After finishing a very rough draft of Chapter 2 of my book, I realized that the very act of writing the book is helping me understand how to communicate agape. This 2nd Step in the 7-step agape prayer practice is about holding in prayer a person who has a special part in your spiritual development. Of course, as I've mentioned in previous postings, calling this a 'prayer' is a little misleading, because it is not what people normally mean by 'prayer.'
In order to get a feeling for what kind of praying could be involve with this approach, I advised the reader to practice this step rather than merely reading about it. I explained that the first time this phase of the agape prayer practice is begun, you can come at it from an attitude of honestly and truly visualizing the well-being of one person you choose for the focus. So from this unusual perspective on prayer, imagine specific ways for well-being to develop in the life of that person.
But also I mentioned that the person ‘praying’ is not asking for ‘something’ to happen, but is holding that special person in prayer. In a sense, when Step 2 is practiced, there should be a visualizing of spiritually sharing with that person in a way that a picture is created in the mind's eye of what it would be for that person to connect with agape deep within them and let agape flow in that person’s life.
An insight I came to when writing that chapter has to do with agape coming through another person relating to you. I put it this way: “You may sense God giving you agape through that person. That is one of the beautiful aspects to the spiritual power of agape, that God can bring it into your life through other people, and especially during a deeply moving worship service or a time of intense discussion about spiritual concerns. The more you work with agape, the easier it will be to feel like agape is ‘flowing’ from the person you choose for this step, especially when you are studying with that person or with a group in which that person is a member.”
As I was trying to find a way to describe the kind of prayer attitude I was meaning, I wrote: “St. Paul wrote some 2,000 years ago that the gift of agape is already there in your heart. So this type of prayer comes as a method for waking up to what is deep within you. And one way for a lot of people to know that they need to wake up happens when they see that they are denying that this special spiritual energy is pouring into their heart.”
The very process of writing this book has opened me to see so much more to the deeper dimension of agape.
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