Hopelessness and Prayer

Malcolm Young  Jer. 31:27-34Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon K28 Ps. 119:97-104

20 Pentecost Proper 24C (RCL) 2 Tim. 3:14-4:5

Sunday 17 October 2004 Luke 18:1-8

“Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”  Lk. 18:1-8

“One November morning… when I was ten years old, my father got up early, put on a pair of gray slacks and a maroon sweater, opened the door to look in briefly on my younger brother and me, who were playing a game in our room, and then went down into the garage where he turned on the engine of the family Chevy and sat down… to wait for the exhaust to kill him…  [T]here was no funeral because on both my mother’s side and my father’s side there was no church connection of any kind and funerals were simply not part of the tradition.

“…[A]s far as I can remember, once he had died my mother, brother, and I rarely talked about him much ever again, either to each oth

er or to anybody else.  It made my mother too sad to talk about him, and since there was already more than enough sadness to go round, my brother and I avoided the subject with her as she avoided it for her own reasons also with us.”

This is not my story.  Frederick Buechner wrote this about perhaps the most important moment in his life.  For fifty years he sought healing.  He strained to be reconciled both with the tragedy of his father’s death and his family’s silence about it.  The journey that he started on that autumn morning led him to the very heart of Christ. 
In a way it is my story.  It belongs to all of us.  We all know about hopelessness and despair.  Perhaps you feel that your spouse does not understand you and because of your history together you cannot talk about it.  Maybe words like anger, loneliness, disillusionment and frustration best describe your relation to someone you are supposed to love.  Perhaps your father died this week and you still have more you need to say to him.  Or you were diagnosed with cancer and feel frightened because the doctors don’t seem to know what to do.  A widow eating alone every night across from her husband’s old chair knows this feeling.
In this world we see no shortage of despair.  Seventy thousand refugees have died in the Sudan since March.²  We long for signs of peace in war-torn Iraq and Israel.  We feel frustrated as politicians make promises that they cannot pay for and obscure the truth.

The hopelessness in a family trying to erase the memory of a father is exactly the kind of despair Jesus talks about to us today.  The vividness of Jesus’ story makes it easy for us to forget that his subject is hopelessness, hopelessness and prayer.  The Bible explains, “Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”
At first the story hardly seems connected to this point.  A poor, inconsequential widow asks for help from a corrupt political appointee.  He cares only about his own advancement not the cause of justice.  She may not have power, but she also will not leave him alone.  She pesters and hassles him.  The judge says to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she will not wear me out.”
1. We can draw two kinds of mistaken conclusions from this story.  First, one might believe that like the judge, God acts in an arbitrary way, that God cares more about the frequency of our prayers than about justice.  Jim has a cartoon in his office.  It shows a man in a suit coming through the receiving line after church.  Shaking hands with a solemn pastor he says, “Oh, I know that He works in mysterious ways, but if I worked that mysteriously I’d get fired.”

Sometimes it seems to me that the only way that the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant could believe in religion at all was because he saw cruel people die without being punished for the evil that they had done.  He believed so strongly in justice, that he couldn’t imagine that this world is not paired with an afterlife of punishment and reward.  We see injustice everywhere.  Sinners prosper.  Corrupt and dishonest people succeed.  Bullies humiliate and maim others without ever experiencing the kind of suffering that they cause.

Some people say that this is God’s justice.  As mortals we just lack the ability to understand it.  I do not believe this.  Christians can know what God is like.  God is not arbitrary but merciful and good.
2. A much more common way of explaining the story of the unjust judge is to see it as an encouragement to nag God.  According to this view we are the widows and God is the judge.  If the widow in the story gets her way by making a nuisance of herself, we can do the same with God.  This way of reading the story almost seems to presume that God, like a distracted parent, does not hear us the first time, or that God does not really know what we need until we say it a few times.  This kind of God also seems utterly false to me.  It reminds me of a child on a playground requiring another kid to say “pretty please” before sharing the kickball.

Both of these interpretations draw similarities between the unjust judge and God, but this is not our God.  God’s ways are not simply arbitrary.  God does not require that we come begging.  The reason we love Jesus is that he tells us what God is like though his life and teachings.  Jesus gives us this story so that we will not lose heart, so that we will pray unceasingly.

I have a friend named Sue Everson who is a world authority on hopelessness.  As a medical researcher she studies the effect that hopelessness has on our health.  What we understand anecdotally, she studies empirically.  One of her more startling statistics is that people who feel hopeless are twenty percent more likely over four years to die from a stroke.  Hopelessness increases your chance of a stroke to the same degree that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day does.  Sue scientifically studies how religion seems to make people less hopeless.
Jesus also connects prayer and hopelessness.  I think he does this both because it is harder to pray when we feel hopeless and because it is often only through prayer that we can find our way out of hopelessness.

Every sermon about hopelessness should include a joke…  God decides he wants to be more in touch with what is happening on earth.  So God sends the angel Michael down here to investigate.  Michael reports back.  “It is awful down here.  Ninety-five percent of all people are rotten to the core and cannot pray.  The good news is that five percent are great.”  God cannot believe this so he sends another angel, Gabriel down to verify this.  Gabriel comes back and says, “Ninety-five percent of the people are total sinners.  Fortunately five percent really love you.”  This was not enough for God.  God decides to send Angelica, the chief executive angel down to investigate.  She says the same thing.  Ninety-five percent of all people do not pray as they should and five percent are good.
So God decided to send an e-mail message to the five percent whose prayers are acceptable and do you know what it said?  I didn’t get one either?
I think that prayer is difficult for people, maybe even for ninety-five percent of us.  As Jesus says, the problem with prayer is that we have a hard time not losing hope.  If we felt hopeful about prayer we would do it more often, we might even pray unceasingly.  If we believed that peace could come through prayer, or that prayer could heal and reconcile or change the way things are, we would do it more.  But instead we lose heart.  Maybe we think of the times we have been disappointed in prayer.  Maybe we are not even sure that there is a God to pray to, or that God hears our prayer.

The preacher William Willimon says that we ought to think of prayer not as asking God to do something for us, but rather as a request that God will be God, that God’s goodness will shine through.  He gives us the example of what it feels like to be comforted as a child.  My three year old daughter Melia’s tiara broke this week.  As most of you know she has worn this every waking hour for the last four months.

My wife Heidi, held her and repeated, “it will be alright.”  She was not saying that Melia was wrong to feel upset about this.  She also didn’t mean that the tiara could be made as good as new, or that everything would be fine immediately.  Instead what Heidi meant was that no pain or sorrow lasts forever, that in the larger scheme of things good and justice prevail.  Somehow even the worst things that happen to us become part of our story and we go on.

This brings me back to the boy whose father committed suicide.  Later this author explains that God is present in private events but does not move us like pieces on a chessboard.  He writes, “[I]nstead, events happen under their own steam…  God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest… of them offers us the possibility of that new life which I believe is what salvation is.”
“For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was only father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons had become unbearable.  God did not will what happened… but I believe that God was present in what happened.  I cannot guess how he was present with my father… but my faith… is that he continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing.”

“I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me…  Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.”

In conclusion, Jesus’ parable is not so much about whether or how prayer works so much as it is about God’s goodness.  God is good and just.  Letting God be God means trusting this goodness and love.  It means that ultimately at the end of every story God’s mercy and kindness are revealed.  In prayer we experience how God cares, how God continues to act in our hearts even when we are tempted by hopelessness.  When Christ appeared to Julian of Norwich during a severe illness in the year 1373 he said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

When God Seems Far Away

Spiritual Wilderness Survival Guide

• Of all human experiences, having God in your life is potentially the most exciting, fulfilling and significant. Yet few, if any, of us are strangers to feeling deserted by God. We can feel empty and our every attempt to touch God can seem to end in stony silence or a divine scowl. Feeling cut off from God is sometimes nothing but a clever illusion instigated by our spiritual enemy, the diabolically cunning, supernatural Deceiver. Sometimes, however, it indicates a serious spiritual problem. Let’s briefly face the worst possibility and then we can indulge ourselves in some much needed reassurance and inspiration.

  Literally millions of people have gone through some sort of church act – perhaps going forward in a Christian meeting, or being baptized or confirmed – and yet have not a wisp of spiritual life. They can be convinced they are born again, look like believers, act like devout Christians, and yet have undergone no spiritual change.

  We can have unforgiven sin in our lives without realizing it. (It’s worth glancing at these Scriptures). This would cut us off from the holy God (Isaiah 59:1-2; Ps 66:18; Proverbs 28:9; Hebrews 7:26). If, for example, you held a grudge against someone, that unforgiveness would hinder your own forgiveness by God. (Scriptures) So whenever God seems distant, it is wise to pray along the lines of the psalmist, ‘Search me, O God, and know my heart . . . See if there be any offensive way in me’ (Psalm 139:23-4).

  There are excellent webpages to help you resolve these issues. If any of the following topics interest you, bookmark this webpage (or note its address), then consult the webpages and return here later:

  We should face and eliminate these possibilities before proceeding to other factors in feeling God’s presence. Gentle Omnipotence
  A man who had never in his life seen the sea was disappointed when he finally saw it. ‘I thought it would look bigger,’ he complained.

  There is always more to God than we can see. Did anyone expect God to be so foolish as to burn our eyes out when he appears, burst our eardrums when he speaks, crush us to dust when he touches? Since the Almighty must restrain himself whenever he relates to us, why should anyone be shocked if he chooses to be just a little gentler than we expected?

  You were literally made for God. It shouldn’t have to be an alien experience – something to fry your brains or drain you of adrenaline – to relate to the God who made you. Why shouldn’t prayer be as simple as breathing, as natural as a child chatting to its mother? You don’t have to wait until something is spooky or spectacular before concluding that God is in it.

  To the Jews, Jesus seemed too ordinary to be their Messiah. Could you be making a similar mistake in your expectations of what it would be like to have God in your life?

  Feelings versus reality
  An act of God might occasionally coincide with goosebumps or a warm gooey feeling, or some other emotion, but the moment we begin to expect inner feelings and spiritual reality to coincide, we are headed for disappointment.

  In both natural and supernatural matters, feelings and reality only sometimes line up. For instance, if someone handed you a million dollar check, you might feel no richer. One reason for feeling nothing could be that you think the check will bounce. You could throw away a million dollars simply because you don’t believe it’s real.

  You could also discard a unique opportunity with God just because you don’t believe it’s real. And that would be more tragic than tearing up a million dollars.

  God wants you to make it
  You are important to God. He is pleased with your search for him and with your genuine questioning. Nothing is more important than getting these matters sorted out. Focus on the fact that what God says is true. His Word guarantees that if you are willing to give up your sins and you ask forgiveness, trusting that Jesus died in your place, then God’s forgiveness is yours. And if you have forgiveness you have full access to God. What you feel is irrelevant. You might feel guilty, depressed, sick, or foolish, it makes no difference. What matters is objective fact, not feelings.

  God longs to save us. It cost him enormously (the death of Jesus) to make your forgiveness possible. He’s not going to squander that sacrifice. He has taken the initiative and what he has started he will finish. He will heed only a stubborn refusal to accept his offer of forgiveness. For anyone who even half wants God, the Lord will rush to forgive, because he is neither reluctant to save, nor so weak that he needs our help. If you have asked Jesus’ forgiveness, then you are forgiven, unless you are strongly aware that you are refusing to give God permission to take a particular sin from you.

  If you are seeking, you will find. That’s the divine promise. Just keep seeking. Although you might feel as if you are doing all the seeking, your hunger for God was seeded within you by God himself. Your spiritual longings are proof that God is actively working in your life (John 6:44; Philippians 2:13). On the surface, it might seem due to the influences of friends, circumstances, or whatever, but these are just means God is using.

  ‘Draw near to God and he will draw near to you’ promises Scripture (James 4:8). The divine commitment is not that you will feel that God is close, but that he will be close.

  Deception
  When you give your life to Christ, you gain the most wonderful and most powerful Friend in the entire universe. You also gain, however, a fearsome foe. Any friend of God’s is an enemy of the devil. Satan is nothing compared to God – not as smart, not as powerful; a total loser. He is, nevertheless, a superhumanly powerful, evil genius. With God on your side you have what it takes to defeat Satan every time, and the devil knows it. All he can do to Christians is to fool them into not using the spiritual power that Christ has given them. So he will do all he can to make you doubt God’s power and reality in your life by trying to manipulate your feelings.

  In short: you have an enemy. He’s an arch Deceiver. And he loves playing with your feelings.

  New Christian?
  There are reasons besides lack of faith why a person with a million dollar check could feel no different. He could be so stunned that his emotions have not yet caught up. Another reason is similar: nothing has happened yet. On paper he might be a millionaire, but he has not yet had a chance to spend a cent. So soon after the event there has been no change to his circumstances. Spiritually, too, unless you have been on the way for quite a while, you haven’t had a chance to start ‘cashing’ your new spiritual riches through prayer, experience and so on. It will take time for the results to become obvious.

  So it is perfectly normal for a new Christian to feel nothing at first. After a while you will receive more and more evidence that you really are in contact with Almighty God, but such awareness takes time. Like the growth of a tree, much of God’s work is not immediately obvious. It takes time to realize what has happened. Nevertheless, by faith you can know the miracle has commenced without having to wait until you can see it with your eyes.

  Regardless of how long we have been a Christian, if we spend just twenty minutes a day (less than one fiftieth of our waking hours) praying and thinking about the Lord, should we be surprised if the physical world seems fifty times more real to us than the spiritual realm?

  Moreover, all mature Christian have times when they feel nothing, because God wants us to learn to trust him, rather than trusting our emotions. He wants us to learn that the weather changes, people change, our feelings change, but he remains rock solid, totally true and dependable forever.

  God has promised to love you, be with you, forgive you, hear your prayers. On and on the promises go, but not once has he promised you will ‘feel’ anything. So place your faith in what God has promised (spelt out in black and white) not what he has not promised (elusive feelings).

  Spiritual highs
  You may feel very different when you go from a valley to a mountaintop experience, but little or nothing in you has actually changed. All that happens on a peak is that you can see further with your own eyes. You are temporarily less dependent upon a map or on what others tell you. (Even then, an accurate map or experienced advice is more reliable.) When you are highly conscious of God’s love for you, or you feel his presence, it’s not that God has suddenly become more loving (you can’t increase infinite love) nor that you’ve become more lovable, it’s just that from a spiritual mountaintop you see everyday reality more clearly. From a peak you can look back and see to your great surprise the wonderful progress you have made. You can see how when it seemed your Guide (the Holy Spirit) was taking you in circles you were actually skirting a dangerous area. Suddenly you see the wisdom in what had seemed aimless wanderings and useless diversions. You see how when it seemed your Guide had deserted you he must have somehow still been directing you because you took exactly the right route. You can look forward and see the exciting things you are headed for. Life seems far more exhilarating and makes so much more sense.

  You feel so different when you can see further. It’s like night compared to day. But when it’s dark nothing has actually changed, it’s just that you can’t see that nothing has changed! So it is when you move from times when you can see God’s love and goodness and closeness, to times when you can’t see them.

  Believing the unseeable and unfeelable
  Can you believe in something you cannot see or touch? Of course, you can! You do it all the time. You believe Abraham Lincoln existed. You have never seen or touched him. You simply believe in the integrity of those who claim to have researched the evidence that he existed. You believe such things, even though, unlike Jesus, these researchers don’t claim to be sinless. We know they are quite capable of lying and they have never confirmed anything by performing miracles, much less rising from the dead, yet we still don’t think of doubting countless thousands of historical events such as Lincoln’s assassination. You probably haven’t even met current heads of state. You merely believe those who claim they know their names and who claim that certain newspaper and television pictures are those of political leaders.

  We could say the same about scientific discoveries. Scientists do not squander their lives trying to replicate everyone else’s experiments. It would take them thousands of lifetimes to personally confirm every scientific fact they believe to be true. They simply trust the integrity of their fellow, fallible scientists and build on that foundation to make new discoveries.

  Someone wrote to me complaining that he could not be expected to believe the eyewitness reports in the gospels that Jesus conquered death. To have to rely on other people’s testimonies rather than on what his own eyes see is too much to ask, he claimed. And yet, like us, this man lives in a society in which it is impossible to function without trusting human testimony. You can’t even use a phone book without reliance upon the writings of fallible, less-than-saintly humans. And if the man on the other end of the phone line claims to be the person you want to speak to, how do you know he isn’t lying? You put your faith in human testimony hundreds of times each day. All of civilization hinges on it.

  The entire universe teeters on the dependability of God. Every time you do anything, you are unconsciously trusting the integrity of God. When you sit on a chair, for instance, you are trusting that God won’t suddenly change the laws of physics and let you crash to the floor. Christian faith is taking the faith we all have in the Creator’s dependability and simply extending that faith to include what he has put in black and white. Bible faith is just taking God at his word. It is choosing to believe that Jesus was not a quack – that he really was from God and that what he said is therefore trustworthy. And since, Jesus taught the reliability of Scripture and that God would reveal further truth to the disciples (who wrote the New Testament), trusting Jesus leads to trusting the entire Bible.

  If you have difficulty believing in Jesus, or the reliability of the Gospel accounts about him, there are many books that should set your mind at rest. I recommend Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Vol I by Josh McDowell. The critical point, however, is that Jesus and his word must be the foundation of your search for a relationship with God, not vague experiences.

• http://net-burst.net/tough/desert.htm

Operating in Faith.

FAITH

The word “faith” is translated from the Greek pi´stis, primarily conveying the thought of confidence, trust, firm persuasion. Depending on the context, the Greek word may also be understood to mean “faithfulness” or “fidelity.”

The Scriptures tell us: “Faith is the assured expectation (substance) of things hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities though not beheld.” (Heb 11:1)

“Assured expectation” translates the Greek word hy·po´sta·sis. This term is common in ancient papyrus business documents. It conveys the idea of something that underlies visible conditions and guarantees a future possession.

In view of this, Moulton and Milligan suggest the rendering: “Faith is the title deed of things hoped for.” (Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, 1963, p. 660)

The Greek word e´leg·khos, rendered “evident demonstration,” conveys the idea of bringing forth evidence that demonstrates something, particularly something contrary to what appears to be the case. Thereby this evidence makes clear what has not been discerned before and so refutes what has only appeared to be the case. “The evident demonstration,” or evidence for conviction, is so positive or powerful that faith is said to be it.

Faith is the hardest thing for a christian to gain. Do not be fooled. It takes time to make the foundation, time to test each segment and much time to build. The apostle Peter is a good example of a human developing faith. First he proclaims it loudly, then he falls, then he lifts up again, and falls again…. we are talking serious TIME here.

Most of us have faith occasionally, and we marvel at how things work out. Sometime we have faith for the wrong things and when it falls flat, we blame God.

Faith is the expectation of things not yet seen, but are coming. We can have faith in Gods promise that he listens to us,and that each individual is important to him. We can have faith that Jesus restored us to Gods favor and took away the shackles of deaths grip. We can have faith that the creator helps us with problems by either removing the issue or giving us strength to endure until he is ready to move us onto the path where we can do his will more fully.

Sometimes, when we are in the grip of financial need or health or fear issues, our eyes can not see past the earthly surroundings of reality. This happened way back in Elishas time when he was faced with an invading army looking for him. 2 kings 6. Elisha asked for his servants eyes to be opened to the spiritual realm, where the servant saw gods angels in chariots and ready for war.

We need to understand that faith, is a spiritual element of our life.  Usually, when we can show a determined stand for God, we receive the help neccesary to sustain us on our journey. This may be shown in the earthly realm, but it might be more a peace in our spiritual life until the trial is over.

However the answers are manifested, we need to keep building our faith  in good season. We need to learn to trust God for all his goodness and support when times get rough. Nothing is easy. Jesus knew that while on earth. He encouraged love and faith beyond all things.

One day, our faith will be completed by the establishment of Gods kingdom.

How to Leave a Religion

For many people it is a horribly intimidating task to leave a religion, either for another or for the absence of one. Whatever the case may be this guide seeks to assist you in releasing yourself from your religion.

Steps

1. Sever any ties you have with the religious organization. If necessary, leave them correspondence that communicates your separation, but do not discuss reasons or beliefs.
2. Make friends outside of your former religion. Ask your new friends about alternative views.
3. Carefully prepare a list of the advantages for leaving your religion and your reasons for doing so.
4. Approach your family and friends tactfully about this topic as a devout family may not understand your choice.
5. Read about your alternatives.
6. Research the religion of your choice, and prepare the reasons that this change would be personally advantageous.
7. Join a local group if you wish, and learn about their views and practices for conversion.

Tips

• If you think your family will be uncomfortable with your change, wait until you are older to make your views public.
• Know your stuff before you get into debates or discussions.
• Read and study the writings that are accepted by your chosen religion. Make sure the teachings are in line with the Bible

Warnings

• Beware of cults
• Beware of intolerant people.
• Beware of religious zealots.

Exposure

Exposure

Barna parenting and child development studies reveal that by age 23, an average American will have been exposed to more than 30,000 acts of violence via TV, movies and video games. He will have viewed thousands of hours of pornographic images, which diminish the dignity and value of human life, plus listened to hundreds of hours of music that fosters anger, hatred, disrespect for authority, selfishness and radical independence. 20-somethings’ typical worldview promotes self-centeredness, the right to happiness and fulfillment, the importance of personal _expression in all forms, the necessity of tolerating aberrant or immoral points of views; allows for disres pect of other people and use of profanity; and advances forms of generic spirituality that dismiss the validity of the Judeo-Christian faith. Their typical worldview doesn’t facilitate respect for life, acceptance of the rule of law, or the necessity of hard work, personal sacrifice, paying the dues or contributing to the common good.
Barna Update 4/23/07

Multi-tasking

Limits of Multitasking Several research reports provide evidence of the limits of multitasking. Neuroscientists, psychologists and management professors suggest many would be wise to curb their multitasking behavior when working in an office, studying or driving a car.

Experts offer some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most.

Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration, but other distractions (most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, TV) hamper performance.

Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea.

In short, the answer appears to lie in managing the technology, instead of merely yielding to its incessant tug. The human brain has awesome powers, but focusing on two things at once is not one of them.

Multitasking is going to slow you down, increasing the chances of mistakes. In a recent Microsoft study it took workers 15 minutes to return to serious mental tasks (writing reports or computer code) after responding to incoming e-mail or IM. They strayed off to reply to other messages or browse news, sports or entertainment Web sites. Studies of professionals and office workers conclude that 28% of their time is spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks.
NY Times 3/26/07

Translation for men

Women’s English

What They Say	What They Mean
Yes	No
No	Yes
Maybe	No
I’m sorry.	You’ll be sorry.
We need	I want
It’s your decision	The correct decision should be obvious by now.
Do what you want	You’ll pay for this later.
We need to talk	I need to complain
Sure… go ahead	I don’t want you to.
I’m not upset	Of course I’m upset, you moron!
You’re … so manly	You need a shave and you sweat a lot.
You’re certainly attentive tonight	Is sex all you ever think about?
Be romantic, turn out the lights	I have flabby thighs.
This kitchen is so inconvenient	I want a new house.
I want new curtains	and carpeting, and furniture, and wallpaper…..
Hang the picture there	No, I mean hang it there!
I heard a noise	I noticed you were almost asleep.
Do you love me?	I’m going to ask for something expensive.
How much do you love me?	I did something today you’re really not going to like.
I’ll be ready in a minute.	Kick off your shoes and find a good game on T.V.
Is my butt fat?	Tell me I’m beautiful.
You have to learn to communicate.	Just agree with me.
Are you listening to me!?	Too late, you’re dead.
Was that the baby?	Why don’t you get out of bed and walk him until he goes to sleep.
I’m not yelling!	Yes I am yelling because I think this is important.

Fear Self Hatred and Loneliness

This information comes from a non Christian perspective. However, by a slight mind adjustment, one can see the Biblical understanding in the comments.

Fear, self-hatred and loneliness are fueled by our mind and cause most of our miseries. The same mind, when made aware, can cure all these maladies, leading to self-mastery. An extract from Phil Nuernberger’s book The Quest for Personal Power (Full Circle)

There are three destructive conditions of the mind: fear, self-hatred and loneliness. They are like fire-breathing dragons that usurp the creative force of the mind and corrupt our resources, creating disease, unhappiness, and suffering. They seem to be so powerful that we feel helpless before them. We don’t realize that we ourselves are the source of their power, and that we can take it away from them.

Fear: a lack of self-mastery

The most dramatic consequence of self-mastery is the ability to live without fear. Fear, the most destructive of the three dragons, is the cause of much of our suffering and stress. While we may be familiar with fear, we often don’t realize just how pervasive this monster is. Much of our anger and resentments are rooted in fear. Greed most often begins with the fear of not having enough or of not being important. Then when we accumulate wealth, we become obsessed with protecting what we have.

Fear drives us to acquire political and military power, feeling that if we can dominate, we will be secure. But this kind of power can become perverse and feed our insecurities. The more powerful we become, the more we worry about someone else becoming powerful. The Cold War between America and the Soviet Union was a classic example of how fear drives entire cultures: so much power and intellect dedicated to servicing both individual and national egos leading only to an unending sense of insecurity, of not having enough, of not being ‘the best’.

There are many faces of fear but the most terrible is violence. Whether it is the homelessness and street violence in American cities, the horrors of conflict in Bosnia and Rwanda, sectarian violence in India or Ireland, or political murders in Haiti, all have their roots in fear. Terrorists operate in a culture of fear, intentionally using it to gain power and control.

Many of our fears are less dramatic, but not the less destructive. Some people spend their entire lives fearful that they will not meet someone else’s standards. Even gossip has its roots in fear. If we can make others look small, and by so doing make ourselves look better, we compensate for the fear of being unimportant. Religions, government, and communities use fear to control others, and parents use fear to control their children.

We usually don’t like to think of ourselves as being fearful. We use softer words, such as ‘worried’ and ‘anxious‘, which seem a little more acceptable. But worry is a form of fear, and being anxious is how we feel when we succumb to fear. Since we do it often, we get pretty good at it. Most of us become so skilled at worrying that it becomes part of our lives. And yet the only thing we accomplish by worrying is misery for ourselves and others.

What would life be like for you if you lost all your fear? What if you didn’t worry about what might happen to this or that, or you weren’t afraid of what others might think of you, or you didn’t have to worry about losing your job or paying your bills? Most of us think that if we were only richer, prettier, stronger, better-looking, more charming, safer, taller, slimmer-or if we had a better job, newer car, bigger house, more friends, better-looking lovers, more respect (the adjectives are almost endless)-then we wouldn’t worry, and we would be happy. Worry and fear aren’t created by a lack of things, they are created by how we think. If you have the habit of worrying, it doesn’t matter who you are, what you have, or what you do, you will worry because that is the habit of your mind. This useless habit is one of the biggest causes of disease and unhappiness. And yet it has become so much a part of our lives that we even think that a little fear is helpful, and that fear is a natural part of being human. There are people who live life without being afraid. They realize that fear is not a natural part of their being, but rather a product of the mind, a fantasy that grips and destroys, but a fantasy nonetheless. Through knowledge and practice, they conquer the mind’s habit of creating fear. The same is true of the samurai, the great sword and martial arts masters of Japan, or the great Taoist Masters of China. You can do the same. You can live life without the petty fears and worries that dog us from day to day, and without the great fears that every so often rattle our cages. Even the most desperate of situations can be faced without fear. As a young man, my Master often walked through the mountains of northern India. The mountains were, and still are, rugged, forested, and untamed. Once, while crossing a very narrow footbridge across a deep ravine, a tiger started crossing the same bridge from the other side. The bridge was so small that only one creature could pass at a time. My Master knew that if he retreated, the tiger would attack. Instead, he raised his arms and rushed toward the tiger, giving a powerful shout. The tiger immediately backed off the bridge, turned tail and ran. Through self-mastery, you mobilize your powerful innate drive for self-preservation and create both the energy and the focus to find a solution to any problem. But once you allow fear to paralyze the mind, you lose your ability to make choices and become locked into reaction. The greater our self-mastery, the greater our ability to face any situation without fear and to live our lives without worry. Self-hatred: the other side of misery At times it seems that we are masters of creating misery. When we aren’t worrying about whether or not something awful is going to happen to us, we remember all the hurts, mistakes, and failures in our past. In other words, when we aren’t preoccupied with someone or something attacking us, we turn around and attack ourselves. We seldom live up to expectations, we are never quite good enough no matter how good we get, and we keep making the same old mistakes. We suffer from guilt, continually find fault with ourselves, condemn ourselves for not living up to our own or someone else’s expectations. These are all part of the dragon of self-hatred. After so many failures, mistakes, and broken dreams we begin to give up on ourselves and on life. Some of us become depressed, withdrawn, and passive, accepting whatever life gives as a cruel joke that we must endure. Others, angry with themselves, become angry at the world. They become cranky and hostile, taking out their own misery on others. Like fear, self-hatred is a habit of the mind, an arbitrary way of looking at life and at oneself that leads only to further mistakes, poor performance, and unhappiness. When someone else attacks you, at least you have the opportunity to conquer your adversary by mobilizing the body’s defenses. But when you attack yourself, there is no outcome but defeat. You cannot win in a battle against yourself; you only create conflict and suffering. Instead of mobilizing your body’s systems to defend yourself, you become depressed, passive and withdrawn. Attacking ourselves is only a habit of the mind, a consequence of the way we learned to see ourselves as we grew up. We can always find many reasons to punish ourselves for the mistakes we make and the expectations we fail to realize. Like fear, the dragon of self-hatred feeds on our lack of self-awareness and skill. We strengthen the dragon by constantly reminding ourselves of our weaknesses and mistakes. But as long as we continue to feed this dragon of self-hatred by paying attention to it, it continues to breathe fire and create misery for us. The secret is to stop feeding the dragon by experiencing your own inner strength and beauty. You can’t create self-esteem by constantly telling yourself that you are a wonderful person. Self-esteem and self-respect grow out of the experience of committed effort. Whether or not you succeed is not as important to your self-respect as when you know that you tried your best. And if you continue to make the effort, if you continue to work with your resources, you will eventually succeed. Self-mastery arises out of effort, the underpinning of success. We have long known that depression and apathy damage the immune system and lead to serious disease. We also know that when you give up on yourself and become a victim, you deny yourself the power to grow and change. You stay stuck in your own ignorance. That’s why we believe that the only true sin is sloth, the unwillingness to make an effort. Mistakes are seen as a necessary part of learning, not reasons for punishment. But without effort, personal power remains undeveloped and unused, and the outcome is self-hatred.

Loneliness: in ignorance of spirit

The third dragon is loneliness, the most subtle of all the dragons. It is the most difficult to defeat in part because it hides in our misunderstanding of its nature. Most of us think of loneliness as being apart from loved ones, having no one with whom to share our feelings, hopes, and dreams, our fears and concerns, and our experiences. The more unable we are to communicate our inner thoughts and feelings, the lonelier we feel.

To solve this problem, we gather loved ones, build friendships, even join clubs and organizations. We think that if we have friends and family, people around us who love and care for us, we will never be lonely. But it doesn’t work. As rewarding as family and friends are, they do not keep us from being lonely, they only distract us from our loneliness. In fact, the more we depend on our loved ones to keep us from being lonely, the lonelier we become.

Think about it for a moment. Are you ever lonely for your enemies? Do you miss having unpleasant people around you? No, we are lonely for our friends and family, for those people to whom we feel close. It is the absence of our loved ones that makes us lonely. We think that loneliness involves our relationship with others, but it really involves our relationship with ourselves. It arises out of our sense of individuality.

Our life experiences seem to confirm that we are truly alone. We are born into this world alone, we die alone. No one feels our pain or our joy, nor do they digest our food, breathe for us, or feel what we feel. Even though we may communicate and share these experiences, it is still ‘me’, the ego-sense of individuality that tells me I am alone. We don’t experience any ’self’ that is connected to, or a part of, any other self.

As a consequence, we fail to understand the fundamental connection we have with each other and with the universe at large. Yet there are times when we experience a sense of wholeness, of completeness, of kinship with the universe at large. It may happen when we look up at the starry heavens, or watch the birth of a child, or participate with others in working through a crisis situation.

It doesn’t happen because we have expectations or make demands, we simply experience a strong sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves. At this moment, we lose our ego-sense of self, and experience being part of a greater identity, a greater ‘Self’, and all loneliness vanishes. Unfortunately, these experiences are fleeting, easily lost in the shuffle of our day-to-day distractions, pressures, and reactions. When we are genuinely loving, we also break free from our ego-sense of self but we confuse ‘loving’ with ‘being loved’.

Most of us engage in a desperate search for someone to love us, but we confuse the issue by saying that we need someone to love. We say we want someone to share with, someone we can love, but what we are really saying is that we need someone to love us, someone who will make us feel important and keep us from feeling lonely. This is not love, but emotional attachment, which leads us into dependency.

We believe that we need this person to be happy, to be content, to be fulfilled. So our loving becomes distorted by our emotional needs. When they don’t love us back, we feel miserable and unloved. When they aren’t around, we feel lonely. We all have a remarkable, unlimited capacity to love one another. There is a wide range of expression of our love, from brotherly and sisterly love to romantic, sexual love. But as long as we continue to confuse love and emotional attachment, we will continue to be lonely, even when we have someone to love.

We can conquer this dragon of loneliness, but we must turn to our deepest resource to do so, our core spiritual Self. The great spiritual sages of all traditions say that our loneliness lies in the ignorance of our spirit, the core of our being. When we become aware of this Self, we experience the mystery of life, the unbroken and unending connection we have with each other and with the universe.

We become fully conscious of the universal Spirit that flows within and through us. Picture life like a large oak tree filled with leaves, twigs, and branches. Our ego-sense of self makes us feel like we are a leaf of this tree. When the winds blow, the leaves rub against each other. Sometimes this is a pleasant experience and sometimes it is very unpleasant.

As leaves, we feel isolated and apart from one another, even though we can see that we all belong to the same tree. When we become conscious of our spiritual Self, we realize that we are far more than just the expression of a single leaf. We are more than even the branch and the trunk. We are the life force within the tree. We cannot realize the power of this experience by analyzing it.

Intellectual understanding is not the experience of wholeness, nor does it put an end to loneliness. Those experiences of wholeness gained by watching a birth or gazing at the stars are not intellectual, logical events. We must go beyond the intellect and become conscious of the human spirit directly. This is the heart of the meditative traditions of self-mastery-to calm the mind so completely, to be so focused, that we experience this spiritual Self directly.

In Tantra, this experience is called samadhi, while in western meditative/spiritual traditions it is referred to as a ‘mystical experience’ because it takes us beyond our thoughts and emotions, beyond even our beliefs. The mystical experience is powerful and undeniable. In just one experience, our loneliness, our fear, and our self-hatred are diminished by half.

As we become more skilled in our ability to have this awareness, we gradually lose all sense of loneliness, all fears are vanquished, and all self-hatred is eliminated. Our ego-sense of individuality now becomes an instrument by which we express in our unique way our thoughts, our love, our joy, and our strength. We do not lose our identity, we polish and refine our identity until our spiritual Self shines through like a bright light, and we experience the real joy and freedom that are our true heritage.

Daycare Danger

Analysis of the largest, longest running, and most comprehensive study of child care in the U.S. finds the more time children spend in center-based care before kindergarten, the more likely their teachers are to report such problem behaviors as “gets in many fights,” “disobedient,” and “argues a lot.” The study confirms earlier Canadian research which found daycare children were 17 times more hostile than those raised at home, and 3 times more anxious. An ’05 study from England confirmed a mother’s care is best for toddlers’ development, while nursery care is linked to higher aggression levels. An ’06 Austra lian study claims day-care seems to damage babies’ brain chemistry and affect their “social and emotional development.

It’s Faith Not Biology

William Jeynes, a California State University professor led a study finding that stable families, coupled with strong religious faith, enable minority youth to achieve at the same levels as white students. For years, researchers have claimed biological factors are responsible for the achievement gap. Minority students at religious schools perform better academically than do their counterparts at public schools because of better race relations and more emphasis on family and faith; yet many public schools look down on people of faith and discourage _expressions of faith.