway. But you
may protest that when you prayed to have the life of your mother
spared, she died anyway, you were in earnest, and you feel that
you did need to have her stay alive. Why was your prayer an ice
pick instead of a screwdriver?
The answer is that your perception is not God’s
perception. In responding to prayer, God takes into account our
entire, eternal existence, not just the specific moments or
years we think we fill. That God took your mother proves that
that experience is necessary for you and also for your mother.
You needed to experience the nature of loss, and she needed to
experience the nature of leaving the material level of
experience and joining the astral level of experience. If you
had known that you both needed this experience for your soul
progress back to God, your prayer would have been very
different; instead of asking God to let your mother continue on
the earthly plane, you would have thanked God for the time you
had with her, and you would have asked God to guide her and make
her joyous on her journey to the astral world. This prayer
would have been the screwdriver, not the ice pick.
Experiences
That Make Us Strong
Perhaps this analogy can help us understand our predicament
with prayer. Suppose your mother requires surgery to save her
life, but the surgery is very difficult and the doctors have
told you that it will take her months to recover from it, but on
the other hand, she will die soon without it. You imagine all
the discomfort your mother will face; she will be in great pain
and discomfort for many months, but as the doctors say, she
cannot live without the surgery. How do you respond? Do you
pray that she decides to undergo the surgery or do you pray that
she decides to simply die sooner? The answer is obvious; you
want to her have the surgery, regardless of the discomfort,
because you know that in the long run, the surgery is a good
thing.
Our situation is similar to this one: without certain
experiences that make us strong in our search for
God-realization, we continue to stumble along the path without
reaching the goal. So we want for ourselves and for those we
love the experience that they really need in order to reach
their goal of God-realization. Of course, we will always hope
that our love ones and we will experience only joyful events,
and if they must go through difficulties, we will always pray
that they are in God’s hands. And joyfully we can be sure that
they are. Jesus and all other spiritual teachers have assured
us of that.
Only God Sees
the Whole Picture
If we truly believe that God does not make mistakes, that
God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and that God is a merciful
God, then we cannot doubt that what God allows to happen is what
needs to happen. When we experience what seems to be injustice
or great suffering, if we understand that God is all justice and
joy, we realize that we simply cannot see the whole picture as
God does. We rely on our faith that God is doing everything to
make our journey to Him exactly what it must be. This kind of
faith is not easy, but then, what is easy in this life?
Sri Gyanamata was a nun of the Self-Realization Fellowship
order, and there was a time in her life when an event was coming
into her life—an event which filled her with dread. As she
meditated and prayed to God about her situation, God inspired
her, and she realized the proper prayer: “Beloved Lord, change
not my circumstances, change me!” This was the prayer she knew
God would listen to. And we can be assured that God will listen
to that prayer. This attitude is the one that fills our lives
with blissful anticipation of what God will do, and the attitude
allows us to use the proper tools of prayer.
